Making Presence discusses colonialism, imperialism, and the violent forms to maintain coloniality in Latin America, specifically in Guatemala, by analyzing performances from Regina José Galindo and Daniel Hernández-Salazar. Diana Taylor delineates intricate aspects of the dictatorship in Guatemala, the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt, the systematic “disappearance” of the ethnic group of Ixil by the military forces, and social aspects designed to maintain coloniality in this place – and several other countries in Latin America. Moreover, Taylor points out the artistic aspects of Galindo as an artist, not an activist, who uses her platform to highlight social justice in her work.
I’d like to focus on the archival and the aesthetic lineage of filming in the text. Taylor argues that Earth (2013) is not an archival performance (p. 124), and I agree. But thinking about it, I’m inclined to say that La Verdad (2013) can act as an archival performance. As Galindo collects the testimony from dozens of survivors’ women in Tribunal Primero A de Mayor Riesgo, and reads several of them during the performance, this act documents specificities of the massacre, including fundamental details to support the feminicide as a strategy in the massacre of Ixil.
Concerning the practice of the archival of one’s own life, as alluded to on page 123, the video has the power to document an act as an archival. For Philippe Artières (1998, p. 31), however, this practice is not neutral. It allows us to agency our own history, by collecting the pieces to our own process, organizing our defense, and perpetrate the time. As the performance of ¿Quien puede borrar las huellas? (2003) that was meticulously recorded, won in 2005 the prize in Venice Biennale, the same year that the Proyecto para la Recuperación del Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, started in Guatemala. The Proyecto was conceived to persecute the truth in the archives of Guatemala dictatorship, the kind of truth that Galindo’s performance seems to reach.
Artières, Phillipe. "Arquivar a própria vida" Revista de Estudos Históricos. Brazil: XX, 1998. 9-32. Print.Weld, Kirsten. Paper cadavers: the archives of dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Print.Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Making Presence" ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence. 105-126. New York University: Duke University Press,