artnexus #118

In her art, Teresa Margolles (Culiacan, Sinaloa, 1963) has explored many expressions of violence and social injustice that result from the war against drug trafficking in Mexico. Hence the central role played in several of her works by the morgue, decomposing bodies, and blood.

Tracking the journey of bodies after death, Margolles has also investigated violence that victimizes women, femicide being a persistent problem. Her intent in creating such works is political and social: it seeks to react against that violence, and not only as it pertains to the situation in Mexico. Works like Los sonidos de la muerte (The Sounds of Death, 2008) bring to the fore everyday aggressions to the female body, with a sound installation based on recordings made in locations where the remains of murdered women were found. 

Margolles’ series of videos of a group of women in the process of creating an embroidery highlight the meaning of that object, revealing the prevalence of domestic violence in a variety of spaces in Latin America, always with the female figure as the receiver of life-ending aggression. The fabric on which the embroidery is being created in those videos was recovered from the morgue; the victim’s blood and traces of the crime, still perceptible in it, become entwined with the painstaking labor of the Mexican, Bolivian, and Guatemalan women in the embroidering group.

Our cover refers to Margolles’ video Mujeres bordando junto al lago Atitlan (Tenemos un hilo común) (Women Embroidering Next to Atitlan Lake [We Have a Common Thread]), from 2014. Lake Atitlan is Guatemala’s largest water surface, a tourism and fishing zone. In the three countries mentioned above, hand embroidering is an important economic activity, but also the container of a powerful ritual tradition. The gathering of indigenous women around the recovered fabric to create various ornamental motifs, symbolically encompasses everything from the sadness of those who labor while reflecting on the function the fabric served and bearing witness to the traces it left, to meditations about the need to foster collective actions that can help women and increase awareness of the urgency of fighting such crimes.

IVONNE PINI