Research with Francisco Martinez
I believe that memory has a gravitational pull. It always attracts us. Those who have memory, are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who don’t, don’t live anywhere. (P. Guzmán)
This performed research commemorates the disappearance of thousands of people during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Until today, most have not been found. German Nazis who fled persecution supported the regime. In this performance, a Chilean and a German performer go on a search for traces. We search for memories in our bodies, in the space, we leave traces for each other, we try to hide the traces and disappear. The abstract and imaginary space of the stage becomes permeated by political and bodily reality. Our movement is in a state of search, following that, which we sense in the present, using objects as tools and our bodies as resonators to amplify signals from other times and other spaces.
In this research, we worked with two historical examples of disappearing bodies and engage with those events on a physical level with a focus on the role of the skin. The skin is the most extensive organ of the body, since we are born it acts as the connector and separator to the outside world and is involved in all our physical interactions on a daily basis.
The skin is our physical boundary, not a linear, impenetrable one, but a fluid boundary space. In this sense, the skin has a comparable function for ourselves as a political border for a nation. In this performative research, we explore the link between the political border and my own physical boundaries. To achieve this, we correlate two examples of disappearing: The “Desaparecidos” in Chile, which are people that were abducted during the Pinochet military regime in the 70s and 80s. The other example of disappearance are the Nazi functionaries that after WWII fled from Germany to Chile, where they have played a role in the torturing of the “Desaparecidos”. This exemplifies one of the hypotheses of the main theoretical framework of this research, which is “The Aesthetics Of Disappearance” by philosopher Paul Virilio. Bringing Virilio’s thoughts into a movement context, we want to investigate closely the function of the skin in practices of memory.
These practices are of personal, but also of political interest, as they can be a form of resistance against the disappearance of bodies and their memories. We engage in movement practices that aim to find out how skin serves as an access point to memory by creating new experiences or triggering old ones. Which sensorial experiences enable a dialogue with the skin as protagonist in memory practices?
This project was supported with a research grant by Fonds Darstellende Künste.
