Brussels-Buenos Aires
Writer / Researcher /
Performance arts producer
Brussels-Buenos Aires
Writer and researcher
fiction, poetry, research
Silhouettes: Choreographies of Remembrance
Against Enforced Disappearance
In this article I analyse actions using silhouettes in cycles of protest against enforced disappearance in Mexico and Argentina. Defining these actions as performances, I show how this particular aesthetic evolved in the traumatic post-World War II context to become incorporated into the repertoire of artistic actions in Argentina in 1983, configuring itself as a landmark in Latin American visual strategies, to end up, in the present time, being re-used and deeply changed by the actions carried out on behalf of the Ayotzinapa students. I propose to look at these performances through the framework of “‘affect theory” and “dance studies” to show how in this remediation of the silhouette as a memory device, the performative allowed the immanency of affect and movement to enact and rehearse a new social order within the political. I will propose “dignified rage” as the way affect is organised during such actions.
In this article I analyse actions using silhouettes in cycles of protest against enforced disappearance in Mexico and Argentina. Defining these actions as performances, I show how this particular aesthetic evolved in the traumatic post-World War II context to become incorporated into the repertoire of artistic actions in Argentina in 1983, configuring itself as a landmark in Latin American visual strategies, to end up, in the present time, being re-used and deeply changed by the actions carried out on behalf of the Ayotzinapa students. I propose to look at these performances through the framework of “‘affect theory” and “dance studies” to show how in this remediation of the silhouette as a memory device, the performative allowed the immanency of affect and movement to enact and rehearse a new social order within the political. I will propose “dignified rage” as the way affect is organised during such actions.
2019 / Alter/Nativas Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, USA
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