Leonard Correa worked as a crime scene investigator in Santa Ana, California, taking on-site photographs of crime victims. On one assignment, he found that his own cousin had been shot to death. To deal with his in-ability to forget the tragedies he was documenting, Correa would eventually turn to personal photography, and his photographs have since appeared in well-regarded public art exhibits.
You and the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles both had jobs involving the remains of those who died violently. How did those experiences affect the two of you?
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As a crime scene investigator, I witnessed the sheer and unimaginable brutality one human can inflict upon another. Many of the crime scenes left a lasting impression on my consciousness. Ordinary streets and buildings I had to keep passing became visual reminders of traumatic events. The rest of the world moved on, but I could not “unsee.” I found myself left to deal with all those triggers.
Teresa Margolles witnessed the results of acts of inhumanity tenfold more while she worked as a forensic pathologist in México during the “drug wars.” Many of us carry images of violence as a silent burden. Margolles rejects this burden. She chooses to incorporate the biological remnants of the victims into her sculptures. Blood and tissue from dead bodies become an inescapable element of her art.
Margolles focuses particularly on the murders of women, right?
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Yes, many of her pieces focus on femicide. One offers a moving photographic tribute to a murdered trans sex worker, memorializing someone from a group that society at large typically disdains.
In her mural Pesquisas, Margolles depicts the faces of 30 missing girls and women feared to have been abducted, sexually abused, and disappeared. The faces come from actual posters put up on the streets, in desperation.
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Margolles: from the mural Pesquisas
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One of her installations, a powerful work titled Lote Bravo, has a series of earthen, adobe-like blocks made from the dirt from various locations surrounding Ciudad Juarez, the places where hundreds of innocent women endured the horrors of rape and murder before their captors discarded them like toys that no longer held a child’s interest. These blocks may seem innocuous to the viewer, but, in context, they be-come a visual testimony to victims and crimes so many of us have forgot-ten.
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The blocks give viewers a sense of the victim pain and suffering that the Earth has absorbed, like a mother embracing a dying child in her arms. Margolles eases Mother Earth's burden by sympathetically removing the soil from her arms to create these blocks. Her art lets the spirits of those taken make an indelible mark on the consciousness of viewers.
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Does the incorporation of actual material from the dead into the art of Margolles give her work greater power?
Her use of cloths infused with the blood of victims following the autopsy procedure makes Lemas another forceful series. At first glance, the random patterns seem as intriguing as the Shroud of Turin.
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But as viewers get drawn in, the smell and the texture of the dried blood strikes the senses with the grim reality of a life lost to violence.
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In another Margolles installation, visitors enter an empty room and feel a cascade of bubbles hitting their skin. The bubbles come from water a morgue actually used to clean corpses after autopsies.
As an artist yourself, do you think these pieces simply honor the unnamed dead?
I feel that these artworks serve a dual purpose. In communities constantly exposed to violent crime, people quickly become desensitized to the plight of others.
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And those who only read about the crimes in their local papers or see those crimes on the nightly news often become indifferent to these horrors.
The art of Teresa Margolles forces us to confront the material reality of death. She wants all of us to be unable to forget, to know we have a moral obligation to speak out against these crimes. Her art calls us to action.
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