Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approximations to the Scenes of the Facts) Installation Image

“Each memory or each woman is covered by the next death, they are forgotten, there are too many deaths. One murder and another murder and another, and then when do we ever remember the one from yesterday, the less famous one? We are all witnesses here, we are not in the place of the victim. When the ground is sponged and the water is collected, the people collecting this essence are not on their knees, they are not in a state of religious stance, they do not kneel. Some sites are childrens’ playgrounds and there is a mix of beauty and tragedy. Some people came up to me and asked about the water and the action, but some stayed back and looked on – especially one women whose friend was murdered not long ago, she stood back quietly and watched us cleanse and collect from that space."

Teresa Margolles’s work is an accumulation of violent acts, plotted through a complex memorial to lives lost and to sites where trauma continues to resonate and bare material traces of the violence perpetrated. In both Mexico and Australia, Margolles visited sites where women and trans women have been murdered. The blood that has soaked into the sites, the hair and body odour, are remembered amongst the sites other accumulated particles. These particles are collected through sponging the sites with water – collecting what residue remains – we are all witnesses. The water is incorporated into a process where a droplet of water – signifying an individual life – is fed through a water system that drops from a central irrigation pipe. Drop by drop onto the electric hot plate, the life evaporates but leaves a stain. Without directly using abject materials, Margolles re-articulates the absent body and the violence perpetrated against it through viscerally present materials, a red plastic butchers curtain, drops of water, and hot plates, creating a chain of events that remembers the losses through a signalling action that becomes visually accumulated moments.