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.
Recommended Citation
Condon, Leslie Anne, "Towards the Non-Spectacle: Responses to Necropolitics in the artwork of Teresa Margolles and Maya Watanabe" (2025). Masters Theses. 1351.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1351
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