STAGING DIFFICULT PASTS

This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and perfor-
mance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of
producing memory for transnational audiences.
Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination
of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory
and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual
culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of
research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators stag-
ing historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre
and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating
and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast
among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, co-
lonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an ex-
panded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?
This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as
for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory.

Maria M. Delgado is Professor and Vice Principal (Research and Knowledge

Exchange) at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of
London, UK.

Michal Kobialka is Paul W. Frenzel Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of

Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota, USA.

Bryce Lease is Professor and Head of Knowledge Exchange at The Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK.
STAGING DIFFICULT
PASTS
Transnational Memory, Theatres,
and Museums

Edited by
Maria M. Delgado, Michal Kobialka and
Bryce Lease

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Designed cover image: © Installation of Erika Diettes’ Río Abajo (2014), Parroquia Nuestra
Señora de las Nieves (Bogotá, Colombia). With permission, archive of the artist.
First published 2024
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Bryce Lease; individual chapters, the contributors
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the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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ISBN: 9781032326030 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003315827 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827
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CONTENTS

List of contributors vii

Acknowledgementsxi

Introduction 1
Maria M. Delgado, Michal Kobialka and Bryce Lease

1 Staging the Story of a People: The Politics of

Co-Performance at the National Museum of African
American History and Culture 22
Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

2 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 38

Bryce Lease

3 Curating the Experiential: The Imperial War Museum’s

Revised Holocaust Galleries 53
James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

4 The Meaning of Working Through the Past: Of Awkward

Objects and Collateral Memories 72
Michal Kobialka

5 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter: Trans-

Affiliative Encounters inside ESMA Memory Museum 89
Cecilia Sosa
vi Contents

6 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the

In-Between 104
Rabih Mroué in conversation with Michal Kobialka

7 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine: Mapa Teatro’s

live Réplica to Modernity 120
Giulia Palladini

8 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles: Museums

and Theatre in Contestation 138
Bishnupriya Dutt

9 ‘It’s art, all it can do is bear witness’: Remembering

Histories of Enslavement in Black British Women’s Plays
and at the International Slavery Museum 155
Lynette Goddard

10 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights: Long Life

to the Theatre! 172
Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

11 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 190

Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

12 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories: Pedro

Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas/Parallel Mothers (2021) 207
Maria M. Delgado

13 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 229

Nadia Davids and Jay Pather in conversation with
Bryce Lease

14 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become

Dark Tourism 242
Katrina Phillips

Epilogue: 10 Strategies for Exhibiting Absence and Loss:

Objects, Narratives, and Trauma on Display 259
Joanne Rosenthal

Index271
CONTRIBUTORS

Vikki Bell is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her

writing explores questions of ethics, aesthetics, subjectivity, and politics. Widely
published across the social sciences and theoretical humanities, her recent publica-
tions include The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional
Argentina (2014) and essays in Feminist Theory, Social & Legal Studies and Third
Text. Her current research studies practices of archiving and curating violence in
Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

James Bulgin is Head of Public History at Imperial War Museums and was previ-
ously Head of Content for the award-winning new Holocaust Galleries. Before
joining IWM, James worked as a commercial theatre producer and director, with
work in the West End and on national tour. He is the author of The Holocaust and
is the presenter of How the Holocaust Began for the BBC.

Nadia Davids is a South African scholar and theatre-maker. She has written four
plays, At Her Feet, Cissie, What Remains, and Hold Still. Nadia is a recipient
of an A.W. Mellon Fellowship, a Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Olive Schreiner
Award for Drama, and two Fleur de Cap Theatre Awards for Best New South
African Script. Between 2009 and 2022, she taught at Queen Mary University of
London and at the University of Cape Town.

Maria M. Delgado is Professor of Theatre and Screen Arts at The Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She has published widely in
the areas of Spanish- and Catalan-language theatre and film with monographs on
Lorca and twentieth- and twenty-first century Spanish theatre published by Manchester
viii Contributors

University Press, Routledge, and Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Her 12 co-edited vol-

umes include Contemporary European Playwrights (2020) and A Companion to
Latin American Cinema (2017).

Erika Diettes (Colombia, 1978) is a visual artist with degrees in both Social Com-
munication and Anthropology. Since 2005 Diettes has turned her gaze to the socio-
political situation in her country. Engaging with victims of the armed conflict has
determined the path of her work and simultaneously offered a vehicle for survivors
to be heard. Her series of works – Río Abajo (2008), A punta de sangre (2009),
Sudarios (2011), and Relicarios (2011–2016) – have been exhibited in the principal
museums of Colombia and internationally in the United States, Europe, and across
Latin America, gaining widespread critical acclaim.

