Author Description

"Semefo 1990-1999" is the first book to gather the entire body of work by the Mexican artist collective (...) In art, for Mexico the 1990's implied blockbuster-style exhibitions and the inauguration of mega-monuments. In parallel there was a boom in performance and in what is called "alternative" with the creation of conferences and festivals and the opening of spaces for artistic development in Mexico City. This context was the scene for the formation and development of the group Semefo, and writing the history of this collective also involves understanding what historical, political situation generated the conditions for this work to come true, eventually within an official framework."--Page 7,9. Semefo (Its name is inspired in the acronym of the Mexican Forensic Service " Servicio Médico Forense") was a collective of artists founded in the early 1990's by Teresa Margolles, Carlos López Orozco, Juan Luis García and Arturo Angulo Gallardo that worked with parts of corpses, bodily fluids and other organic materials during the 1990's seeking an aesthetic approach not to the subject of death, but to its socio-cultural implications and the concept of decomposition at its different stages (first in animals and later with humans) based on the myths of destruction, degradation, the paraphernalia of torture, disgust and the morbid, i.e. violence in relation to the concepts of life-death and eroticism.