La Búsqueda

The last work of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, at Zürich's Migros Museum, tells the plague of femicide in Ciudad Juarez through the posters of lost identities.

Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
“At nightfall, the district comes to life, filling up with nameless men and women looking for fun, something that will assuage their survival or ignite their desire.
It is heaving with drug addicts, prostitutes, parties of revellers and Mexican and foreign tourists. Those who work here have a hard gaze: they are obliging with paying customers and resigned to indifference. Or to silence. This is the arena of the violent, their hunting ground.” Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez 
Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez, Ossa nel deserto, Adelphi 2006
Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez, Ossa nel deserto, Adelphi 2006

Ciudad Juarez is the city featured in Bones in the Desert, the Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez book that accompanied me on my trip to Mexico a couple of years ago. It is also the setting for La squeda, the latest work by Teresa Margolles, who has, for more than a decade, focused on the social injustice and death that plagues her country.

Albeit in different contexts and manners, both authors refer, in particular, to an occurrence that has long been repeating itself and which, although things have improved slightly in recent years, aùn no se acabò (is not over yet).

More than 13 years have passed since the femicide phenomenon exploded in Ciudad Juarez and reverberated all around the world but no TV channel, newspaper or the country’s police has ever narrated or explained it (in the terms of an investigation). At the start of the 21st century, four murder victims out of ten in Ciudad Juarez, in the State of Chihuahua, are women – as explained by Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez, a non-fiction writer, author and correspondent of the Reforma newspaper who has devoted many years of his life to this investigation.

The authorities claim to have solved 80% of cases, of the more than 300 murders, but hundreds of innocents are still rotting away in the prisons and as many probable guilty ones roam free and hold prestigious roles in the country. Despite the repeated political pressure and threats, Rodriguez has worked hard to uncover thoughts, records and testimonies, in some cases placing a serious risk on his life. Teresa Margolles does the same with her skilful and raw work.

Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
The lists of names in Rodriguez’ long narration get longer in the memory. Never-ending names of women and children of mixed identity, photographed and printed on sheets of white paper, worn by time, become the wallpaper of a densely populated cityscape, the one that Teresa Margolles has literally uprooted and brought to the Migros Museum, once again underlining the force and ferocity of this story.

“Look. Missing. Anyone with information, please telephone...

When someone disappears, premature mourning sets in as soon as the ‘Missing’ flyers and posters appear. An endless stream of sad landscapes, a constant fluctuation between hope and the thought of death.

The faces on the posters are almost indistinguishable. Most are children or teenagers, their features struggling to emerge from the dark blotches to which photographs are reduced by poor reproduction. Features become blurry smudges in a growing muddle of names.” (SGR)

Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
The Búsqueda consists in eight shelters formed of faded glass panes and aluminium frames that sit on the street kerbs of Ciudad Juarez. For years, the duplicated posters of lost identities pasted on them have radically altered not only the mood of the city but its urban conformation, too, redesigning its architecture and topography.

“Every notice states an age, a skin colour, a stature, an eye colour and perhaps a scar. A person’s life in ten printed or handwritten lines.” (SGR)

They are here, samples from a narration that Teresa Margolles decided to exhibit, as blunt as the truth that surrounds them and fused together in the surroundings by a sound, a recording of the train that cuts through Ciudad Juarez along more than 12 km. The low frequency vibrates the glass of the structures, moving the loose edges of the flyers and giving a voice to the faces. The uneasy pressure on the rails reverberates indefinitely, leaving the task of crossing all the city’s circles to the imagination: from the outskirts to the centre, from the maquilladoras to the check points, from the colectivos stops in the overcrowded barrios to the sleepy hangouts offering mezcal and chapulinas.

Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum
Teresa Margolles, La Búsqueda, Migros Museum

The scene is not easy to imagine if you have never actually been there, to this land of injustice where the humidity-pollution mix changes people’s complexions.

La Búsqueda extracts a piece of it, a synthesis transported across the ocean.

People used to get lost at sea, in the mountains or in the desert; now they get lost in the cities. Here the number of dead equals that of the living and the living who remember the dead are also dying.

“The city is home to a colossal, vile ossuary that resplendent with official acquiescence. These crimes expose us to the whole world. That is why I told myself, remember: you are one of the dead now. Pay homage to them.” (SGR).

We are approaching the end of the book by Rodriguez, Bolaño’s friend and a character in 2666, introduced by the Chilean writer as follows: “There were no deaths in July. None in August either. Round this time the Mexico City newspaper La Razon sent Sergio Gonzáles to write a story on the Penitent: Sergio Gonzáles was thirty-five and recently divorced, and he was looking to make money any way he could,” (Roberto Bolaño) [1].

What has not ended is Teresa Margolles’ quest to pursue the traces left by the omens of death, signs that measure the system of a society in a state of alarmism and voluntary ineptitude.



1 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, 1 Farrar Strauss & Giraud, New York 2004, translated by Natasha Wimmer

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