Bishnupriya Dutt is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School

of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. Her areas of
research include politics and theatre, feminist readings of Indian Theatre and con-
temporary performance practices and popular culture. Her recent publications in-
clude Maya Rao and Indian Feminist Theatre (Cambridge, 2022). She is currently
the President of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Jordan Ealey is an assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at the

University of Rochester. They research black theatre and performance, black femi-
nist thought and praxis, musical theatre history, sound studies, and black girlhood
studies. Their work is published or forthcoming in The Black Scholar, Girlhood
Studies, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre Topics. Jordan is a freelance
dramaturg, playwright, and co-host of the black feminist theatre podcast, Daugh-
ters of Lorraine.

Lynette Goddard is Professor of Black Theatre and Performance at Royal Hol-

loway, University of London. Their research focuses on representations of race,
identity, social and political issues, and activist performance forms. They are cur-
rently researching the careers of Black British theatre directors with a focus on
Paulette Randall and co-editing the two-volume Routledge Companion to Twenti-
eth Century British Theatre and The Cambridge History of Black British Theatre
and Performance.

Milena Grass Kleiner is a translator and theatre scholar, and full professor at
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her areas of expertise include theatre, his-
tory and memory studies, and research methodologies in the arts. She directed the
Millennium Nucleus Arts, Performativity and Activism (NMAPA) and currently
leads an interdisciplinary project on rock art (800–400 BC) in the North of Chile.
 Contributors ix

Mariana Hausdorf Andrade is an independent theatre researcher, actress, and

director. She also holds a BA in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de
Chile and has worked as a secondary school teacher. She is completing a master’s
in Latin American Cultural Studies at Universidad de Chile. As a theatre researcher,
she works in the fields of theatre history, historiography, and performance archives.

Michal Kobialka is Paul W. Frenzel Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of

Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota. He has published widely on theatre/
performance historiography. His book publications include A Journey Through
Other Spaces (1993), Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (2009),
Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015), co-edited with
Rosemarie Bank; Tadeusz Kantor’s Memory: Other Pasts, Other Futures (2018),
co-edited with Natalia Zarzecka; and A History of Polish Theatre (2022), co-edited
with Katarzyna Fazan and Bryce Lease.

Bryce Lease is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at The Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is author of After ’89:
Polish Theatre and the Political (2016) and co-editor of Contemporary European
Playwrights (2020), A History of Polish Theatre (2022), and the journal Contem-
porary Theatre Review. From 2018 to 2021, he was Primary Investigator on the
AHRC-funded project ‘Staging Difficult Pasts: Of Narratives, Objects and Public
Memory’.

Rabih Mroué is a Lebanese theatre director, actor, visual artist, and playwright. He
is a contributing editor for The Drama Review/TDR (New York) and a co-founder
of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research
Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/FU/Berlin from 2013 to 2014. He has
been an associated theatre-director at Münchner Kammerspiele from 2015 to 2019.
His most recent solo exhibition, Swept Under the Carpet, was at KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022).

Giulia Palladini is a researcher and critical theorist, whose work moves between dif-
ferent languages and fields of knowledge, exploring the politics and erotics of artistic
production from a feminist and Marxist perspective. She is an Alexander von Hum-
boldt alumna and has worked in various international contexts in Europe and Latin
America. She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure
in 1960s New York (2017) and co-editor of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (2017).

Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator, and academic. Based in Cape Town, he is

a professor and directs the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT, and curates Infect-
ing the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. He also curates for
x Contributors

Afrovibes in the Netherlands and the Biennale of Body, Image, Movement in Ma-
drid, and is curatorial adviser for Live Art for Season Africa 2020 in various cities
in France. He has co-curated for Spielart in Munich and has been Adjunct Curator
for Performance at the Zeitz MOCAA.

Katrina Phillips is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She
holds a PhD in History from the University of Minnesota and is currently associ-
ate professor of history at Macalester College. Her first book, Staging Indigeneity:
Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History, was published
by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021.

Leticia Ridley is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Drama at

the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests include African American
theatre, Black feminism(s), Black performance, and popular culture. Leticia has
published essays in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, the August Wilson
Journal, and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Leticia is also a co-
producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast.

Joanne Rosenthal is a freelance curator, researcher, and museum consultant with

experience in communicating complex narratives and ideas. She works with mu-
seums, universities, arts, and heritage organisations to research, conceptualise, and
produce exhibitions, particularly those that deal with ‘difficult’ narratives and mar-
ginalised histories. Her exhibition, Jews, Money, Myth, won the UK Museums As-
sociation’s ‘Museums Change Lives’ award in 2019.

