Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

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Introduction

Esther Belvis Pons

To cite this article: Esther Belvis Pons (2019) Introduction, Performance Research, 24:7, 1-5,
DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1717855
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1717855

Published online: 17 Feb 2020.

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Introduction
E S T H E R B E LV I S P O N S
In these days in which existence is akin to making
us visible and we have proneness to mediatized
exposure, global unrest gives evidence of how
we have condemned our senses to the obvious,
noisy and tumultuous. The sovereignty we
have granted to the visible is indicative of our
ineptitude to respect our lives, account for our
history and dismantle Anthropocentrism. In
2018, in the context of the dystopian exhibition
After the End of The World, Professor McKenzie
Wark delivered a speech entitled ‘The Drunken
Driver: Thoughts on a waning civilisation’ in
which he argued about the possibility that the
corporate–robotic–information complex that
drives our lives could likely be in the hands of
a drunk driver. A driver driving fast and reckless,
unable to read the warning signs and red lights as
it accelerates for the cliff. A driver totally unaware
of the consequences, negligent and careless about
the lives they are putting in danger. Through
this metaphor, Wark explains the magnitude of
the crisis and the disappearance of the world
we once knew, alerting us of the pressing need
for understanding the collateral effects that
are taking place. Although facts, figures and
metaphors seem to be effective, attending to the
increasing demonstrations and movements that
alert about all sorts of disappearances – species
go extinct, icebergs melt, migrants perish in the
sea, armed conflicts destroy lives and cultures and
so forth – the truth is that ‘Anthropocene cannot
visualize itself’ (Mirzoeff 2014: 217) although its
authority can be felt across the world.
Anthropocene visualization problem clashes
with the overwhelming mediatized world –
a world that is fully dedicated to producing
images and stories that circulate and keep us
subjugated, as if we were sitting in the back seat
of the drunk driver’s car. Despite the amount
of information that we consume and manage,
we seem unable to take the reins of our own
evolution, and, thus, of our own history. Yet,
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·7 : pp.1-5
http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1717855
narratives are the only way we have to explain
our world and get the information to make
decisions and intervene in it; because ‘stories have
a performative nature; they can enact and not just
describe things – even if there are of course limits
to what they are capable of enacting’ (Zylinska
2014: 11). Moreover, humans mainly care about
the stories we tell ourselves. The defiance here
consists in providing an ethical viewpoint to
create narratives that avoid apportioning blame
and proposing individualist solutions, and that
focus on our shared responsibilities instead.
Narratives that escape from the primacy of the
big, impactful and effortless and respect the
intimate, insignificant and neglected; narratives
based on a counter-visuality of our own
standpoint as living humans. Indeed, narratives
that revisit the sense of the self always in relation
to the world and beyond.
It is precisely in this conflicting state of
affairs that disappearance emerges as an
alternative approach to put critical pressure on
the construction of life, as it defies the visual,
continuous and iterative forms of representation.
Disappearance and its paradoxical manifestations
– voluntary or forced – touch off delicate and
thoughtful dramaturgies of the isolated, hidden
or unconnected. Through its always fragmented
and elusive stories and actions, a process of
shared ‘attunement’ emerges, providing healing
scenarios of dissent. In other words, the narratives
of disappearance contribute to reconfigure and
expand the sense of history and life as they
accept its nuances and need for fiction for the
past, present and future events. In this issue,
we explore how these narratives re-establish
cosmopolitanism as they become examples of the
praxis of the political (Zarka 2014), that is, they
untangle the effects of our daily ‘performance’.
In the opening essay, José A. Sánchez explores
the paradoxes of disappearance, allowing the reader
of this issue to understand the approaches and
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 1
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 subtleties that emerge in the events and practices
addressed. According to Sánchez, there is an active
and a passive disappearance; the first expresses
dissent while the second operates with exclusion
and is also a symptom of it. In other words, while
active disappearance interacts with the visible as
a way to disturb the values of the neoliberal way of
living, passive disappearance puts forward forms
of exclusion based on the deprivation of presence
in its multiple forms and spheres. In any case,
disappearance involves the experience of a liminal
space in which even the silenced, extinct or dead
announce the power of the powerless. It operates
in blurred, imperfect and forgotten territories
restoring life through dissent, in opposition to the
violent hegemony of the visible.
