En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene) is Teresa Margolles’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, and it makes a quiet, steady case for restraint in an era of violent excess. The show covers three decades of her work, and it is currently on view at MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her approach to the subject is not through spectacle, but through a sustained focus on the ordinary and the overlooked, which she presents with a precision that refuses to sensationalize.
Born in Culiacán, Margolles currently resides in Mexico City. Her art zeroes in on the intense violence found at locations along the US-Mexico border, particularly Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Yet her investigations echo scenes of cruelty in places far beyond those two cities.
Absence, repetition, and a feeling of futility form the foundation of the show. It does not shout at you. Instead, it leaves you to sit quietly with the weight of what has been lost.
The Room That Scrubs Blood
In the first room on the third floor at MoMA PS1, the exhibition starts with a large wall projection titled El agua de la city, Dallas (The Water of the City, Dallas), which comes from 2016. The video gathers footage of individuals cleaning the ground at various locations in Dallas where someone has been shot. Every scene opens with a title card containing the victim’s name, age, date of death, and address.
The runtime stretches to 296 minutes, yet the footage never seems to end, underscoring the sheer scale of the bloodshed and its utter lack of purpose. A title card offers an explanation: “victim shot while accidentally trying to enter the wrong apartment.”.
“victim shot while accidentally trying to enter the wrong apartment”
In a condensed viewing format, La nieve (The Snow) (2015) captures a man in Staten Island clearing snow in front of the altar dedicated to Eric Garner, who was killed by police in 2014. Both videos set apart a small patch of street space through the removal of marks or residue. Margolles describes these actions as “señalizaciones” or “signalizations.”.
The land around the rectangle appears wild and disorderly. Inside the rectangle, by contrast, order reigns, reflecting the unknown and what cannot be held within any fixed bounds.
Control as Coping
Margolles makes you consider control as a way of dealing with the unavoidable shock of dying through her exhibition. She shows Aire (Air) (2003), where two humidifiers let loose water gathered from places of violence in New York City into a chamber concealed behind grilles. That piece comes after the better-known installation Vaporization (2001), a space packed with water turned to vapor from morgues, first displayed at MoMA PS1 in 2002.
Inés Katzenstein, one of the exhibition’s curators, explained in the press preview that “we don’t need the beauty of the steam anymore” — we still breathe it every day, all the time.
What the Show Asks of Us
Margolles’s work compresses complex ideas into visually simple gestures. Minimalism’s potential lies in distilling an essence into an experience that cuts away excess. Her unsparing trim attempts to show us something about ourselves: a system of violence so destructive that it reinforces and codifies notions of “us” and “them” across artificial borders, all in the name of capital.
The program asks what formal restraint achieves in an era marked by violent excess. Margolles responds by presenting the aftermath rather than the spectacle itself.
The Scale of the Loss
In El agua de la ciudad, Dallas, the title cards carry the weight of the show’s most difficult element. They are not abstract arrangements. Instead, they list names, ages, dates, and addresses of individuals whose lives were cut short by violence.
What Margolles does with scrubbing is not a ritual. It is work. It is a means of identifying a place where something terrible has taken place. Her signalizations make plain what would otherwise remain unseen — the precise location where someone died.
What We Take From It
Margolles does not want her work to be easy to look at; she wants it to unsettle you, so that you cannot help but pay attention.
The show’s power comes from holding back on spectacle. It avoids exaggeration and commentary. Instead, it lets the images speak for themselves: streets cleaned, air humidified, shovels at work over a memorial.
The whole purpose of her work is to keep you from feeling. Margolles wants you to look instead.
The Verdict
The show at hand is a forceful exhibition. It offers no comfort, and makes no claim to doing so. Margolles’s pieces demand that viewers face violence head-on, stripped of any staged detachment.
The series serves as a reminder that violence is not an abstraction; it occurs on streets, within homes, across cities. Margolles gathers the water from these locations and places it inside a room. The viewer enters and inhales it.
What makes the exhibition so powerful is that it is not a lecture at all; it is a sensory experience. Death hangs in the air around you, and the scrubbed ground bears witness to the spot where someone died.
The experience is not an easy one to endure, yet it stands as a necessary stop for anyone seeking a true understanding of the subject at hand.
Key Works in the Exhibition
- El agua de la ciudad, Dallas (2016) — a video compilation of people scrubbing streets where someone has been shot, with title cards for each victim
- La nieve (The Snow) (2015) — a video of a man shoveling snow in front of the Eric Garner memorial in Staten Island
- Aire (Air) (2003) — humidifiers releasing water collected from sites of violence in New York City
- Vaporization (2001) — a room filled with vaporized water from morgues, originally shown at MoMA PS1 in 2002
Source material: “Teresa Margolles and the Violence We Breathe,” Hyperallergic.
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