Cecilia Sosa is an Argentinean sociologist and cultural journalist. Her PhD in

Drama (Queen Mary University of London) was awarded the Most Distinguished
Thesis of the Year (2012, AHGBI). Her first monograph is entitled Queering Acts
of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship (2014), and she has
published extensively on the crossroads of memory, performance, and affect. She
is the co-curator and co-screenwriter of Cantos insumisos [Rebel Songs] (Alejo
­Moguillanksy, 2023).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume would not have been possible without all those who worked with us
on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘Staging Difficult
Pasts: Of Narrative, Objects and Public Memory’, which ran between June 2018
and June 2021 (AH/R006849/1). Our project partners and collaborators: Agustín
Blanco-Bazan; Xavi Bobes and El Solar; Alfredo Castro, Millaray Lobos, and Tea-
tro La Memoria (Santiago Chile); James Bulgin and Rachel Donnelly at The Im-
perial War Museum; Erica Lehrer and Roma Sendyka; Yana Ross; Ana Longoni;
Miguel del Arco; Marcelo Brodsky; Alejo Moguillansky and El Pampero Cine;
Alejandra Naftal and the staff of ESMA Memory Museum; Nora Hochbaum, Flor-
encia Battiti, and the staff of Parque de la Memoria, Monumento a las Víctimas
del Terrorismo de Estado; Mariano Stolkiner and Teatro Ex Extranjero (Buenos
Aires); Lluís Pasqual; Joanne Rosenthal; Rubén Szuchmacher; Alejandro Tanta-
nian; Natalia Zarzecka, Izabela Zawadzka, and the staff of Cricoteka (Kraków,
Poland); Oliver Frljić; and Wojtek Ziemilski. So much of the thinking for this col-
lection developed through the activities and conversations with these partners and
collaborators, and we owe them a huge debt of thanks for their generosity. In addi-
tion to those acknowledged above, a few further colleagues served as intellectual
interlocutors for the work: Ludmiła Ryba, Keya Ganguly, and Tim Brennan at the
University of Minnesota, Lynnette Moran and ANU Productions, Lola Arias, Katie
Mitchell, Nadia Davids, Maggie Gale, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Georgina Guy,
Jean Graham-Jones, Mercè Saumell, Joanne Tompkins, Marcin Kościelniak, Anna
Burzyńska, and Katarzyna Fazan. The anonymous peer reviewer for the collec-
tion helpfully invited us to emphasise the distinctions between performance and
performativity and to consider how these differently articulate power relations that
museal and theatre practices seek to critique but which they also embody.
xii Acknowledgements

We owe particular thanks to Cecilia Sosa, the postdoctoral researcher on the

project, particularly for her energy and passion, sharp intellect, and ability to bring
people together across cultures and different industries. The project would not have
been possible without Cecilia’s input, organisation, and collaboration.
We would like to thank those who have contributed to this volume with essays
and interviews for their generosity and insights. The photographers, companies,
and artists who have provided images also deserve our thanks: Erika Diettes, Zoë
Belton, Naubertas Jasinskas, the Imperial War Museum, Rabih Mroué, Joaquín
Cortés, Román Lores, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Federico Pala-
dino, Mapa Teatro, Guillermo Calderón, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos
Humanos, Alejandro Vélez Restrepo, El Deseo, Pedro Almodóvar, John Gutierrez,
Mark Wessels, Baxter Theatre Centre, Kader Attia, and Ian Lillicrapp. We would
like to extend huge gratitude to Tim Heitman for his excellent work documenting
many of the events on the Staging Difficult Pasts project, his design of our website,
and the cover for this collection. His understanding of and engagement with the
core ideas that underpinned this endeavour has meant that our archive has been
carefully produced and curated.
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama supported Maria M. Delgado
and Bryce Lease, and the University of Minnesota provided additional funds to
support Michal Kobialka’s research for this project. Both Central and Royal Hol-
loway, University of London offered financial support for two doctoral awards as
part of the Staging Difficult Pasts project, and we have been delighted to collabo-
rate with our fantastic PhD students Agnieszka Jakimiak and Alma Prelec over
the past few years. Bryce Lease wishes to thank the International Cultural Centre
in Kraków and the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of
Poland for supporting the research for this book through the Thesaurus Poloniae
Fellowship in 2021. Maria M. Delgado wishes to thank Josette Bushell-Mingo,
Broderick Chow, Tony Fisher, Dan Hetherington, Elaine Henry, Mark Hunter, and
Kate Pitt for their assistance and support.
Ben Piggott at Routledge commissioned this book, and Steph Hines has steered
it into publication. Many thanks for their encouragement and faith in the project.
Maria M. Delgado wants to thank Henry Little and Tom Delgado-Little for their
support and care; Bryce Lease wants to lovingly acknowledge Martin Schnabl; and
Michal Kobialka would like to thank Tim Heitman for his continuous support and
shepherding him through the intricacies of linguistic nuance and imagination.
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the pro-
ject digital archive, Staging Difficult Pasts, at https://www.stagingdifficultpasts.
org/. With the interviews cited in Chapter 12, the filmmaker did not give written
consent for the full interviews to be shared publicly.
INTRODUCTION
Maria M. Delgado, Michal Kobialka and Bryce Lease