Disappearances draw poetic sceneries made
of traces, evanescent memories and even
imperceptible scars as materialized in the essays
of Edwin Culp and Beth Weinstein. Both authors
question visual language and stress the forensic
need to investigate beyond the layers of what
is visible. Culp focuses on the relationship
between violence and landscape images in Latin
America through the figure of the desaparecido.
Desaparecidos are scattered across clandestine
graves; bodies are often found incomplete and
mixed, creating a ghostly sense of commonality
that comes into being in demonstrations of
the living, although the landscape – visual but
also political – seems to deny its very existence.
Likewise, Weinstein excavates, using forensic
architecture techniques, the landscapes of
internment camps to render the invisible
visible through performances of spatial labour.
The dismantled architecture of camps and
the disguise to cover graves gives evidence of
a physical but also historical banishment that is
numbed by what can be captured at first sight. For
those alive and for those who never witness these
disappearances, a sense of uprooting emerges.
There is no space, no recognizable remains or
ruins that account for the past, therefore, we
are not capable of understanding the world that
surrounds us anymore (Virno 2003).
Our difficulty to make sense of our world
might have its origin in our tendency to create
simplistic versions of the events to conform
history – ignoring the quandaries and the small
gestures that brought us here. A call to re-account
2 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 24·7 : O N D I S A P P E A R A N C E
history can be found in the essays of Krassimira
Kruschkova, Hélia Marçal and Maite Garbayo-
Maeztu. The authors reveal, through processes
of re-enactment, recomposition and archiving,
the silenced or hidden narratives of dictatorship,
power abuse and human rights violations.
They advocate for the polychromies of history
addressing performances and choreographies that
navigate between the figurative and the literal,
focusing on the inconsistencies and complexities
that surround periods of conflict and dictatorship.
Hence, Kruschkova focuses on the work Archive
by the Israeli artist Arkadi Zaides that wishes to
address from an alternative approach the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. Zaides with the support of
Camera Project – which distributes video cameras
to Palestinians in high-conflict areas to document
human rights violations and expose the reality
of life under occupation – explores the gestures
that compose violence. Kruschkova discusses the
meaning of ‘perspective’ and the paradoxes in an
archive that researches modes of disappearance
through the geopolitical deterritorialization of the
image and through the cloudiness of the author,
that is both present but hidden behind the camera.
While Kruschkova focuses on a still latent
conflict, Marçal and Garbayo provide routes of
subterfuge to the twentieth-century dictatorships
of Portugal and Spain. Marçal analyses the
historicization and archiving impossibilites
of the performance artworks created during
the Portuguese dictatorship (1933–74); these
being dormant and even unsubscribed to any
specific movement in art history. She advocates
for the need to restore these historical gaps
and grievances by enhancing the practices of
diffraction (Barad 2007) and participation. From
her side, Garbayo focuses on the happenings
of the Catalan artists Gonçal Sobrer and Fina
Miralles that explored forms of reenactment
to make the dead appear. She explores the
subjectivations and vulnerabilities that emerge
in the process of embodying the other while
throwing light on those bodies that are still
waiting to be uncovered and identified. Bodies
that, four decades later, are waiting to be officially
acknowledged as disappeared. In other words, she
claims for the communal responsibility to build
an inclusive history in which all the bodies can
be present.
 The potential to scrutinize the violence and
the figures of the desaparecidos in Latin America
intersect in the essays of Alejo Medina, Livia
Daza-Paris and Geraldine Lamadrid Guerrero.
They focus on performance and participatory
practices to critically address the systematic
and even normalized violence, that is both
perpetrated in bodies but also in the narratives
attached to the death of the desaparecidos that
historically the state prefers to ignore or silence.
Medina carefully depicts Lukas Avedaño’s
performances Buscando a Bruno (In Search of
Bruno) and Llamando a la autoridad (Appealing
the Authorities) in which the Zapotec artist
denounces the disappearance of his youngest
brother Bruno. The performances are bodily
political acts in which traditional Muxhe poetics
and rituals give visibility to the disappeared.
