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The question about “the way performance transmits traumatic memory” (164) stood out to me the most in Diana Taylor’s analysis of the protests conducted by H.I.J.O.S. in Argentina. Taylor notices a continuity between the performance strategies first used by the madres and abuelas of the victims of disappearance in the protests held by the children of the disappeared: the use of the ID photographs is appropriated by the later even when the former stopped using them; if for the madres the photos were no longer needed since they “knew who the disappeared are” and their focus changed to point at the disappearers, the affective dimensions that those apparently sterilized photos carry with them are at the core of the demands of H.I.J.O.S., “these are the people that we are here for” and yet, the ones who gathered them were the victimizers whose houses they surround and watch over as well as the responsible for taking such photos, the government. The power of these images gets activated precisely because of this action, in that way, they get recontextualized and their composition gets denounced:
white background, frontal pose, hair back, ears exposed, no jewelry—the individual differences become more easily accessible to scrutiny and ‘positive identification.’ The tight framing allows for no back ground information, no context, no network of relationships. The images appear to be artless and precise. Yet they are highly constructed and ideological, isolating and freezing an individual outside the realms of meaningful social experience (176).
Taylor cites Richard Dawkin’s theory on memes, cultural materials that need to “catch on”, to be “realized physically” (174); the ID photos, while carried in/on the bodies of the madres got realized physically, resignified and caught on, at the same time, reappropriated by the children of the disappeared continued catching on and eventually people from other parts of the globe started using this strategy to make claims for their own disappeared. Carrying the images of the sons and daughters on the body became a motif, a meme. I can relate closely too to this practice because in Juarez I have accompanied mothers and fathers who have lost their children due to human trafficking and femicide who use the same strategy of wearing their daughters’ images. This specific performance is effective in transmitting traumatic memory because they signal to the empty spaces in our communities, in our physical bodies (we can no longer have them between our arms, for example), left by people who got violently disappeared and whose place cannot be replaced. Surrogation cannot happen easily in these instances as it does in Joseph Roach’s theory of the genealogies of performance, according to Taylor (174). And, in the end, in this transmission of traumatic memory, we all get involved, as she declares at the end of the chapter, simply because globally we’ve suffered the violence of neocolonial capitalist systems of governance that use people as just usable discardable bodies; but as the use of those photographs points out, even when stripped of all context and personal attire, we are all unique and we can be strongly present, almost yelling, among others even if our bodies are not.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. ""You Are Here": H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance" The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. 161-189. Durham: Duke University Press,