Teresa Margolles | Rites and Rituals
127 Bodies, 2007, installation
The ordinary-looking thread stretched between the two walls of the space consists of 127 pieces of thread left from post-mortem body stitching, which Teresa Margolles gathered in a Mexico City morgue. The threads, that absorbed body fluids during the stitching process, are charged with meaning which deviates from what meets the eye, transforming into relics of sorts. While the life and death stories of the martyrs whose remnants fill the Catholic churches of the world are known to us, these threads are like secular remnants left after the autopsies of nameless corpses. All we know about these unknown dead is that they ended their lives in violent circumstances and found their way into the autopsy room.
Margolles addresses death neither metaphorically nor mimetically. The work’s formalist-minimalist structure makes for the illusive presence of the dead – each thread is associated with the anonymous figure through whose skin it passed, granting it a place in reality. The threads are similar, yet differentiated from one another. Their shared fate ties them together to form a boundary or barrier, confronting the viewer with death.
Margolles creates her works from materials which she gathers in forensic autopsy rooms where unclaimed corpses arrive after unnatural deaths. The ostensibly banal materials, such as water, threads and bricks, are transformed as a result of their use in the secular death rituals in the pathologist’s room. It is precisely the ordinary, non-threatening appearance of the materials that allows for the introduction of death into everyday reality.
