“The danger of speech, of integration into the narration of memory, may lie not in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much. […] The possibility of integration into memory and the conciousness of history thus raises the question, van der Kolk and van der Hart ultimately observe, ‘wheter it is not a sacfrilege of the traumatic experience to play with the reality of the past.” (Caruth, 154)

While watching a short video about Teresa Margolles art exhibition “What else could we talk about?”,  I froze when I heard the artist say that as part of the exhibit she brought people from Ciudad Juárez –the city I grew up in– and Sinaloa to clean the pavilion where actual blood from victims was being displayed. More shocking to me was hearing the translator add, maybe mistakenly,  that those people cleaning were actual relatives from people who were killed by the cartel violence. That made me think about the way this specific form of art was dealing with trauma. I started this short response citing Caruth’s initial statement on the impossibility to integrate trauma into a simple narration as therapy. If those people were actual family of the victims, I would be very interested in knowing how participating in Margolle’s exhibit had an impact on them (I would find it very hard to believe that it had had none); the way I see it, the narrative she proposes is just too direct, it puts the person at the center of the event and makes them live the experience of physical, social and institutional violence once again. I believe, as Saidiya Hartman would say, that displaying and spectacularizing the violence people have suffered not only poses an ethical problem, but also misses the opportunity to tell through other symbols whose meaning can be deeper than just the direct showing of blood and wounds. The exhibit took place in Venice. While I understand that people there might not be familiar with the types and extent of violence happening in Mexico, and that showing how people escape and suvive traumatic events as Caruth would say could open a space for empathy and communal healing, I still cannot not think that the people inserted into the exhibit are there as both actors and spectators as well, and I question whether this new event is seen –or not– as another traumatizing instance. On the other hand, as shown in the Freud piece, if trauma is embodied, how does this different role at the violence scene —a role were the body is not as shocked as the second of losing someone, but a more quiet and discrete one, slowly cleaning– can transform that embodied memory? Is the healing part of this exhibit for those (non)actors not in the seeing the blood in a new context but in the moving the rest of their body at a different rythm, one more proper to think slowly and digest what has happened?