The Reyes Salazar Familia

Wednesday February 23 2010 Mexico City: Inside a camp set up outside the Senate, Marisela Reyes ended her hunger strike, but will continue to demand federal authorities the safe return of her siblings Elias and Maria Magdalena Reyes, and Elias' wife, Luisa Ornelas. Witnesses say armed men forced the three into a vehicle on 7 February in the town of Guadalupe, Chihuahua state, and nothing has been heard of them since.

A week after the kidnapping, unknown assailants attacked the Reyes Salazar family home with Molotov cocktails. No one was injured as the family had departed the residence days early due to fears of cartel related activities in the area.

Marisela, her brother Saul Reyes and mother Sara Salazer began their strike in Ciudad Juarez, but Chihuahua state governor Cesar Duarte refused to listen until they moved to the capital on Monday.

Marisela's sister, the well known human rights activist Josefina Reyes, was murdered a year ago in Ciudad Juarez.

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Friday February 25 2010: The bodies of Elias and Malena Reyes Salazar and of Luisa Ornelas, were found early Friday on a dirt road located about a mile from the Ciudad Juarez suburb of Guadalupe.

With the bodies were messages alluding to organized crime, though their details are yet to be released.

Marisela Escobedo

Thursday December 16, 2010: Human rights defender, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, was shot to death in full view of the Palace of the Governor in Chihuahua City. For two days she had maintained a vigil in front of the offices of Governor Cesar Duarte vowing not to move until investigators showed progress the case of her daughter, Rubí Marisol Frayre, who was murdered in September 2008.

A security video recording shows masked men pulling up in a white car in front of the governor's office. A man appears on the footpath and confronts Marisela, who tries to flee across the street. The man chases her down and shoots her in the head. Ms Escobedo was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she died within minutes.

Marisela's daughter, Rubí Marisol Frayre, disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 2008. Prosecutors alleged Frayre's live-in boyfriend, Sergio Barraza, admitted to murdering her and led police to the 17-year-old's burned and dismembered remains in a trash bin in June 2009. At the trial Barraza, who is also alleged to work for the criminal group Los Zetas, asserted his innocence claiming he had been tortured into confessing. He was absolved by a court in April 2010 for lack of evidence and allowed to walk free.

After appealing the case, the Superior Court Justice of Chihuahua found Rafael Barraza guilty of the murder and sentenced him to 50 years, however he was already on the run. A reward of 250,000 peso been issued for his capture.

The day after Ms Escobedo's murder, Governor Duarte called for the suspension of the three judges presiding over Barraza's trial. Barraza is also the prime suspect for Marisela's murder.

Necronaut

Necronaut is a term derived from the Greek words nekros (νεκρός), meaning "corpse" or "dead", and nautes (ναύτης), meaning "sailor".
Wikipedia
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We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-
1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death's beauty - that is, beauty.

3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies - by radio, the internet and all sites where its processes and avatars are active. In the quotidian, to no smaller a degree, death moves: in traffic accidents both realised and narrowly avoided; in hearses and undertakers' shops, in florists' wreaths, in butchers' fridges and in dustbins of decaying produce. Death moves in our appartments, through our television screens, the wires and plumbing in our walls, our dreams. Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already.

4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft[1] that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage towards oblivion, mankind's sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways. Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.

[1] This term must be understood in the most versatile way possible.It could designate a set of practices, such as the usurpation of identities and personas of dead people, the development of specially adapted genetic or semantic codes based on the meticulous gathering of data pertaining to certain and specific deaths, the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual, the perfection, patenting and eventual widespreaddistribution of ThanadrineTM, or, indeed, the building of an actual craft - all of the above being projects currently before the First Committee.


INS Founding Manifesto, published 14 December 1999: The Times, London, p. 1.
International Necronautical Society

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"... we’re trying to do for death what the Situationists did for sex, that’s one way of looking at it."
Simon Critchley International Necronautical Society
Fowler, Steven "Nihilism, Punk and the International Necronautical Society: an interview with Simon Critchley" 3:AM Magazine, 30 MArch 2009

"Believing that every text is coded, he looks to writers like Freud and Jacques Derrida, who hold the same view, only to find, of course, that their writings are coded too. Every text, it turns out, is at once a nexus of hidden messages and a key to reading other texts. His interest in death is not in the empirical event; in his thinking it generally stands as a cipher for the outer limit of description, for the point at which the code breaks down—a point that is often alive, as McCarthy points out, with secret desires."
Verhagen, Marcus "Deathly Pursuits, profile of INS General Secretary, Tom McCarthy" Art Monthly, no. 277, June 2004
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Aztec Lego

L-R: Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Xipe-Totec, Mayahuel, Mictlantecuhtli, and Huitzilopochtli

Coatlicue

"Coatlicue, also known as Teteoinan (also transcribed Teteo Inan), "The Mother of Gods" (Classical Nahuatl: Cōhuātlīcue [koːwaːˈtɬiːkʷe], Tēteô īnnān), is the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the moon, stars, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war. She is also known as Toci (Tocî, "our grandmother") and Cihuacoatl (Cihuācōhuātl, "the lady of the serpent"), the patron of women who die in childbirth.

