Bloodstained

Abstract

Teresa Margolles subverts the epistemic hierarchy of the archive. Her work privileges and affirms embodied memory and material meaning as essential modes for knowing, understanding, and documenting social violence. Margolles invests her concern for societal injustice through her use of bodily fluids derived from actual human corpses. Specifically, in the textile, Sutura—a work arising out of Margolles’s research at the Venezuelan-Colombian border during the migration crisis—the artist and her collaborators commemorate the life of a murdered migrant in material and method. Embroidery is utilized as a historically coded artistic form that resembles suturing and links the project with the reparative action of sewing. Using the stark and minimal representation of a straight line, embroidery is a metaphor for the narrative lines of millions of Venezuelans who have fled the country in the last decade. Similarly, the bodily material integrated into the bloodstained cloth functions to conflate textile, skin, and landscape to explore the confluence of substance, body, and place. I argue that Margolles configures a solution to the hegemony of the archive and the approach to bodily violence in Latin America more broadly. Her archival alternative and use of corpses and bodily fluids may be gruesome and ethically questionable, but the works are also reminders of the perpetual acts of violence inflicted on forgotten bodies.