Consider the current world-historical landscape: the wars in Afghanistan, Somalia,

and Syria; the political unrest in Peru and Venezuela; the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict; protests in Iran, Tunisia, and China; or the past and present worldwide critique
of imperialism, settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism. They are ideological,
politically motivated, and imbued with historical interests, biases, and aims. So is
the way they are presented in the news and social media, in film and other forms
of mass media, by politicians and political agencies, in museums and theatres. The
way these events are ‘staged’ draws attention to the fact that staging difficult pasts
(or presents, for that matter) are never neutral acts. One of the most vehement
examples of this claim in the twenty-first century is Vladimir Putin and his admin-
istration’s resuscitation of the legacy of Joseph Stalin through the lens of the ‘Great
Patriotic War’ whose years are encased between 1941 and 1945, thus eschewing
the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 – the year
Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded Russia. Putin’s staging of this past reflects
his arrogant treatment of the people in his Realpolitik, imposing forms of public
forgetting and amnesia, and the harnessing of patriotic pride and nostalgia through
erasures of the historical records. Equally important, Putin’s staging of this past
justifies the war by placing it in the historical context of Russia’s continued fight
against US/NATO imperialism and its particular claims to the states and territo-
ries formerly in the Soviet orbit.1 Putin has placed memory of the ‘Great Patriotic
War’ centre stage from the very outset of his premiership in order to consolidate
his power, emphasising Russian heroism and suffering not only for the citizens of
Russia but also for the world at large and the new Eurasian geo-political alliance
and regimes of power. A similar rhetoric was used by Putin in his article, ‘On the
Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ (12 July 2021 – thus about half a year
before a full-scale Russian offensive on 24 February 2022), wherein he voices his

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-1
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
2 Maria M. Delgado et al.

convictions that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’, while blaming the col-
lapse in bilateral historical ties on the West/United States and its interventionalist
politics. The controversial essay is an ominous final ultimatum to Ukraine being
one step short of a declaration of war. Contrary to such rhetoric of historical disin-
formation promoting thinly veiled threats, this book argues that the public staging
of difficult pasts in a manner that promotes contestation over consensus and open
debate over perceived acquiescence is crucial to the reparative labour necessary to
foreclose ideological – and, ultimately, totalitarian – ambitions to maintain power,
dislodge civil resistance, or counteract emancipatory efforts. Working on memory
in an open-ended, non-totalising, or evaluative manner, as we propose here, cor-
roborates a political subject’s agency and relies on intellectual curiosity, emotional
vulnerability, and shared determination. Memory is thus never complete or closed
but a multilayered and agonistic process, much like democracy, to be navigated in
ways that recognise the different lived experiences and complex political histories
that configure to shape societies.
Bridging museum and theatre and performance studies, this book brings into
view the political and artistic stakes of such efforts. Our central focus is on the new
knowledge that is produced when we – the editors and contributors to this volume –
think about the potentials for theatricality in the museum, about the museum itself as
a performative space, and how museal strategies in display, in producing narrative
and in staging objects, are informing original approaches to theatre making. These
elements are particularly acute when considering their relevance for the display,
representation, and staging of difficult pasts. The collection comes out of a three-
year project, ‘Staging Difficult Pasts: Of Narratives, Objects, and Public Memory’,
in which we found that theatrical is often used as a pejorative description in mu-
seums, denoting spectacle and excess, while performative is embraced by many
curators without a clear sense of the differences and overlaps between these critical
terms. Conversely, in theatre, if you describe a performance as a ‘museum piece’,
it indicates that something is dead and no longer alive – a mausoleum of sorts, as
Theodor W. Adorno signals in his reflections on the Valery Proust Museum (1997:
175–185). Museum in this sense signifies the opposite of live (performance); it
functions like anti-theatrical. This collection is intended to place pressure on these
preestablished but outdated modes of understanding and harmful binaries that do
not sufficiently elaborate the complexities of these descriptors or the interwoven
approaches to contemporary curation and theatre-making.
In order to accomplish this, we draw on a rich body of materials on a political
valence of the terms performance and performativity. If performativity is the ‘inter-
connected triad of identity, experience, and social relations’, which includes ‘class,
race, sex, geography, religion, and so forth’, as D. Soyini Madison and Judith Ham-
era argue, then performativities (as distinct from performances) can be understood
as ‘the many markings substantiating that all of us are subjects in a world of power
relations’ (2006: xix). The ‘performances that “materialise” performativity and that
 Introduction 3

