‘Who Cleans the Blood of the City?’

Abstract

Teresa Margolles's 2009 exhibition, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), as part of the 53rd Venice Biennale, explored Mexico's militarized cartels, narcoviolence and the complex history of Mexico's relationship to gendered and racialized violence. Limpieza was a daily cleaning performance that worked to reproduce a crime scene; the blood used, diluted with bleach, was drawn from the crime scenes of murder victims across Mexico. This article focuses primarily on Margolles's use of blood as an aesthetic material and the ways the installation further draws out complicated questions around crime scenes, domestic and reproductive labour, and economic exploitation. Overwhelmingly, many critics focus on how Margolles's use of blood moves beyond the frame of the crime scene, distending and expanding upon the trauma of narcoviolence, creating what Iván A. Ramos calls an ‘ecology of death that quite literally bleeds out within and onto an unfamiliar, delocalized space' (2016, 'The Viscosity of Grief: Teresa Margolles at the Scene of the Crime', Women & Performance: A journal of feminist theory 25(3): 298-314). I move against these perhaps more cathartic, constructive and salutary readings of Margolles's materialist use of blood and human remains, and instead propose that Margolles draws our attention to the material, domestic and reproductive labour that underpins these ecologies of violence and death. Unlike Margolles's previous artworks, what are the stakes of removing corpses and the crime scene from view, where all that is left in its wake are the faint musty smell of death, a few blood-soaked mops and a lone cleaner washing away the violence? Further, while blood is important here, I propose that Limpieza draws us to more gendered, racialized and classed question of who labours to ‘manage’ crime scenes as products of ongoing state-sanctioned narcoviolence - affectively, emotionally, practically, physically - and what this further reveals about a history of colonized domestic labour in Mexico and the US.

Notes

1 According to Margolles’s gallery, Peter Kilchmann in Switzerland, ʻWhat Else Could We Talk About?, 2009' is a major piece by Teresa Margollles and consists of mopping the floors of the exhibition space from left to right, from wall to wall, much as the system followed by doing an autopsy. The water for doing this action is collected by moisturizing fabrics through a humidifying system. The fabrics previously absorbed the fluids and leftovers of the place where murdered people were found in different cities of the north of Mexico. See Galerie Peter Kilchmann 2009.

2 Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service), which is the Mexican Coroner’s office.

3 An acronym for the Mexican coroner’s office, Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service). I define narcoviolence here as violence associated with the illegal drug trade in Mexico.

4 In an email exchange with Margolles she informed me that she ‘looked for the relatives in Culiacán and Juarez and invited them to participate’. They were also paid for their travel, hotels and meals for the duration of their stay in Venice. A group from Juarez and Culiacán were there for the week of the opening. Another group from Juarez came for a week during the middle, and another from Culiacán for a week during the closing. During the run of the exhibition, ‘there was always somebody in the palazzo performing: man from Mexico who lived in Venice. He did it everyday, and he also had a relative who was killed in Mexico. The days the people from Juarez and Culiacán came, he didn’t perform’ (Margolles and Klett 2023).