November 2004 Vol.23 No.9
A publication of the International Sculpture Center
En el aire, by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, is a machine that produces soap bubbles from water used to wash corpses prior to autopsy in the Mexico City morgue. The artist says, "My work shocks. But as long as depravity, poverty, corruption, and unpunished murder exist I will not change the concept of a work." Many visitors, not being aware of the meaning of the work (and the origin of the water) played with the soap bubbles.
Bubble sculpture in art.
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/nov04/webspecials/artbasel_tansini.shtml
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http://www.providencephoenix.com/art/tripping/documents/03555050.asp
...Unfortunately, the show’s been organized along very different lines, lines sufficiently obtuse that for the most part I can neither tell them apart nor understand what they mean. For instance, "Social Space" claims to be a category of artistic output that addresses "the social and political situation in Mexico." So, you might ask, how do Teresa Margolles’s bubble-making machines — four black, breadbox-sized units on shelves up near the ceiling — that spit out by the minute hundreds of bite-size soap bubbles, qualify as addressing anything, let alone the social and political situation in Mexico? Answer: read the wall text to En el aire (In the Air) and learn that the water used to produce the bubbles originated in a morgue in Mexico City, which somehow makes the bubbles more than bubbles. For all that her installation looks and feels like a kid’s birthday party, we’re supposed to appreciate it as protest.
http://www.bregenzerkunstverein.at/english/m4_archiv_margolles.htm...
The exhibition displays six bubble machines producing 14,400 soap bubbles per minute. "The bubbles are corpses: 14,400 corpses per minute." (T.M.) Indeed, the bubbles are a mixture of tap water and soap to which Margolles added water used to clean corpses before an autopsy. The water comes from Mexico City's central morgue.
Margolles's work addresses the cycle of life and death, symbolised by the water from the morgue which is returned to the regular sewerage system and ends up in precisely the poor areas of town from where most of the corpses come from that are dealt with at the morgue. "En el aire" pointedly exposes the social, economical and political situation in Margolles's homeland Mexico.
http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/mmk_e/03_margolles_s1_01.html
In the main hall of the museum, soap bubbles are churned into the air by machines. An installation of ethereal beauty, En el aire (2003), turns on us with shocking vengeance when we learn that the water in these soap bubbles comes from the morgue and has been used to clean dead bodies prior to autopsy. For the spectator, the fact that the water has been disinfected is no longer relevant. The difference between the soap bubble before and after the information as to the water’s origin is the difference between the living body and the dead one.
Like a horrifying return from death, the bubbles serve as reminders of life destroyed; at the same time, breaking on our skin, they confirm our own vitality: Whereas motifs of Vanitas traditionally remind us of our mortality, the work of Teresa Margolles reminds us that we are alive.