open meanings and critique’ (ibid.) include theatres and museums. The concept of
performativity enables scholars, as Elin Diamond contends, ‘to become aware of
performance itself as a contested space, where meanings and desires are generated,
occluded, and of course multiply interpreted’ (1996: 4). Performance and perform-
ativity thus offer further routes to critique what Tony Bennett has called ‘museum
regimes of truth’, the myriad of ways in which museums ‘function as and at the
junctions of power relations’ (2017); and such a critical framework adds to the
growing scholarship that has exposed the racist and colonial foundations on which
museums have been formed and come into being. Many of the contributors to this
volume engage in a nuanced discussion of the staging of difficult pasts by address-
ing directly or indirectly: the epistemological and phenomenological differences
between performance and performative; the relationship between performance and
power, or power relations, shaping it – thus, the relationship within the triad: a
material object, theatre and museum space, and public memory/memories; and the
function of the museum or theatre in today’s political and ideological landscape
redrawn by identity politics, decolonising manoeuvres, necropolitics, and calls for
social and racial equity.
Over the past few decades, widespread attempts to reinterpret public memory –
which some scholars have called a ‘memory boom’ and others a ‘memory crisis’
(see Nora and Kritzman eds 1996; Terdiman 1993; Winter 2006) – have been de-
termined and shaped in theatres and museums by formerly taboo historical narra-
tives of difficult pasts. Indeed, public memory or memories, which have become
a public concern for live audiences, are precisely contested by them because these
memories are believed to be crucial to the construction of identity on national, cul-
tural, and individual levels. Contributors analyse how identitarian myths are given
dramatic shape or are performatively confronted by theatre makers and curators
primarily through narrative (a spoken or written account of connected events) and
objects (material things) as well as the relationship between the two – what Jacek
Ludwig Scarso terms ‘critical theatricality’ (2021: 54). This project originates from
a central observation: museums, and history museums in particular, have become
more invested in theatrical and immersive environments, while theatre makers have
been staging archives that included objects and historical images typically confined
to museum displays. While they might have shared aims in staging difficult pasts,
curators and theatre makers did not necessarily have a shared vocabulary. Shan-
non Jackson’s analysis of Andre Fraser stretches across theatre and performance
and visual arts disciplinary frames. She invites the reader to ‘notice what comes
forward when contemporary socio-political experimentation in one medium finds
itself working in a tradition of socio-political experimentation in another medium’
(2011: 121). This collection attempts to take note of precisely such transmedial
encounters, dialogues, and strategies that produce new knowledge. Jackson draws
our attention to the contingencies of perception that are conditioned not only upon
‘critical histories but also upon disciplinary perceptual habits that can make for
4 Maria M. Delgado et al.

drastically different understandings of what we are in fact encountering’ (2011: 4).