The word "Coatlicue" is Nahuatl for "the one with the skirt of serpents". She is referred to variously by the epithets "Mother Goddess of the Earth who gives birth to all celestial things", "Goddess of Fire and Fertility", "Goddess of Life, Death and Rebirth", and "Mother of the Southern Stars".

She is represented as a woman wearing a skirt of writhing snakes and a necklace made of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Her feet and hands are adorned with claws and her breasts are depicted as hanging flaccid from nursing. Her face is formed by two facing serpents (after her head was cut off and the blood spurt forth from her neck in the form of two gigantic serpents),[1] referring to the myth that she was sacrificed during the beginning of the present creation.
Most Aztec artistic representations of this goddess emphasize her deadly side, because Earth, as well as loving mother, is the insatiable monster that consumes everything that liveth. She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist.

According to Aztec legend, she was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple, and subsequently gave birth to the gods Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui then rallied Coatlicue's four hundred other children together and goaded them into attacking and decapitating their mother. The instant she was killed, the god Huitzilopochtli suddenly emerged from her womb fully grown and armed for battle. He killed many of his brothers and sisters, including Coyolxauhqui, whose head he cut off and threw into the sky to become the moon. In one variation on this legend, Huitzilopochtli himself is the child conceived in the ball-of-feathers incident and is born just in time to save his mother from harm.

A new article by Cecelia Klein (2008) argues that the famous Coatlicue statue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and several other complete and fragmentary versions, may actually represent a personified snake skirt. The reference is to one version of the creation of the present Sun. The myth relates that the present Sun began after the gods gathered at Teotihuacan and sacrificed themselves. The best known version states that Tezzictecatl and Nanahuatzin immolated themselves, becoming respectively the moon and the sun. But other versions add a group of female deities to those who sacrificed themselves, including Coatlicue. Afterwards the Aztecs were said to have worshipped the skirts of these women, which came back to life. Coatlicue thus has creative aspects, which may balance the skulls, hearts, hands, and claws that connect her to the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli. The earth both consumes and regenerates life."

Wikipedia

Teresa Margolles

"Now I won't show the physical horror, but silence. I have tried to clean my pieces and speak with the minimum amount of elements."

37 cuerpos / 37 Bodies [2007]
Thread / Remnants of threads used after the autopsy to sew up bodies of persons who have suffered a violent death. Each thread represents a body, Length 1240 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

Tarjetas para picar cocaina [1997-9]

"I would give addicts these cards, and when they turned them around they would see the mage of this dead body. This shows that the consumer is also part of this circle. You don't feel responsible of (for) this death, but you are part of this chain of death."





















Lengua [2000]

























"This is a tongue that belonged to an adolescent that was murdered. This body was going to be given to the morgue. I showed his Mom my work and said to his Mom the tongue of her son could speak for a lot adolescents that had been killed in Mexico."

"A morgue for me is a thermometer of a society. What happens inside a morgue is what happens outside. The way people die show me what is happening in the city. The morgue in Brasil was full of children, and the morgue in Mexico City was full of bodies that had not been identified, because there is not enough resources to cover a funeral."

On The Air [2003]

"Each bubble is a body."

In the main hall of the museum, soap bubbles are churned into the air by machines. An installation of ethereal beauty, En el aire (2003), turns on us with shocking vengeance when we learn that the water in these soap bubbles comes from the morgue and has been used to clean dead bodies prior to autopsy. For the spectator, the fact that the water has been disinfected is no longer relevant. The difference between the soap bubble before and after the information as to the water’s origin is the difference between the living body and the dead one.

Like a horrifying return from death, the bubbles serve as reminders of life destroyed; at the same time, breaking on our skin, they confirm our own vitality: Whereas motifs of Vanitas traditionally remind us of our mortality, the work of Teresa Margolles reminds us that we are alive.
Labor

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¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? / What Else Could We Talk About? Venice Biennale 2009





The works presented at the Mexican Pavilion are a subtle chronicle of the effects of a devilish international economy: the vicious circle of prohibition, addiction, accumulation, poverty, hatred and repression that transmogrifies the transgresive pleasures and puritan obsessions of the North into the South as Hell.

