Teresa Margolles -Iluminacion Subterranea

Dear Shaded Viewers,

I met Mario, the curator of a new literally underground gallery recently in Barcelona.

walk down these steps to find the art work of Teresa Margolles

Today Mario invited me to his opening show the Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles.

Teresa Margolles her artwork is about death and body fat

Teresa visits  morgues in Mexico where she finds people that died violent deaths and then uses their body fat to make art. The fat is  placed on the ground of the underground public passage under one of two lights hence the name Iluminacion Subterranea.

A long shot of the gallery which you will find at the underpass behind Palais du Tokyo

This was one of the two lights without the fat

can you see the fat on the floor below the light?

My friends and I were not sure exactly what we thought of this as art work. The show is open day and night.  The people walking by have no idea that they are experiencing art.

I asked my friend Thierry to take a look at the entry and tell me what he thought about the work. He wanted to know if this is the same  public passage where the rape scene of 'Irréversible' has been shot ? brrr...

I am looking forward to the opening of Adriana Varejao at the Fondation Cartier and her Chambre d'echos on the 17th of March. She deals with death and decay as well but I think that I can relate more strongly to her work.

Eiffel Tower, I needed to see something beautiful before my friends and I went off to dinner. Some days one has to take a break from fashion.

Later, Diane

YOu might enjoy reading some of Teresa Margolies press:

Teresa Margolles: Galerie Peter Kilchmann., 2002, Zurich - El agua de la Ciudad de Mexico Mexico City's Water
ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Hans Rudolf Reust

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Entering the gallery, one found the climate of the building on Limmatstrasse drastically different from what one would expect: Through a pair of humidifiers, water used to wash the bodies of corpses in Mexico's metropolis was being atomized into superfine particles. The rinse water of the anonymous dead settled on the skin of the living and penetrated them when breathed in. More than just the humidity level was being altered. Unsettling social realities, normally excluded from the world of art, were permeating the atmosphere, hardly noticeable but nonetheless powerfully present. A work similar to this one had been shown at P.S. 1 in 2002. Vaporizacion, 2001, was a fog room with a strong visual presence, which in the Zurich piece, El agua de la Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City's Water), 2002, was reduced to pure humidity--only to spark the imagination even further. Ultimately it wasn't revulsion that created a sense of the uncanny but rather the idea of being unable to escape the dead because of this purified water of their last cleansing. They catch tip to us, persecute us, like Banquo's ghost in Macbeth.

In Europe, Teresa Margolles's macabre work might be associated with the material-centric performance art of the Viennese Actionists. But such a comparison would miss the Mexican artist's very different conceptual stance and approach to the public. While the actions of artists like Hermann Nitsch or Otto Muehl still follow a theatrical kind of dramaturgy, with Margolles all resemblance to stage and mise-en-scene falls away. The mist of corpse water lands on the skin of all visitors, and all find it hard to breathe. One's own body is engaged; the physical and the mental are equally affected. Only through the absence of any representation and through the minimal means employed do images ultimately begin to come to mind.

"Tarjetas para picar cocaina (Cards for Cutting Cocaine), 1997-99, a series of large-format documentary photos, shows drug consumers getting their materials ready. For this they use small pieces of plastic in the same format as credit cards, which Margolles had distributed on the street; these bore images of murdered drug couriers, dealers, and addicts. The image career thus becomes a gruesome informer against itself, and the image of death becomes deadly equipment.

The exhibition also included photographic documentation of the action Anden (Sidewalk), 1999: In the Colombian drug center of Cali, Margolles had over a hundred feet of sidewalk ripped out. Relatives and friends of drug-trade victims placed personal items of remembrance in the open grave, and then the sidewalk was repaved. The urban passage becomes an invisible site of remembrance and reflection. For all who know about it, what has been buried--and the act of burying it--cannot ever be forgotten.

Mexico City is one of those places where the social distances between the partial worlds of the global economy seem on the verge of collapse. Margolles punctures the aesthetic distance between social realities without entirely overcoming it. The victims of violent crimes are never voyeuristically presented, but their traces are still unavoidably present. Even the documentary photograph creates an only apparent distance from events. Margolles's works function as an infective agent. Long after a visit to the gallery, breathing remains difficult, one's skin remembering again and again.

  Translated from German by Sara Ogger.

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