Los neoliberarchivos de Teresa Margolles

Abstract

In Lote Bravo (2005), What Else Could We Talk About? Cleaning (2009), and Irrigation (2010), contemporary Mexican artist Teresa Margolles exposes and denounces the política de negación, or politics of denial, that conceals or disregards the violence and the precarious conditions that define life along the US border in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Here, neoliberal rationality has empowered a corrupt political and economic class to sanction behavior that favors profit over life and creates a culture of fear and death. To investigate Margolles’s confrontational approach and her recurring engagement with this border city, or “cyclical border encounters,” I adopt the concept of neoliberarchivos, defined as contemporary artworks that act as anti-neoliberalist counterarchives, rendering visible the exercise of violence upon bodies as seen in the feminicidios, masculinicidios, and juvenicidios that have occurred for the last three decades on the border. In the form of installation, sculpture, video art, site-specific artworks, and performance, the neoliberarchivos document and display marginalized knowledge and contest official rhetoric. The neoliberarchivos of Teresa Margolles exemplify a significant trend in global contemporary art that seeks to destabilize hegemonic economic and power structures dominant at the border through a counterarchival impulse.