Illuminated signage tiles set on the floor of a museum’s exhibition space spell out, in bold black letters, MUNDOS. This sign has been salvaged from a bar in Ciudad Juárez, a city in the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua. At once ruin and promise, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles gives this sign new life: it becomes a metonym for the transnational forces that contribute to integrating Ciudad Juárez into globalized economies, and the potential for finding community in the aftermath. In her works from the past decade—several of which were presented in the Mundos exhibition recently held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM)—Margolles has alluded to the material, lived impacts of global circulation processes. Far from being merely the expression of crisis left in the wake of economic liberalization, political corruption and the drug trade in Mexico, the worlds that Margolles evokes also encompass communities in becoming, formed from, and despite, the ruinations that Ciudad Juárez has witnessed. Through an examination of such recent Margolles works, which repeatedly examine the city, I hope to shed light on how the materials she uses reflect and embody systemic forms of crisis and circulation under contemporary globalization.

Margolles is widely known for using human remains and bodily fluids (notably fat, blood and bodily oils) in her art. Originally from the city of Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Margolles studied forensic medicine in Mexico City, where she also worked as a morgue technician at Servicio Médico Forense (the Federal District’s central

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