Performance carries in its nature the power of inventing a reality, even for a brief moment, performers can make reality through their bodies. Regardless of the polysemic concept of the word – from Visual Art, Theater, Anthropology, Dance, or other fields – performance is a bodily practice that can be used to build, in flesh and bones, narratives grounded in the living present.
Paul Connerton in his book How Societies Remember (1989) drives us to think about what is incorporated into the body methodologically in order to observe how the acts we practice on a daily basis serve to maintain (or destroy) the society where these bodies live. He connects the individual practice of basic codes, such as “sitting straight on a chair”, to the collective cultural memory, by observing the common denominator of certain practices, in order to analyze how a status quo can be maintained or created, for example.
Connerton’s investigation of body incorporation and inscribing practices as an interpretative key, left an uncanny sensation of powerlessness when we compare the other works of literature regarding memory and violence, gender addressed specifically. Sigmund Freud, arising from the hypnosis example (1914, p. 148), indicates that memory is not only on the surface, but it’s a deep ocean of what we’ve lived in our bodies. It might be not always conscious, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t answer to those memories by making choices to avoid the same situation of an uncomfortable memory that is unconscious, or “feeling” that something is not right and you don’t know why. Different authors, such as Judith Herman and Marianne Hirsh, mentioned the complex feelings, which are individual and collective at the same time, of “knowing” something that you never experienced. Bessel van der Kolk summarizes this in his passage that says “we instinctively read the dynamic between two people simply from their tension or relaxation, their postures and tone of voice, their changing facial expressions” (2014, p. 95). This knowledge that we are taught since childhood goes both ways, the same way a woman knows that “she’d better not walk in a dark alley alone late at night”, a man also knows what he represents if “he’s a man in a dark alley late at night with a woman”. Curiously, in each case of violence that Herman presents, this individual common sense is treated as the opposite, as a weaponized “ignorance” in a system created to benefit determined people. To exemplify it, Herman’s study regarding survivors of childhood abuse shows that these victims are more susceptible to becoming victims of sex trafficking, rape, and intimate violence, and she says “they may be invisible to most people in their communities, but apparently they are easy for predators to spot” (2023, p. 48).
Thinking about justice, in the way Herman guides her book, accountability is something that should have been at the foundation of every institution of art, mainly museums. It’s legit that artists should work with any form and subject they want, mostly if they’re building a narrative about something that was historically denied from them. It’s not up for discussion about what artists should or should not do. What is up to a long dialogue, however, is the responsibility of narratives created by those art spaces.
In Brazil, the fact that art institutions open a huge space for artists who use violence and pain as a virtuosi for their work, building exhibitions where “justice” or “restoration” are shown by artists who own a painful technique, makes me wonder if the agency has really changed. If the price for exhibiting people who are black, latin, transgender, or cisgender women is controlling what history they’ll narrate, are those artists really protagonists of their own voices? Or have the institutions been creating a stage to put those artists just to talk about certain things? In other words, male white men’s narratives are still general, and the other voices can talk just about their identities – preferably over their wounds.
The work of Carlos Martiel, Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, Rosana Paulino, and many other artists who are incredibly applauded for their work (because they are fantastic), put themselves through painful situations – psychological or physical. Their narratives, histories, and methods are plural, they claim for different experiences. Nevertheless, what’s the price of showing artists who are just in positions of suffering?
A body that endures such pain will, eventually, get stronger by not feeling so much pain. It’s hard not to think about dissociation, as van der Kolk wrote in his book; or as a training to become so strong that you won’t feel anything – however, isn’t it a problem too? If you feel nothing, it means that you also cannot feel pleasure, or any other feeling.
Thinking about the audience who goes to museums, who just see those artists in this position, how could they imagine something else? As a queer woman, maybe I’d like to get a chance to make an artistic work without having my own sacrifice to validate that, as bell hooks (2001) said “love is profoundly political”. The work Point B of The Door of No Return (2022) of Yelaine Rodriguez, is a series of photographs that remembers a place where many slaves were buried, in her words the work evokes “awareness to this historical site, which often goes unnoticed by tourists and locals” (2023, n.p.), by building a costume, ornamenting, and conjuring the force of a “goddess” through the body of a living woman in this place. It seems obvious that the subject regards collective trauma, but the artist offers an alternative narrative, bringing to the surface the power of memory through beauty, religious, and exaltation standards.
To summarize, memory and trauma are singular, but what concerns collective memory – and collective justice – should have enough space to be plural. Narrating history, based only on the wounds, implies building a stereotyping image. It seems more effective in museums to stage not just one narrative, otherwise, this is just another form of agency history again. Is there space to imagine a different future?
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References
Abramović, M. (1975). Rhythm 0. Performance, photography. Guggenheim Museum. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5177
Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences). Cambridge University Press.
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,12():145-156.
Herman, J. L. (2023). Truth and Repair (How trauma survivors envision justice). Basic Book, New York.
Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. Columbia University Press.
Hooks, B. (2001). Salvation: black people and love. William Morrow Paperbacks.
Martiel, C. (2023). Several works. Artist website. https://www.carlosmartiel.net/
Paulino, R. (2023). Several works. Artist website. https://rosanapaulino.com.br/
Rodriguez, Y. (2022). Mal De Ojo / Point B of The Door of No Return (Side A & Side B). Film stills. https://www.yelainenyc.com/works/maldeojo
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score (Brain, mind, and body in the healing trauma). Viking, New York.