Hardcover, 181 pages, 24,5 × 17 cm, Spanish/English
The testimony of the witness still has an important place among many artists and writers who identify their works with activist politics, dissidence, the subaltern, and the liberation strategies particularly favored in the last decade of the twentieth century. However, in these times, in which human testimony has been displaced from prominence by so-called material evidence, and in which psychology has given way to forensics, our attention seems to be directed away from the subjective aspects of evidence: the ambiguities and anxiety with which trauma and memory inevitably perfuse the account of the victim. This displacement is already pervasive in the field of law as much as it is in politics, the social sciences, and the entertainment industry, as we have increasingly seen with the influence of DNA, 3D scanners, and satellite surveillance, or in the popularity of the crime novels of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, or the CSI television series. The current exhibition of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Madrid embraces this cultural shift in unexpected ways, without placing itself outside the frame of testimony.