Using practice-based research methods
Daza-Paris and Lamadrid Guerrero explore the
intricacies of witnessing and recovering the
missing. Through dialogical processes they
provide comprehensive ways to question the past
and alternative ways to mobilize communities in
the present. While Daza-Paris investigates the
political disappearance of her father in Venezuela
to stress public historical amnesia, Lamadrid
Guerrero explores three episodes of violence and
impunity in Xalapa (Mexico) in different historical
contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first
century. Next to the need to articulate and give
visibility to grief and loss what all these projects
have in common is their capacity to build
a counter-narrative; they award power to the
disappeared by making them still present and not
allowing them to be fully dead.
Gargi Bharadwaj and Anita E. Cherian address
episodes of genre violence in India. For them, it
is impossible for performance to compete with
the penetration, swift movement, scale and reach
of media. However, they argue that it is within
its limitations where it can trigger its subversive
strengths. This is the reason why performance,
through its elusive and fragile nature, has the
capacity to contend and raise attention to what
is neglected, obscure or forgotten. Performance is
the medium through which stories about sexual
violence against women in India find a context to
be addressed and analysed thanks to its capacity
to rematerialize and mobilize affect. On her side,
Helen Murphy examines the biographical files of
Maud Allan, the Canadian dancer and pianist, that
played along with customs in her shows. Through
the analysis of these materials, she tries to reveal
the genre conventions and affects hidden in the
anecdotes captured in magazines and newspapers
of the period. Thus, Maud’s legacy is devised to
disclose its figure and the relevance of her work.
As seen in these previous examples, the
status of disappeared is discontinuous; both
the dead and the alive have the intermittent
quality to become ghosts. Hence, ghosts inhabit
the physical and virtual daily spaces appearing
and disappearing through data, objects and
relationships. Sebastian Althoff refers to this
idea through the digital works of Hito Steyerl in
which the subject becomes empowered because it
is capable of hiding in-between the mechanisms
of the digital grid. In other words, the subject
becomes powerful not due to its active resistance
but rather due to its capacity to disappear and
hide within the matrix of data, avoiding any
kind of surveillance. Michael Eades uses objects
to narrate the ghostly legacies of those gone
instead. He navigates within the personal objects
and projects of the Opies couple (being Iona
Opie, his grandmother). His position as both
researcher-practitioner and relative triggers
a ‘surrealist ethnography’ as he is constantly
played by the discovery and the familiarity of
the objects in the house. The dead reappear
in the process of dismantling, organizing and
exploring all sorts of items. Likewise, the idea of
the living as ghosts is addressed in Chris Green
and Katheryn Owens’s artist pages. The ghostly
is a quality that emerges due to neoliberalism as
it brings isolation, precarity and individualism.
The ghost is stuck within times and spaces and is
unable to share the present with the other livings;
it cannot fully participate in society as it has been
forced to remain invisible. But the invisibility is
a quality that can be also understood as a status
of dissidence.
In this same line of thinking, the practitioner-
researcher Ignacio de Antonio Anton delves
into the subversive nature of disappearance in
contexts of censorship and repression. As dance
is based on radical present and occurs within
its own disappearance, it has a clear potential
to produce new directions for a distinctly
B E LV I S P O N S : I N T R O D U C T I O N 3
 different future. In other words, it is within the
same choreographic practice that new agencies
can emerge, having effects beyond their own
happening. Choreographically reconfiguring
what is coming is a way to defy power structures
and their precise and organized machinery of
production and, thus, the future. Isis Saz and
Leyla Dunia, in their artists’ pages, explore the
textile poetic dramaturgies of disappearance
that take place in the same act of weaving.
According to them, weaving works as a critical
instrument as it both involves the disappearance
of the author and problematizes historical and
identitarian complexities related to labour,
gender and indigenous traditions. Moreover,
contemporary artistic practice has been gradually
incorporating the power of weaving to contain
and communicate artistic statements, constantly
questioning the canons of validation between art
and crafts. Hence, the tissue constitutes a vehicle
for knowledge exchange, a space for dignification
of labour and an act of resistance in which
the action of weaving subverts the sense of its
former confinement.
The reign of the visual is challenged by artworks
that focus on sound. Audio installations, in
which there is something that we cannot see but
just hear, reconfigure our relationship with the
visible. Moreover, they stress the disappearance
of our capacity to critically analyse what we can
clearly see, and they help us to understand that
disappearance is both inevitable and subversive.