The museum curator and the theatre maker often perceive the same phenomena dif-
ferently. Discussions animate how curators might approach objects as a fundamen-
tal problem that can be considered theatrically and how theatre makers can deploy
museal strategies in their mise en scène.
Examining staged narrative offers a point of comparison and contrast be-
tween museums and theatres, and their roles in shaping public memory. Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2015) has referred to new narrative history museums as
‘theatres of history’. This assertion requires careful analysis. Is this due to their
borrowing of theatre conventions, such as scenography, the organisation of history
into scenes and acts, the deployment of theatricality or spectacle, or their develop-
ment of immersive performance techniques? Are their narratives – as Geneviève
Zubrzycki (2017) argues – largely constructed through embodied performance?
Essays in this collection analyse theatre makers who have innovated approaches
to narrative, including the movement between present and past tenses, collabora-
tions with historical witnesses, the blurring of first and third person, and the use of
parody, satire and humour. These all operate to challenge histories or positionings
that might threaten to fall into ‘official’ of ‘fixed’ terrains. Indeed, as it should be
noted, the staged narratives in some of the case studies offered here would have
been unimaginable or considered unrepresentable in the past or today, in some
geo-political spaces, because they contest those narratives determined by former
(or current) state historical policies and call into question approaches that ossify
or fix the past as a stable, incontestable entity. These narratives have varying aims
and can be reparative, redemptive, or defensive; they question, intervene into, or
disrupt metanarratives in politics and culture. Contributors reflect on the modes in
which spectators can be invited to act as historical agents, to immerse themselves
in narrations of the historical present in the ‘first person’, and to imagine alterna-
tive histories and thus alternative futures in modes that are formally specific – and
differ from, for example, forms that might appear to be more ontologically fixed,
as with literature and film. The ‘rewriting‘ of books through acts of translation,
through censorship, editorial intervention and removal of references and/or phrases
deemed offensive or racist – as with Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Ian Flem-
ing’s books in 2023 – does challenge such understandings and show how even an
ontologically-fixed object can be rewritten and recirculated due to the changing
historical imaginaries and ideological sensitivities.2 Directors’ cuts, final cuts, and
re-edits following theatrical releases further reinforce this sense of film as a mate-
rial (as much as a digital) and malleable entity subject to ‘staged’ ­modifications – as
per Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – and repackaging for the
small screen – as with The Godfather Trilogy (1972/1974/1990). While this vol-
ume is primarily concerned with the relationship between museums and theatre,
the discussion of film, archival footage, and use of screen technologies across dif-
ferent chapters allows for the discussion of objects and narratives to circulate in a
different disciplinary context – one where theatrical motifs, icons, and texts serve
 Introduction 5

to examine how cultural texts have intervened in broader discussions of the role of
multidimensional and post-memory in a contested public sphere where it is linked
to gender politics and broader political debates.
Objects are one of the most highly contested aspects of memory in performance,
display, and encounter. Although it is often a prerequisite of a museum to have ob-
jects (though new immersive experiences are decisively challenging such assump-
tions), these do not by necessity have to be historically authentic originals. Whether
authentic, copied, or reproduced, critics have widely argued that museum objects
must be deemed to be of cultural value. While this might suggest an object’s value
is alterior to its presence in a museum or theatrical frame, a number of perfor-
mance theorists (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, Kobialka 2016, 2022, Lease 2017)
have argued that it is an object’s placement in representational space that produces
its cultural value and its metonymic reach into the past. Peter Bjerregaard argues
for a distinction to be made between Realität, the physical reality of an object, and
Wirklichkeit, ‘the experience of the object in a particular setting and in a particular
relation to subjects’ to show that the scenographic arrangement of an exhibition
produces an atmosphere that has the power ‘to dissolve the individual objects at
display allowing them to become part of the general experience of space’ (2015: 7,
2, emphasis in original). This raises questions concerning the emphasis placed in
museums on artefact over copy, on authenticity over theatricality, on historical aura
over pedagogical function and the ethical considerations surrounding the reproduc-
ibility of heritage objects.
Since the nineteenth century, museums have been shifting their point of focus
from the autonomous object to the object-as-manifestation of a predetermined nar-
rative.3 The essays in this collection grapple with how the latest iterations of the
narrative history museum are reliant on spectacle, and whether museums make
their forms of representation apparent through visible excess, as Valerie Casey
(2005) and Larry Shiner suggest (2011). This requires a nuanced analysis of the re-
lations being generated between spectacle and objects, which is also crucial to our
analysis of theatre practices. The book’s focus on narrative and object highlights
key points of intersection between theatres and museums, while acknowledging
that narrative and object are themselves enmeshed and mutually generative. As a
number of our contributors demonstrate, for many experiential museums, the ob-
ject is the performative encounter engendered by the interactions of the spectator
and the exhibition or installation at a particular moment in time – which is currently
framed by renewed discussions about the shifting registers of the terms such as
anticolonial, decolonial, culturalism, colonial matrix of power, and supremacist
Eurocentrism (Larsen 2022).
Jenny Kidd and Eva Nieto McAvoy note the importance of recognising the
­implications of digital colonialism in these encounters: ‘a risk that information
technologies can be used in ways that reproduce colonial power relations, particu-
larly if artefacts and environments are digitally appropriated by institutions from
the global north – not to mention the appropriation and exploitation of the user data
6 Maria M. Delgado et al.

