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Teresa Margolles catches the pain of the 'carretilleras'

2020-10-07T03:57:07.280Z


The Mexican artist denounces the violence suffered by women who cross between Colombia and Venezuela in the exhibition 'La piedra'


Exhibition of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles in Es Baluard.david Bonet / EL PAÍS

Since she became known internationally with her project to denounce drug trafficking and its implications, for the Mexico Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, 1963) has not stopped speaking out for the weakest and most exploited, victims, raped women and street children, materializing in the aseptic space of art, social injustice, violence, fear and death.

Her projects arise from tortured contexts, from extreme situations that shake our protected environment and challenge the public from a restrained, sober, even minimalist staging, as if to reconfirm that pain does not need fuss.

Despite the health emergency, Margolles has inaugurated, as planned, the project conceived for Es Baluard, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Palma de Mallorca.

The exhibition

The stone

tells the story of the carts, women who, armed with carts, transport goods on the Simón Bolívar international bridge, which marks the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

Hard work, precarious, poorly paid and dangerous in itself that since the closure of that border has become a gamble with destiny.

Now the carts are

trocheras

, women who cross the

trail

, that piece of no man's land, hidden between shadows and bushes.

They go through it carrying bundles and even sick people, often heavier than their own body.

Margolles became interested "in what was happening not only on, but also under and around the bridge" while preparing

Estorbo

, his first solo exhibition at MAMBO, the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá.

“Every trip I made between 2017 and 2019 to Cúcuta, on the border of Colombia with Venezuela, the increase in women crossing the border was greater and I decided to work with them in a series of actions documented in video and photography,” explains Margolles, aware of the importance of highlighting and dignifying the presence and female workforce, the most invisible and vulnerable, in such a dangerous place.

The image that occupies an entire wall of the room, portrays those women, the same whose brief testimonies can be heard in the sound installation that the visitor welcomes.

“I asked them to form a line in front of my camera with their work instrument, the metal wheelbarrow, joining tire to tire to make a roadblock, stopping traffic for a moment,” recalls Margolles.

In front of that portrait of women with closed lips and prematurely aged faces, a 60 kg stone.

it symbolizes the maximum weight that can be carried by the unstable roads of the trail.

It is inevitable to wonder what happened to them, while the stomach shrinks at the thought that hopefully they had not found themselves in the middle of a shooting, a shooting they say there.

It comes precisely from a murdered person, the cloth soaked in blood that Margolles brought with him from his last trip to Colombia and that he used to make the overwhelming

opening

performance

.

It was not easy to do something like this in the middle of a Covid emergency, but with the collaboration of the museum director and curator of the project, Imma Prieto, he succeeded.

“It was very important that those who carried out the

performance

were Venezuelan migrant women.

Prieto found two unemployed teachers and an engineer who worked as a tour operator on the island.

Already in Mallorca, we searched together through the Internet, Venezuelans who were engaged in prostitution, since it was vital to have their testimony as well, "explains the artist.

Due to the protocol imposed by the pandemic, the

performance

was performed before groups of 10 spectators, who entered the room every 15 minutes.

“The action, which never stopped for an hour and a half, consisted of submerging 100 bolivar bills, which at the current rate is equivalent to 29 euro cents, in the water where we soak the bloody cloth.

The wet banknotes were methodically pasted on the museum wall, as if an autopsy were being carried out, from left to right and from top to bottom, one after the other, vertically, with the face of the liberator Simón Bolívar facing the front ”, says Margolles who began his career with the SEMEFO collective (Mexican Forensic Service) and worked for years in the morgues, establishing an almost intimate relationship with abused bodies and bodily fluids, which he uses in his works to denounce the indelible marks that violence and continuous murders they leave in Latin American societies.

In Es Baluard, 1,486 bills were glued and while one woman was sticking them to the wall, another passed the bloody cloth over the wall and the others wet the bills.

All interspersed the actions, while talking to the public.

It was simple, clear, forceful and at the same time deeply emotional, because of the format there was no final applause but people were clearly touched.

Now, the glued tickets and the video of the action are part of the exhibition, open until March 28, which constitutes an allegation against intolerance and dangerous indifference, so that the small private stories of pain and struggle are not forgotten, They deserve respect and attention and are instead an embarrassment to all of humanity.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2020-10-07

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