In Regina José Galindo’s work Tierra and Diana Taylor’s writing on it, one of the things that interested me was this relationship between action and speech as well as movement and stillness. When asked about why she didn’t include any specific testimonial information in her work, Galindo explains, “I never speak or give information…I just carry out an action” (109). I am curious about what removing specific identifying information, such as testimony, does to the experience of how the work is experienced. Does it shift the work out of a temporally and spatially specific world and into a more abstract space? While I do think that there is a certain amount of universalizing that may happen through the shift away from the didactic, in that there is an openness for people to bring their own experiences to the work, I also think that the decision to focus on action only is an incredibly powerful one. Instead of rooting the performance in the specifics of the Ríos Montt dictatorship, a time in the ‘past’, the piece makes a claim that history is not over. This could be and is the now.

 

The contrast between the continuous movement of the backhoe and the stillness of Galindo also seems like a very important statement on both the inevitability of the violence to come but also the insistence on resisting and of standing one’s ground. As Taylor writes, Galindo is simultaneously “a no one” (112) as well as enacting a refusal to move (106). In this tension, we the spectator are implicated. Do we stand with her? Do we stop the backhoe? How and will our intervening in this one instance effect a history of inaction? Does Galindo need or want our action? What might we find in our own stillness?

 

I was also interested in a small moment in Taylor’s essay when she addresses names, specifically in relationship to how power is named. Taylor writes, “The names only distract momentarily from the continuity of brutal practice” (118). I was drawn to this idea because it made me think about how and what names perform. Does calling a government a democracy make it a democracy? History, and our present, clearly show us that the answer is no, however, the name does do something in some instance it may perform an erasure, in others perhaps it lends power and authority to a statement.  In thinking about Galindo’s Tierra, it also makes we wonder what it does to frame this work as performance.

 

 

Taylor, Diana. “Making Presence.” In ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence, 105-126. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

 

Galindo, Regina José, Tierra. YouTube, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSRqMMieSIA