One of the lastest series by Margolles, where she gives a face and a voice to the transgender prostitutes of Ciudad Juárez. Now deprived of their working places, they are portrayed in the barren spaces that were previously occupied by the discotheques where they used to work.
Over the past decade Teresa Margolles has focused her practice on Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), a city sadly notorious for being the main stage of a bloody drug war between competing cartels, and for the hundreds of women who have been murdered or gone missing there.
This series depicts transgender sex workers on the remnants of what once were nightclubs, now in ruins. Margolles has worked in close collaboration with them, which has enabled her to gain an insight into the complexities and difficulties experienced by these workers on a daily basis: exclusion, discrimination, and an alarming rate of hate crimes.
For these photographs Teresa Margolles highlighted the dance floors of the onetime clubs, using water to indicate the exact perimeter of where they used to be. The human shapes blend into a landscape dominated by ruin and devastation. Nevertheless, they put on their best faces, almost as if reasserting themselves amidst all this violence and destruction.
Teresa Margolles,Dance Floors
Festival PHotoESPAÑA
May 31 to September 17, 2017
CentroCentro Cibeles
Plaza Cibeles, 1
28014 Madrid
Spain
