The Body Bears Witness: Teresa Margolles’s Environments of Death
Jessica L. Orzulak, PhD | April 30, 2024
In the center of an expansive gallery space featuring an installation by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, bubbles gently tumble to the floor from high above audiences’ heads. Descriptions from the event recollect the sound of children, their laughter and feet pounding as they run through the space while bubbles burst on their skin. Bubbles connote any number of ideas, bringing to mind images of whimsy and play, or conversely, morbid symbolism as memento mori. Featured in 17th and 18th century paintings for example, bubbles reminded viewers of the fleeting nature of human life as they balanced on the knife edge between existence and bursting into nonbeing (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699-1779), Soap Bubbles (probably 1733/1734), oil on canvas. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Margolles’s bubbles, however, have an even darker side. Amanda Coulson, a writer with Frieze Magazine recalled the scene in 2003, writing, “Running, laughing, catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float down from the ceiling . . . The children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously read the captions. Suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer their offspring away.”(1) The sudden shift from rollick to repulsion comes with the knowledge that the bubbles have been made using water that had cleansed corpses prior to autopsy in the Mexico City morgue.
The installation, titled En el Aire (2003), is part of a wider series of works by Margolles responding to the brutal landscapes of violent death in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez. She is well-known for using materials connected intimately and even indexically to death through the bodies of the violently murdered in the region. Her practice brings attention to the epidemic of femicides, murders, torture, and mass disposal of individuals caught in the crosshairs of drug cartels, and the effects of poverty and political disenfranchisement brought about by neoliberal policy and market capitalism. Margolles came to her subject matter while working with the polemical collective SEMEFO in Mexico City, where she also worked as a morgue technician after earning degrees in forensic medicine and social science, giving her access to the materials and deeper insight into the afterlives of corpses.
Despite engaging a wide range of materials in her practice, Margolles has returned repeatedly to the medium of water collected from the morgue. Installations, including Aire (2003), Vaporizacíon (2001–2018), and En el Aire all manipulate the liquid, creating environmental conditions that rely on the dispersal of water into bubbles, vapor, and fog. These ephemeral works forge a particular relationship among material, reception, witnessing, ethics, and violence that deliberates on the ways that violent death has become an environmental quality for the communities in the region.
In each of these installations the water is dispersed to the point it becomes either atmospheric or integrated into an environmental experience that envelops the viewer in a way that makes it physically impossible to avoid. As suggested by Coulson’s recollections, viewers are often initially unaware of the nuances of the material they will encounter until after it has already occurred. While the water is announced as having been thoroughly disinfected, the conditions of experiencing the work of art, nevertheless, set up a complicated ethical relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer in which audiences experience something like contamination, bringing to mind 18th century notions of the dangers of miasma, as invisible traces of decomposing bodies leach into the environment.
In interviews, Margolles has emphasized that “everyone dies but not everyone is murdered,” saying concretely, “I want people to recognize that.”(2) She has further described her work as “bearing witness to a retelling of facts: thousands of dead, and hundreds of children killed.” But what does it mean to bear witness through transitory elements like air, fog, or bubbles, what information is shared through such fleeting materiality? The facts representing the violence are available in the form of statistics associated with the numbers of dead, pay inequities, poverty, and crime rates, but even those numbers cannot offer a full picture as tracking is complex and not well-organized, resulting in a dearth of even reliable data. Moreover, as scholars like Saidiya Hartman have demonstrated, facts—archival data itself—are incapable of recovering the stories, traumas, and lived realities of those represented. Margolles’s environmental installations offer, instead, an experience that sits at the intersection of absence made physical, sensorial witnessing, and ethical violation.
In works like Aire and Vaporizacíon, where the audience moves through a space that is outfitted merely with air conditioning units or humidifiers which pump air or fog into a room, the water quickly dissipates, becoming imperceptible or an indistinct field. Despite the strength of emotion that may arise from the knowledge of the fluid’s material history, it can only register physically as a simultaneous presence/absence–there but not there. Rather than offering facts that register abstractly, Margolles creates a spatial field that intimates the invisible but pervasive experience of mass trauma. Margolles’s act of witnessing does not bring attention to the individual dead, names are not recovered and the dead stay anonymous, reflecting what is often the condition of their death and burial in mass disposal sites or entry into the morgue.
The aesthetics of absence performed by Margolles reflects on the multiple and complex ways it emerges in the socio-political realities she is responding to. There is an absence of political action in response to the ongoing violence and built-in economic precarity, for example the region around Ciudad Juarez is well known for its maquiladoras which in 2020 paid laborers only $5.90 a day to produce goods to sell over the border in the U.S. There is a marked silence of politicians and elites on the side of Mexico as national image and tourism are safeguarded at the cost of the lives lost and, on the U.S. side, corporations seek to protect their access to excessively cheap labor while pundits demonize the population. This social precarity has resulted in what Judith Butler has theorized as lives that do not rise to the level of the grievable, leaving those lost invisible to the wider social consciousness.
Reacting to these absences, the materiality of the environmental works creates the conditions for witnessing mass social trauma while it marks the expression of violence as an undifferentiated and inescapable field. While the installations lay a framework for the act of witnessing, they also manifest an ethos of the impossibility of fully grasping or quantifying the vast ramifications of experiencing violence, turning toward the sensorial rather than the analytical as an alternative way in. The investment in the sensorial refuses the viewer the option of contemplation from a safe distance as it takes place in the consumption of news reports, numbers, and data.
Viewers are forced to experience the act of witnessing as an assault on their own bodies and psyches as the water acts as a medium of contamination. As the audience moves through the space, the water and its residue of corpses seeps into their skin and is inhaled into the interior of their bodies. It is unavoidable, just as violence and death were unavoidable for the victims whose bodies had been washed with it. Visitors may not consent to the incursion and are perhaps not even given the chance to do so, but then, neither were the victims.
In her works that prioritize the formal element of water, Margolles sets up a dynamic within which the audience is penetrated by the violence they close their eyes to. Though it registers on an infinitely smaller and less brutal scale, the environments transfer the inescapable conditions of violence onto those who have the privilege to avoid it. The environment becomes a physicalized metaphor for mass trauma, mirroring its effective break-down of ethical relations. If looking away remains an option, the body nevertheless bears witness inside and out. We are all contaminated by the violence.
Notes
Amanda Coulson, “Teresa Margolles,” Frieze, September 10, 2004, https://www.frieze.com/article/teresa-margolles.
Teresa Margolles quoted in Denis Fitzgerald, “Artist Draws Attention to Violence in Culiacan,” Queens Chronicle, June 19, 2008, www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19 787915&BRD=2731&PAG=461&dept_id=576260&rfi=6.
About the Author
Dr. Jessica L. Orzulak is the Associate Curator and Curatorial Affairs Manager at the Asheville Art Museum. Her research explores decolonial aesthetics, the history of photography, and art at the intersection of the human and the environment. She is currently organizing the exhibition Sovereign Memories: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories (2025) for the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.