gathered. How heritage objects are then (digitally) represented, by whom and for
what purposes is a searching question – and one with strong ethical dimensions’
(2019). Immersive technologies may offer strategies for the promotion of empa-
thy in audiences, but what has been termed the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and
Gilmore 1998, cited in Kidd 2018) may itself throw up challenges on what Kidd
terms ‘aesthetic’ and ‘emotional’ capitalism that require consideration. ‘What is it’,
she asks, ‘that makes these encounters justifiable without heritage contexts rather
than (say) theme parks or theatres?’ (Kidd 2018). Perhaps it is this idea of contesta-
tion that offers the clearest justification: a way of reforging the present by unset-
tling the past.
Furthermore, archival, degraded, or artefactual objects have been used in per-
formance practices both to evoke and to contest public memory. Vivian M. Patraka
conceives of representation itself as an object ‘that is always a reconstruction, a
pre-framed, pre-narrativised set of practices that attempts to make visible certain
events, practices, and/or beliefs assumed to be fixed, essential, and pre-existing’
(1999: 5). However, Patraka is conscious of the foundational tension underlying
the relationship that grounds the struggle between an object of representation and
a process of reiteration. She defines this as a ‘risky struggle’ between object and
process or memory and history. There appears to be a double marking at work
here. While representation attempts to mark the ‘goneness’ of traumatic historical
events, the form of performance (from theatrical objects to performative encoun-
ters in museal spaces) is itself generated through an ongoing process of disappear-
ance. Essays consider how objects of memory constitute a particular metonymic
situation in relation to disappearance, across theatre, the museum, and film. Per-
formative modes are shown to animate material objects, documenting and marking
loss, occlusion, or the impossibility of recovery, instead of simply substituting it
through representation.

Mnemonic Refractions
Public memory of difficult pasts can be activated, contested, and pluralised in per-
formance and museal practices as part of a process of generating shared histories
and broadening publics’ historical consciousness. Commemorative acts in theatre
and performance have dynamic relationships to the affective environments and
performative encounters currently being generated in experiential museums. In
conversations and collaborations with museum curators, we have noted an anxi-
ety over the theatrical experience in the display or approach to difficult pasts that
relies on showy or overblown spectacle that produces unmerited or ethically dubi-
ous emotional responses or unethical forms of historical attachment or nostalgia.
Scholars have been hesitant to rely on empathy as the ultimate horizon of audience
experience. Jennifer Bonnell and Roger I. Simon do not reject empathy as a cura-
torial objective, but invite its interpretation away from a commonality of feeling
towards a
 Introduction 7

relation of acknowledgement, a responsiveness to the feelings of others that

opens the question of what it might mean to live in proximity to these feelings,
to live in ways in which one experiences the force of these feelings to alter one’s
experience of the world and actions in it.
(2007: 76)

Placing an emphasis on the verb ‘to remember’ positions memory as an action,

which is to say, as performance theorists, we conceive memory as enacted and
embodied. We argue that performed memory – as a practice and a generator of
social knowledge – affords a productive site in which to apprehend difficult pasts,
especially if there is a desire to democratise authority and knowledge of such pasts,
to reject totalising syntheses of historical narratives, to foster divergent under-
standings of the past, and to offer space for contradiction as well as congruence.
Adapting Deborah Britzman’s concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ (2000), the project
articulates ‘difficult pasts’ as those that are confrontational, antagonistic towards
existing social myths, and difficult to assimilate in grand or heroic narratives. The
counterpoint of difficult pasts are then heroic pasts: historical narratives that re-
inforce existing knowledge, valorise particular ethnic groups, champion political
gain, or easily conform to the status quo.
This concept can be separated from ‘traumatic pasts’ in that they do not assign
trauma to the spectator, or ‘contested pasts’, which suggest that two or more posi-
tions are in conflict with one another. This is not to claim that the staging of difficult
pasts is not concurrent with performances of and interactions with countermemory
that refract trauma: the exposure of that which has been ‘negated, deemed unrep-
resentable on account of its traumatic nature, or silenced’ (Gluhovic 2013: 103).
However, ‘difficult’ draws attention to the inherent tensions in approaching the past
that is embedded in a single object, in the experience of a witness, or in a specific
memorial museum. The first-person experience of historical trauma, or second-
generation inheritance of trauma (as in Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory)
(2012), is not identical to the representation of such pasts. Rather than downplay-
ing competing memories, the term ‘difficult’ allows us to focus on the ways in
which cultural institutions stage understandings of pasts that are not only explicitly
disputed by different groups but which are inherently in conflict. For this reason,
we analyse how the activity of remembering engages the aim of many contempo-
rary museums and commemorative forms of theatre and performance – as well as
film and documentary practices – that seek to democratise authority and knowl-
edge of difficult pasts, reject totalising syntheses of historical narratives, foster
shared and divergent understandings of history, and offer space for incompatible,
contradictory, or diversified perspectives as well as dialogical encounters. These
perspectives are as much about the present as the past – a way of thinking through
processes of transitional justice, of what is remembered and why, and the ways in
which national histories are constructed that lie at odds with personal memory/ies
of communities within the nation-state (Crane 1997). Elizabeth Crooke, writing on
8 Maria M. Delgado et al.

