The Body Is Shared Vapor: Via Negativa as Ethical Praxis for Installation and Performance Art in Teresa Margolles’s Vaporización Available to Purchase

Teresa Margolles’s installation Vaporización uses water collected from washing the dead to transfuse gallery space with palpable absence. Fogging the room with inhalable condensation makes the living and dead permeable to each other while reinscribing the role of performer onto the body of the viewer. In this exchange, the nameless dead of Mexico City are given a communal theatricality that operates at the edge of visibility, in the theological realm known as via negativa. Through refusal, via negativa has the potential to encourage transformation of self-concept and commitment to others’ well-being. This article explores these elements as ethical and aesthetic imperatives in Teresa Margolles’s neo-minimalist installations, comparing methods of encountering the illegible through literal diffusion of bodily contact with theology that concerns divinity as unknowable. Tactics of performative negation emerging in Queer theology and contemporary art have the ability to resuscitate the sacred within the relational aspects of exhibition space, to confront dehumanization, and to retain intimacy while contributing nondidactically to human rights discourse.