To speak means to come forward and to locate oneself in one’s sphere of existence; it means to claim a modest quantum of agency.

Michel de Certeau¹

My introduction to the work of Minerva Cuevas was Drunker (1995), a videotaped action in real time of the artist sitting alone and writing at a school desk whilst drinking her way through a bottle of tequila. Exhibited alongside the video were the sheets of writing paper, inscribed with such self-reflective statements as ‘I drink not to feel… I’m not drunk… I drink to talk… I’m not drunk… I drink to forget… I drink to remember…’, which traced the descent into incoherence and, according to the artist, total amnesia. On the face of it Drunker seems like a purely personal act with little political resonance. Cuevas’s written statements, however, point to a different narrative, one in which substance abuse is a means to ‘obliterate’ the anguish of trauma, where the sufferer is caught between the compulsion to bear witness to the catastrophe and the impossibility of articulating it. Alone at her desk, the drinker has no witness but the mute, voyeuristic gaze of the camera — and ultimately the empty bottle, which, given the trajectory of Cuevas’s subsequent work, we may retrospectively suggest figures the anaesthetic effect of capitalist consum­erism. The problem for the witness to trauma is in finding a language capable of transmitting empathetic recognition of the experience in the receiver. It is tempting, therefore, to regard Drunker as the ‘ground zero’ from which, through experiments in colonising public space and communications systems, including street interventions, gallery installations and her website, Cuevas’s work forges