Interview: Teresa Margolles, artist

WHEN I meet Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, she is straight off the plane from Madrid, where she has been attending a family funeral. It’s evening. Glasgow Sculpture Studios, where she has been working for the past few months and where she is preparing an exhibition that will open on Friday for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, is cold and deserted.

Margolles is perched with her translator on a sofa in her studio. I apologise for the hour and the inconvenience, and awkwardly offer my condolences. The death, she says, was very sad, but peaceful: “It happened in a good place.” That, she says, is something denied many of her own countrymen.

Loss, death, the fate of a Mexico that has been blighted by violence, these have been the 48-year-old’s subjects for some years. She once said that when she travels to other countries from her home in Mexico City, she always takes the pain of Mexico with her.

Margolles’ black hair is tightly bound in two neat pleats under a khaki cap. She wears black work boots and black denim dungarees, with small silver hoops in her ears. Her black t-shirt, emblazoned with logos, is the football shirt of Los Indios, a team in the blighted Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. She likes football and Juarez, one of the murder capitals of the world, is a place that is dear to her.

She has made friends among the mothers looking for their missing daughters in a city where, in the past two decades, hundreds of women – many of them students or temporary migrant workers in the factories of big corporations – have been murdered in unsolved crimes.

She also has friends among the academics trying to understand what has happened in Juarez, where the spiralling crime rate of more than 3,000 murders a year can’t just be understood through its disastrous role in narcotics trafficking. And she has friends among the residents of a city centre being displaced by demolitions and property speculation. Among them is Luis Alvarado, a second-hand clothes salesman, who in 2010 first showed her his photographic archive of the city’s social scene in the 70s and 80s.

In Glasgow, Margolles has had the space and the silence to begin examining the archive, and she will show some of it in her exhibition. It is a job that will take her years, she says. Among the images of teeming bars, dancing girls and wrestling matches are stories of a lost city, one that has now descended into a state of criminal anarchy.

“They are very important documents for Juarez,” she says. “To see what happened and why.” She says she wants to look beyond the obvious. “To see what is in the shadows, the message. There must be some answers in the shadows. When did it start and we didn’t notice?”

The answers will be important for all of us. British journalist Ed Vulliamy, whose recent book Amexica told the story of Juarez, wrote: “Mexico’s War is how the future will look.” Charles Bowden, who has written extensively about the city, says: “Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order.” Juarez may be what unbridled global capitalism actually looks like.

Margolles lives in Mexico City and has looked in the shadows for more than 20 years. At first glance she might be a construction worker, a trade unionist or even a lorry driver. She clutches a can of beer. Her dark eyes, lined with kohl, seem to tell a complex story. Frequently when we talk, those eyes fill with tears, and while she smiles a lot, that smile sometimes seems to turn into a faint grimace with the burden of knowledge.

As well as art, she is trained in forensic science. She spent more than a decade working in the morgue, first as a photographer and later making the artwork that gained her worldwide attention, using the waste materials from the mortuary and the street to tell the stories of the dead.

She has told of streets in northern Mexico that glitter at night with the smashed glass from street clashes and shootings. She has gathered such glass and turned it into the kind of flamboyant jewellery worn by drug dealers. She has smeared the walls and windows of galleries with the sweat of the living and the traces of the dead.

In 2009 she was invited to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale and presented one of the most memorable and frightening works ever shown there. In an empty palazzo, families of the Mexican dead worked each day mopping the marble floors. Their swabbing did not clean the floors however, but laid down a terrible residue: a mixture of water and human blood. From a flagpole next to the Mexican flag hung a bloody rag, material that Margolles and her team had collected from the blood-soaked streets.

It would be easy, in the abstract, to accuse Margolles of sensationalism, but it’s almost impossible to do so face to face. When she talks of why she makes such work she says it is a response not just to the dead of Juarez (3,500 in the year of 2010 alone), but to the 50,000 lost across the country since the beginning of the so-called drugs war. “To work with the remains of the body,” she says, “to transport if from the morgue to the gallery is to put it in public discussion. If I was asked to do it again I would do exactly the same because the country hasn’t changed.”

If someone asked her what Mexico should do next Biennale, she would leave the blood-soaked flag “until there is a real response, until Mexico stops crying”. Her job, she recently told students at Glasgow School of Art, is to get close to the people who have been lost, not the people who have committed the crimes.

These days she is more involved in the life of the street than the mortuary. In December she went back to Mexico City where she had a show at the Museum of Modern Art. She held a performance, The Scream, with local schoolchildren. She wanted the voice of the living to be heard. “It was hard to get them to scream. In the beginning they didn’t know how to scream, I didn’t know how to. After that, they wanted to go and scream in other places. I have learned to scream with them.”

When Margolles arrived in Glasgow it was in the immediate aftermath of the riots. “I had to go and see what was happening. It was this feeling of asking why in rich countries this could happen.” She went to Croydon. “It was chaos.” What did she see? “Sadness. Fear. Silence. There weren’t many local people around: there were people with cameras including foreign film crews.”

She bought some cloth locally and dragged it through the streets collecting the charred debris. Back in Glasgow she has asked an upholsterer to use it to recover an old armchair she found near her studio. He wasn’t best pleased because of the traces of glass. All her work is an act of memorial.

In Glasgow with a studio, and the time to think things through, she feels that she is achieving some distance on the subject matter that has consumed her life and art. “Sometimes,” she says of her relationship with her native country,” it’s like being a doctor, it’s so hard to operate on a sick relative.”

It’s not clear whether Margolles has chosen her work or if it has chosen her. Her Venice show was titled What Else Is There To Talk About? In confronting the horrors of Mexico she seems to have incredible stamina and no small degree of personal courage. But when I suggest that she is brave, she is outraged: “The people who live day in day out are brave. The teachers who go and teach, the children who go every day to school, the baker who makes his bread. We are just the witnesses.”

• Teresa Margolles is at Glasgow Sculpture Studios at The Whisky Bond, Dawson Road, Glasgow, Friday until 30 June, as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. www.glasgowinternational.com