Teresa Margolles: The Promise

The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México will present from October 6, 2012 through January 6, 2013, the exhibition entitled The Promise, a site-specific project created for the Museum by Teresa Margolles.

This exhibition is the result of a long research by Margolles that began five years ago in Ciudad Juárez. It was centered on the prospect of settling in a place that, as any border town, has been historically a pass-through town. With the arrival of the large assembly plants, also known as maquiladoras, the town became a place of opportunities and promises. An important percentage of the Juárez population consists of migrant workers from other states of the country, who arrived there looking for work and managed to settle down. A wave of violence, the economic crisis and unemployment, have generated a new migratory shift in the population, as these conditions pushes individuals to abandon the city through internal movements.

The Promise is based on this horizon of unfulfilled promises that in its first phase consists of working with one of the abandoned government-subsidize homes in Ciudad Juárez. The house was dismantled in order to be transported to Mexico City, where it was eventually crushed. The process was carried out with extreme care and gentleness, to contrast the systematic destruction and abandonment to which the entire city has been subjected. The house is conceived as a space that ensures the most basic conditions of comfort and protection.

In the exhibition room, the installation is activated by a group of persons that collaborate by moving the remnants in order to eventually, little by little, occupy the surface of the space. This action is carried out every day for one hour and through a period of six months.

The Centro de Documentación Arkheia presents an archive of the project that consists of videos, texts, and articles about the problems addressed by the project, as well as copies of periodicals in Juárez like: El Norte, El Diario, El Mexicano, and PM (from February to June of 2012)