Teresa Margolles

What does it mean to go from carretillera, a handcart porter, to trochera? Quite likely, many of us are unfamiliar with the meaning of the second word; yet it is not a question of rhetoric, it denotes resignation. The question strikes us when we approach the exhibition “The Stone”; it looms large when one lives in a context that is as “hot” as many of the border zones are today.

Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, Sinaloa, 1963) spent a long period in Cúcuta, a city on the border between Venezuela and Colombia. It is a territory that has turned into a symbol of contemporary evil; a suffocating place, in which to speak of human rights is to appeal to fiction. Margolles sheds light on many of the issues that plague contemporary international politics: class struggle, migration, gender, contraband… In short, a reality stained with blood.

Thus, Margolles defines a new territory from a sharp reflection, a triangular space in which each of the vertices responds to a present-day debt: border, work, woman. A triad that reveals the condition of vulnerability in a situation that affects all who live there, although not all live in equal conditions. The exhibition highlights the importance of resignifying names taking into account the socio-political reality and the existing gender inequality.

“The Stone” recovers some of the central ideas that run through all of the artist’s work. Teresa Margolles denounces the current migratory crises in an outspoken manner; she opens the debate around the work; above all, she bears witness to the vulnerability of women in any situation. Likewise, the exhibition presents some unpublished works and invites, in this order, to: listen, accept the challenge of the gaze and think distances.

Curator: Imma Prieto

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Teresa Margolles: The Stone
Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Artist