OFFSCREEN 2026 – Moris – Poor Killing Poor

The first revolution of the twentieth century was the Mexican Revolution. It was a complex guerrilla movement driven by the idealistic ambition of distributing rights and opportunities equally among the people. Tragically, it also became the first great failure of such utopian visions of civilization: to this day, the vast territory continues to suffer from a lack of security, development, justice, and equality. Beneath this river of bloodshed among the people and betrayals by those in power, the graphic narratives of José Guadalupe Posada gave rise to one of the first bodies of work attuned to reality. They captured the decisive moments of chaos, documented them so that everyone could access their unvarnished truth, and simultaneously created a mythology that circulated between legend and fact, questioning why truth is defined as such, where it ceases to be truth, and who shapes, disguises, or censors it.

What this remarkable body of work achieved was to bring into full view everything that had previously circulated beneath the apparent surface projected to the world. As a result, Mexico developed its own visual language, a genuinely revolutionary aesthetic discourse in a reproducible format: pages of narrative and illustration that, when collected, ultimately formed an annual volume—an almanac.

What has endured from all of this? Quite simply: the poor.

It is a straightforward equation: the larger the country’s population grows, the greater the number of poor people. They multiply because prevailing conditions relentlessly deepen the lack of opportunities to escape poverty—or even to evade it. A daily stream of publications also persists in which nota roja (crime reporting) dominates the front page. Their headlines starkly recount the misfortunes suffered by the day’s antihero, someone crushed by the suffocating oppression of poverty and, more often than not, killed at the hands of another person from the very same social condition.

The failure of modernity meant that, following the redistribution of land and property, many former peasants chose to migrate to the United States in the hope of building a better life and sending money back to the families they had left behind.

The works comprising this exhibition propose a journey through an inhabitable, ephemeral structure that simultaneously encloses a womb embedded within another architecture—permanent and imposing. It is not merely a play of harmonious and shifting scales, but a system in which the works themselves correlate with their surroundings, becoming walls and windows, entrances and exits that visitors penetrate and occupy as characters who both witness and participate in a subtle form of complicity. Silent trespassers—one might even say respectful ones—moving through compositions where fragments of José Guadalupe Posada’s printed imagery coexist with clippings from the contemporary press, materializing a timeless scene of human tragedy.

Moris establishes this graphic-pictorial dimension as a clandestine site: the makeshift stall that a migrant must erect and dismantle every day while working—or committing a crime—and while blending into an environment that briefly grants them the rights of citizenship and provides only what is necessary to continue the journey toward the American Dream. Although multiple techniques coexist within a single canvas, they converge into a unified narrative that is forceful yet restrained, silent yet harrowing. The process begins with the daily collection of newspapers, followed by the painstaking separation of images from text and the semi-handcrafted reproduction of selected elements into new compositional forms. A mastery of diverse techniques gives rise to assemblages on coarse industrial fabric and to the construction of a scenography whose exquisite corpses lead toward a central work entitled Cenotaph. This piece is nothing less than a mordant, alienated compendium of every headline published by the Mexican newspaper La Prensa over the course of an entire year, condensed into a fabric-bound book. Every crime reported in 2025 finally finds a place in limbo commensurate with the weight of its memory. It can be leafed through, smelled, contemplated, and will almost certainly stain the fingertips, for the volume bears no responsibility for the crimes it contains, and yet there is no escape from them.

A pair of works interrupts the exhibition with a remarkable material richness, bringing together diverse substances beneath a single critical lens. Once the migrant succeeds in reaching the United States, there is no possibility of retracing their steps; returning home in defeat is simply not an option. Instead, they begin to imagine new ways of carrying both their own flag and that of their host nation, forging a new layer of syncretic culture from the traditions of their homeland and the culture of consumption and disposability that defines their new environment. In these assemblages, Moris incorporates fabric from U.S. Army duffel bags, which migrants often use—when they are fortunate enough to travel back and forth—to transport their belongings and gifts for their families. Handcrafted objects, masks produced in the mountains of Guerrero—the Mexican state with one of the highest rates of male migration to the United States—stars that gradually transform into barbed wire, and stripes delineated by police batons all converge within these compositions. The resulting works unfold like two monumental symbolic scrolls, articulating the migrant’s equation: their internal struggle alongside the daily realities of adaptation—exploitation, discrimination, and persecution.

Poor Killing Poor is not merely a title but an indictment. It invokes art’s capacity to awaken those who mechanically reproduce the models imposed by political and media powers. Moris began his career by gathering information for what amounted to a manual of survival, decoding the signs, languages, and behaviours of marginal communities and neighbourhood crime. In recent years, his practice has become an effort to counter everything that dictates and compels—what was once called justice and constitutional order but has increasingly become a script that represents no one and protects even fewer. His work is a critique of the institutions that compel us all to fear, flee, and disappear, counting down toward a death that aspires to little more than a gravestone suggesting that our lives were not those of the poor.