Georgina Guy analyses Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s
Saydnaya (the missing 19db) (2017) in which the
artist invites the audience to visualize through
sound and speech an inaccessible prison located
near Damascus. A place wherein detainees are
held in near total darkness and a regime of
enforced silence. Prisoners are forced to partly
use their senses so they cannot render a shared
imaginary of the place. Guy explains how Abu
Hamdan challenges this regime of omitted
visibility, producing a legible account through
different testimonials. By providing an emerging
legibility of the testimonials’ experience
through sound the artist prevents stories from
disappearing. Likewise, Ixiar Rozas Elizalde points
out the imperative to restore the value of silence
as its extinction would mean the disappearance
of authentic communication. Hence, she argues
4 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 24·7 : O N D I S A P P E A R A N C E
through different artistic examples how poetics
can only emerge within the uniqueness and
transcendence of silence. Silence has the capacity
to convey meaning beyond the semantic and
consequently cross other artistic forms and
provide hope for what is to come.
This capacity of subverting the power of the
visual and the body through sound frames the
works of the artist Jaume Ferrete-Vázquez.
According to him, traditional reproduction of
sound was based on repetition, making evident
the need of a body to produce variations and
demonstrating, at the same time, its limitations.
Through his own works Ferrete-Vázquez
announces how speech synthesis provides both
an additional degree of autonomy to produce
utterances and expand voices in unexpected
ways. The body reaches new spaces through its
mediatized disappearance. Following this same
idea, Rodrigo Parrini and Patricio Villarreal
Ávila shed light on the implications of bodiless
relationships that emerge within a context of
global transactions and exchanges. In Teatro
Ojo’s Deux Ex Machina, a call-centre is set up
inside a theatre venue in Mexico City. Telephone
numbers from a commercial database are
contacted with the aim to start an in-depth
conversation concerning historical, regional
and daily aspects about Mexico. Anonymous
citizens on the other side engage in an expected
relationship with the interviewer that is on the
other side of the line, yet created to disappear.
The conversations appear as aesthetic intervals
that divert the course of events and alter
power relations.
Disappearance from an ecological perspective
is addressed by Sarah Wade in her essay about
the latest works of Marcus Coates in which
the artist explores with humour the subject of
extinction. Through the analysis of Coates’s
works Wade provides an approach of how satire,
absurdity and irreverence can both tackle serious
issues and raise ecological awareness from an
unconventional point of view. In this regard,
the disappearance of species is also linked to
alteration that habitats suffer due to human
intervention. For his part, Asli Uludag addresses
the changes in the landscape due to the use
of hydroponics to increase the production of
crops. Hydroponics is a way to reorganize and
systematize the environment to respond to
market demands, especially with the construction
of large amounts of greenhouses that make the
original land disappear.
In the editorial process of this issue, we realized
that disappearances call for our attention –
a vital attention that is disappearing. This
oxymoron is key to overcoming the effects of
Anthropocentrism as disclosed in the essay
of Jelena Vesić. She unfolds through Freedom
Landscapes, an installation by the performance
theorist Ana Vujanović and filmmaker Marta
Popivoda, the importance of attention to make
sense of our present. The artwork is concerned
with the suppressed histories of Yugoslav women
partisans creating atmospheres and affects
that hold all that has been disregarded. Vesić
effectively makes us understand that we need
to retrieve our state of attentiveness based on
our capacity to be courteous, perceptive and
proactive. As she stresses, our main challenge
is to battle an attention based on a succession
of never-ending distractions of this era of post-
attention result of overexposure to inputs and
a frantic way of life.
While our lives are full of multi-tasking,
distractions and anxieties that take us nowhere,
the drunk driver of the Anthropocentrism is
approaching the cliff, announcing our own
disappearance. This issue aims to shed light on
all the things we are missing and all the things
we have missed for not having the time to tell us
the stories that we need to share to understand
the world.
REFERENCES
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham:
Duke University Press.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’,
Public Culture 26, 2(73): 213– 32.
Virno, Paolo (2003) Gramática de la multitud: para un análisis
de las formas de vida contemporáneas (Grammar of the Crowd.
An analysis of contemporary ways of life). Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Colihue SRL.
Zarka, Yves Charles (2014) Refonder le cosmopolitisme
(Rebuilding Cosmopolitanism), Paris: PUF.
Zylinska, Joanna (2014) Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene,
London: Open Humanities Press.
B E LV I S P O N S : I N T R O D U C T I O N 5