While the work of contemporary Mexican artist Teresa Margolles and her collaborators in the death-metal band and performance group SEMEFO is often contextualized within a national framework or within specific artistic developments of the 1990s, meager writing exists to explore how the artist and the audience experience the work. This thesis examines the work of Margolles and SEMEFO to contextualize their work with dead bodies and animal carcasses within a historical moment in Mexico City, but also to relate it to its many venues and audiences. In it, I study the work's relationship to affect, narratives of personal experience, and to the intimate ways in which artist and audience view the dead. Studying how Margolles and her collaborators change their presentation of corpses over time and in different spaces allows readings of the artists' relationship to their underground death-metal community, their urban independent artistic community, and their international museum-based community. Through these communities, we can understand Margolles' work as part of a more specific history based on intimate interactions and expressions of mourning.

Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-01T23:30:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_10997_MONICA_CONTRERAS_DISERTACAO.pdf: 7122957 bytes, checksum: 41ace7668ab273d20c22b737a707af3d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-05-09 / Esta dissertação tem por objetivo trazer a tona uma reflexão sobre a produção artística contemporânea em três artistas latino-americanas, especificamente Janine Antoni (Bahamas, 1962- ), Teresa Margolles (México,1963- ) e Dóris Salcedo (Colômbia 1958- ), artistas que procuram uma exploração da noção de corporalidade por meio da análise de alguns processos esculturais-objetuais em produções artísticas que parecem trabalhar de maneira a repetir ou sugerir fatos, embora evitam a representação realista e que têm um interesse como obra de protesto. As três artistas utilizam a presença corporal em sua relação com o real apresentado. A repetição ou impressão é o que retorna, não é o fato original, mas sim, à sua sombra, sua memória. É no encontro com ela que se produz no sujeito um estranhamento, uma ansiedade e angústia traumática que parecem permitir sair do cotidiano e cogitar outras possibilidades de viver no mundo. Os resultados revelam as obras como testemunhas de processos vivenciais que permitem uma revisão de diferentes estados da poética corporal envolvida com a problemática de índole política. Palavras chave: Arte corpo, Janine Antoni, Teresa Margolles, Dóris Salcedo, memória, materialidade.

This report outlines the conceptual, procedural and formal descriptions of the artistic development I have acquired over the course of the past three years. The current violent events caused by the War on Drugs in México –my home country- led me to this research. Beginning with the idea of erasure as language, I concentrated on the use of processes that are reductive in nature to create the bodies of work mentioned in this report. Thousands of people die in drug-related violence every year in México; by using metaphors and visual metonymies to tie together process and subject matter I explore the idea of perception, memory and transformation. I believe my work is derived from a need to find meaning in these brutal events that repositions the corpse in our field of vision, reminding us that our physical existence is finite. / text