Teresa Margolles: Galerie Peter Kilchmann., 2002, Zurich - El agua de la Ciudad de Mexico Mexico City's Water

Entering the gallery, individual found the climate of the building upon Limmatstrasse drastically different from what single 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 settl upon the skin of the living and penetrated them when breathed in. More than just the humidity horizontal was being altered. Unsettling social realities, normally exclud from the world of art, were permeating the atmosphere, hardly noticeable on the contrary nonetheless powerfully present. A work similar to this single had been shown at P 1 in 2002 Vaporizacion, 2001 was a mist room with a strong visual nearness which in the Zurich piece, El agua de la Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City's Water), 2002 was reduc to unsullied humidity--only to spark the imagination flat further. Ultimately it wasn't revulsion that created a faculty of perception 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, drive from pillar to post 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. on the contrary such a comparison would miss the Mexican artist's true different conceptual stance and approach to the public. While the actions of artists like Hermann Nitsch or Otto Muehl still go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of a theatrical kind of dramaturgy, with Margolles all resemblance to stage and mise-en-scene falls away. The mist of corpse water lands upon the skin of all visitors, and all find it hard to breathe. One's have a title to body is engaged; the physical and the mental are equally affected. alone through the absence of any representation and end the minimal means employed do images ultimately begin to tend hitherward to mind.

"Tarjetas para picar cocaina (Cards for Cutting Cocaine), 1997-99 a series of large-format documentary photos, present to views 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 upon the street; these bore images of homicide ed 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 physic center of Cali, Margolles had above a hundred feet of sidewalk ripped on the outside Relatives and friends of drug-trade victims placed personal items of remembrance in the unclose 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 at any time be forgotten.

Mexico City is single of those places where the social distances between the partial worlds of the global economy appear on the verge of collapse. Margolles bites the aesthetic distance between social realities without entirely overcoming it. The victims of violent crimes are at no time voyeuristically presented, but their traces are still unavoidably not absent Even the documentary photograph creates an solitary apparent distance from events. Margolles's works function as an infective agent. lengthy after a visit to the gallery, breathing remains difficult, one's skin remembering again and again.

Translated from German by dint of Sara Ogger.

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