Date of Award

Winter 1-15-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Program

Global Arts and Cultures

First Advisor

Dr. Sean Nesselrode Moncada

Second Advisor

Dr. Naimah Petigny

Third Advisor

Dr. Katherine Stefatos and Dr. Kenneth Berger

Abstract

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of Indigenous farmers and villagers were disappeared in the 1980s

and ’90s by rebel communist parties and the Peruvian State itself during the

nearly twenty years of internal conflict.

This thesis explores how Margolles and Watanabe’s use of non-

figurative and non-spectacularized representations of the wounded body in

these artworks, specifically poor Brown Indigenous female victims of political

violence, resist the sanitized narratives of their respective nation-states while

contributing to critical visual counter-narratives generated by local media and

grassroots organizations. In the following chapters, I will discuss how these

alternative modes of representation extend beyond the visual, evoking a

somatic response that transcends language and more closely echoes life under

extreme violence and anticipatory death while avoiding the spectacle of that

violence. Through my analysis, I ultimately argue that Margolles and

Watanabe’s use of the non-figurative, non-spectacle, and anti-spectacle in

Lote Bravo and Liminal offer a critically distinctive modality for engaging

with the legacies of violence they bring visibility to, and representations of

political violence more broadly.

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