Scarlett, Pista de Baile del Club ‘La Cruda’ (Scarlett, dance floor from the club ‘La Cruda’),

2016

Scarlett is a portrait from Margolles’s series Pistas de Baile (Dance Floors), in which she photographed transgender sex workers striking poses at the sites of razed queer nightclubs in Ciudad Juárez, a municipality on the US-Mexico border. She documents the devastating effects of social unrest, impoverishment, and urban blight resulting from the governmental corruption that accompanies the drug trade controlling large areas of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Margolles swept the dirt lots where clubs once stood until she revealed a section of the dance floor, a former communal social space. In partnership with her subjects, she explores the relationship between marginality and the violence they experienced due to gender and sexuality. While cleaning is often understood as an act of removal or erasure, in Margolles’s work it becomes a process of recovery through which social and political repression is brought to light.