The Creaturely Archive Natalia Almada and Teresa Margolles Document the Mexican (Un)Dead

• In Event: Sensate Archives

Abstract

Since 2006, Mexico has gone through its most violent episode in recent history. During that time, documentaries have experienced a surge in México. Artists like Natalia Almada and Teresa Margolles shed light on indexical traces of violence inscribed on the individual body and the social tissue. They have built an archive of “documents” that stimulate the senses and appeal to the affect of their public. They tread on what Eric Santner calls “the creaturely,” which designates the realm of organic living traces in the dead body even after the dissolution of its symbolic belonging to society, as well as the altered state of symbolic social structures after the violent elimination of the living bodies that populated them. In other words, Almada and Margolles build their documentaries/archives on the realm of the “undead.”

This presentation explores Almada’s film “El General”—about her notoriously violent great-grandfather, former Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles—as well as Margolles’s 2009 exhibition titled “¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar?” (“What Else Could We Speak About?”), where the artist had the floors of the gallery mopped daily using rags saturated with blood collected by the artist from the streets of Mexico after shootings. For these artists, the true document of violence is not the film or the exhibition catalogue, but rather the eerie wailing of the off-camera mother after the murder of her son, the uncomfortable inheritance of a violent familial history, and the anonymous blood ritually smeared on the ancient marble floors of a Venetian Palazzo.

Author

• Marcela Romero Rivera, Hobart and William Smith Colleges