Diana Taylor’s “Making Presence” departs from Regina José Galindo’s performance “Earth” to weave a series of considerations about performance and politics. Galindo, a small woman, remains motionless, with her body naked, while a backhoe digs the earth around her. Galindo’s piece refers to the genocide committed against the indigenous population of Guatemala by the dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. Despite being political, there is no explicit mention of this; the performer intends to allow an opening of meanings. But the devastation, extermination, and disproportion of power relations stand out. The inexorability inscribed in her action resonates with Antigone’s walk to her tomb: “It’s clear that she can never get out. It’s simply a question of time” (Taylor 2023; 107).

Referring to the piece Rabinal Achi, Taylor contrasts the respect one must have against one’s enemies with the alienation embodied in the performance by the driver of the excavator. Resonating Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, Taylor states, “The separation between the one who orders the violence and the one who carries it out eliminates all sense of personal responsibility” (Taylor 2023; 111). This statement allows for a series of reflections, from who benefits from the separations brought about by so-called Western thinking to the use of the internet by the extreme right, when people feed untrue narratives by reposting content produced by third parties without the slightest sense of responsibility. But some know what they are doing – and here I would like to bring again the photo of the torturers of the president of Brazil who try to hide their smallness. “Disrespecting one’s enemy destroys one’s own integrity” (Taylor 2023; 110).

The progress represented by the backhoe action and the otherness of Galindo’s figure can be summarized in María Lugones’ statement, “The colonial “civilizing mission” was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people’s bodies through unimaginable exploitation, sexual violation, control of reproduction and systematic terror” (Lugones 2014; 937). The construction of the imaginary of civilization necessarily requires barbarism, making the project of modernity the exercise of epistemic violence, both in its microphysics of power and in its geopolitical macrostructure. Thus, a taxonomy that generates opposing identities justifies colonial spoliation, with the colonized being the “other of reason” who needs to be civilized. Colonialism is not just about the colonization of territories but also of knowledge, languages, memory, and imagination. The march of history’s progress excludes those considered non-human since the starting point of this progress is only the history of those who have the right to it.

As Taylor observes, when dealing with colonialism in Guatemala, “Earth” also talks about a structure that repeats itself over time: conquest, colonialism, imperialism, and coloniality – different names for the same destructive rage of this invented other.

References

Taylor, Diana. 2020. “Making Presence” ¡Presente!: The Poetics of Presence. 175-202. Durham: Duke University Press.

LUGONES, María. 2014. “Rumo a um feminismo descolonial”. Estudos Feministas. Florianópolis.