Due to the recent upsurge of violence in Mexico ─ according to the press, in 2008 more than 5000 people lost their lives in executions and shootings related to drug trafficking and its combat ─ Teresa Margolles’s work, that for almost two decades has concentrated in the exploration of the artistic possibilities of human remains, has put an increasing emphasis in the meditation on violent death and its victims.

Margolles most recent work involve a subtle and moving chronicle of the pervasive economy of death that plagues the north of Mexico.

¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? will be a narrative based on tactics of contamination and material actions, which will seek to emotional and intellectually involve the visitors in the issues surrounding the way violence and the current global economy involve the effective declaration of whole generations of individuals as a virtually disposable social class, trapped in between the perverse logic of criminality, capitalism and prohibition. The Pavillion project will be accompanied by a number of public actions which will extend the concept of her participation to the venues of the Venice Biennale and the city.

e-flux
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"[Margolles] interrupts the art space by bringing in these materials that are really charged, which traces the relationship between death and power. It's about necropolitics, and the eruption of necropolitics in the art sphere."
Cuauhtémoc Medina Gonzalez, curator of the Mexico Pavillion at the venice Biennale 2009. [cited at Intersections – Daniel Hernandez.]

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21 Scores Settled / Malverde's Jewelry

"There are a total of 21 “Score Settlings,” 21 pieces of jewelry - rings, bracelets, bangles, pendants, earrings, etc. - that Teresa Margolles had made at Joyería Anne in the Rafael Buelna market, a place situated in downtown Culiacán, where small establishments supply all sorts of accessories to low-income people. This location abets and is a venue for drug trafficking.

In an exercise of displacement, far from the noisy streets with its masses, the artist presented this series in November 2008 at the Galería Salvador Díaz in Madrid and at Art Positions - Art Basel Miami Beach in December of the same year. The pieces of jewelry were exhibited in a solemn, dark, even elegant, atmosphere; each piece occupied a dramatically lit black pedestal showcase. On this occasion, the artist’s intervention consisted of generating a collection of glass fragments that she took from crime scenes and later used to replace precious stones in pieces of jewelry. Thus, Malverde’s “glow” is, curiously, ill gotten. It is the result of a tragedy that Mexican politicians have called: 'The fight against organized crime.'"

Positions 08 Art Basel Miami 2008


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In using the resources and effects of the Sinaloan drug trade, producing the jewellery via businesses that depend on and service the drug economy, as well as the figure of the narco saint Jesus Malverde and then placing/selling it within the commercial art world, it might be said that Margolles is 'infecting' the art market with the drug economy – implicating the narco dollars operating inside the Art World.

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Santa Muerte

"Santa Muerte's precise origins are a matter of debate. Some experts say its roots lie with Aztec spiritual rituals that mixed with Catholicism during Spanish colonial rule. What is clear, however, is that Santa Muerte developed a large following only in the last quarter century among Mexicans who had become disillusioned with the dominant Church and, in particular, the ability of established Catholic saints to deliver them from poverty. Residents of crime-tossed neighborhoods like Mexico City's Tepito began revering Santa Muerte more than Jesus Christ, experts say. Some of its devotees eventually split from the Catholic church and began vying for control of Catholic buildings. That's when Mexico's Catholic church declared it a cult."

Gray, Steven "Santa Muerte: The New God in Town" TIME 16 October, 2007

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"The shrine of the Holy Death is just blocks away from a compound of low-income housing where, in 2007, Mexico City police conducted a full-scale assault in search of drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods. Enriqueta Romero Romero, known as Queta, or Quetita, set up the shrine on this spot seven years ago after one of her sons, who was himself a devotee of La Santa, made her a gift of the skeleton. The bewigged saint now stands in a glass case, elaborately robed and veiled according to Queta’s inspiration—sometimes in rainbow gauze, sometimes in white lace. Queta and her son also more or less invented the 8 P.M. “Rosary” that is held on the first of every month, and draws thousands of the faithful, including the skull-ringed young men who, at a guess, make a paltry living running many kinds of errands for the lords of Tepito."

"Queta’s genius has been to create out of her Catholic faith an inclusive syncretic ritual: a Rosary, which is recited complete with Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer; special prayers for those in jail; and a culminating, quasi-Pentecostal moment when the faithful all lift their effigy to Heaven to “charge it with energy.” It is a cult, Queta says, accurately, that does not discriminate. A Catholic priest might extend grudging absolution to those who confess that they have just sold several grams of crystal meth to a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but only at Queta’s Rosary can you be blessed on a monthly basis without the matter of how you earn a living ever coming up."

Guillermoprieto, Alma "Letter from Mexico: Days of the Dead –The new narcocultura" The New Yorker 10 November, 2008
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