TERESA MARGOLLES / PLANCHA (2010)

Plancha at DHC/ART

One post in and I’m already deviating from my intended structure! Oh well. This post is a bit more tangential, actually, but I’m hoping it’ll give a bit more background as to how/why I’ve come to Prof. Hunter’s “Liquid Intelligence” research project and it acts as an avenue for me to reconsider some of my earlier writing. One of my initial attempts to theorize the ‘body as liquid’ came from a paper I wrote last semester on an installation by a Mexican artist named Teresa Margolles entitled Plancha – which was on display at Montreal’s DHC/ART last winter. The installation consisted of a series of heated steel plates which extended across the gallery floor, and Margolles had rigged a tube across the ceiling which sent single drops of clear water down to hit the plank and evaporate into the gallery air. After reading the accompanying wall text, it became apparent that Margolles sourced the water from a morgue in Mexico City where it was used to clean the bodies of the anonymous/unclaimed dead after autopsy. I recently read Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence for a course, and it struck me how helpful her writing was for allowing me to reconsider my (conflicted) thoughts on Margolles work. Through Precarious Life, I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation for how ‘liquid bodies’ can create new intersubjective relationships between disparate people. So I’ve written up some of my thoughts here! 

            In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the politics through which legitimized mourning becomes unevenly divided across different lives and different deaths, ultimately asserting that some deaths attain status as publicly grievable over others: “we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more valuable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.” (30) Plancha renders this division of value palpable in the gallery air: the traces of Mexico’s dead – rendered anonymous and unclaimed through uneven systems of power and privilege – linger in the air and are taken into my lungs, into my very body, in the gallery space. In a quite deliberate, jarring manner, her installation calls into question how the deaths of some are simply absorbed back into the status quo – calling the gallery visitors to directly attend to the ephemeral (or even invisible) traces left behind by a necropolitical regime. By taking the traces of the anonymous dead into my body, a twofold form of violence occurs: on the one hand, they infiltrate my boundaries, disrupting my sense of coherence/cleanliness, yet conversely, by breathing them in I assist in their further dispersal/dissolution, perhaps their continued invisibility. In Precarious Life, Butler is arguing for a redistribution of grievability, a reconsideration of intersubjective relations that emphasizes vulnerability and interdependence over hierarchies of value: “In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (29). In a beautifully (or perhaps frighteningly) simple gesture, Plancha encapsulates these complex layers of intersectional vulnerability: by entering the gallery space and participating within its atmosphere (whether or not the water is ‘actually’ sourced from where Margolles claims, which is a whole other issue I’ve considered at length) visitors become aware of their own corporeal vulnerability and fundamental interdependence with others who – due to systematic forms of violence and oppression – are no longer able to speak for themselves. Standing in the gallery space, I take that violence into my body, creating an awareness of complicity and intersecting forms of interdependence that allows me to take responsibility for my own position of privilege. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” (23) Butler writes: my boundaries are undone by the traces of the dead in the air, just as I participate in their undoing by taking them into my lungs.

Margolles’ ambivalence in relation to this still unnerves me. Her work is amazingly effective in calling forth how this interdependence functions on a personal, bodily level – and causes me to consider how the air I breathe implicates me as a citizen of Montreal, of Canada, as a participant within the systems of power that exist here – yet is this at the expense of enacting more violence upon those who have already experienced enough suffering – the doubled violence of death and subsequent social invisibility? Is Margolles participating in what Butler has named  “the derealization of the ‘Other’” (33)? As they disperse into the air, are the bodies in Plancha rendered invisible twice over, rendered unreal and left anonymous? Perhaps it is the extremely loaded nature of her (presumed) material that prompts me to wish for something more, to ask for a treatment of the traces of the anonymous dead that more directly differs from the cold, medicalized, unsympathetic system that they are already subsumed within. Even as I write that, I wonder how feasible such a demand could be/what such an installation could look like – at the end of the day I don’t think it would be as effective in illustrating these intersecting forms of vulnerability and interdependence that Butler discusses. All in all, Margolles’ work manages to say a lot with a surprisingly sparse visual vocabulary, and Butler’s Precarious Life has assisted me immensely in sorting through many of the ambiguous, conflicting, and disarming implications of her installation. 

Info on the exhibit that Plancha was included in - it was a great show! http://www.dhc-art.org/en/exhibitions/chronicles-of-a-disappearance