the display of historical artefacts associated with the conflict in Northern Ireland,
observes that these mnemonic devices for remembering the past can also make the
memory of those who died in the conflict tangible (2016: 87). In making ‘a moment
of the past more accessible’ (ibid.), these memories are intrinsically linked to the
policies of the present, politics in place since the signing of the Belfast Agreement
in 1998 that have sought both to recognise past violence and recover the truths of
what happened (ibid.). In mapping how projects ‘inhabited by insiders (Lundy and
McGovern 2006)’ – that is, the participants being the families and individuals who
use the resources of the organising groups’ – differ from ‘the local commemorative
projects of marching, murals and monuments’ that the reader may be more familiar
with, Crooke discerns a curatorial imperative that invites the viewer to take action
(197), in this case the demand for an inquiry into the circumstances in which a
person died.
Tadeusz Kantor – an artist who elided easy categorisation and worked between
theatre and visual arts and resisted imposed medial divisions of stage, gallery,
and museum – is interwoven through this project. He appears and disappears,
as is his fashion. Rather than constructing heroes, Kantor invites to the stage the
conflicting demands of human experience that do not (and cannot) add up to such
a neat category as ‘hero’. From The Return of Odysseus (1944) to Today is My
Birthday (1990), they are always in reality, but not of it, as Michal Kobialka ar-
gues, suggesting that Kantor’s was a radical praxis exposing history and politics
caught in the act of inventing forms of presentation of the events and its actors
(2009: viii). While space produces particular walking rhetorics and historically
and ideologically justified habitability, time has its own slow inculcation of norms.
Kantor offers a new way of recognising these demands, alternative responses to
time, and glimpses of countermemory. For this reason, we have been interested
in the way Kantor might trouble Maurice Halbwach’s long-upheld distinction be-
tween history, which produces a double focus highlighting both the alterity of the
past and society as inherently in flux, and collective memory, which advocates
for a coherent, unbroken line that stitches the past to the present. Transformation,
rupture, and catastrophe are eschewed or sidelined to produce a strong sense of
preservation and continuity. Our hypothesis is that it is precisely the anxiety over
the perceived loss of reified and safeguarded cultural values that have produced
what some understandably call ‘mnemonic wars’ (Saryusz-Wolska, Wawrzyniak,
and Wóycicka 2022: 1275–1288). Kantor anticipated such anxiety; he also moved
us further into it. The focus on difficult pasts and collective memory works across
the political spectrum from those values espoused by global coalitional initiatives
that cultivate pluralism and tolerance to those tensely defended by neoconserva-
tive groups that favour restrictive ethnonationalism. The aim to re-establish and
enforce such values in the present can either be enacted as history lessons in hu-
man rights abuses or as reinforcements of hierarchies of suffering that privilege
particular ethnic groups.
 Introduction 9

A calculated choice to move away from tightly circumscribed and rigidly po-
liced national frameworks towards postnational communities and forms of cosmo-
politan memory and a recognition of entrenched racism in governmental, societal,
economic, and cultural structures and institutions has seen curators and theatre
makers invest in anti-imperial and decolonising actions. As Dan Hicks has argued
in The Brutish Museums, such efforts cannot be reduced to or reliant on ‘the mere
rewriting of labels or shuffling around of stolen objects in new displays’ (2020:
xiii), even if their ambition is to reformulate understandings of empire in a critical
or self-conscious manner; for those working in the global north, this work must
entail equitable co-production with colleagues in the global south. Both Hicks and
Ann Laura Stoler have called attention to the enduring nature of the past in the pre-
sent – its failure to be past – particularly in relation to what Stoler has theorised as
‘imperial durabilities’ (2016). For Hicks, museal objects themselves are not frag-
ments of time but are the materialisation of ‘endurance’, of human duration (2021:
xxii). Erica Lehrer and Joanna Wawrzyniak (2023) produced a preliminary to-do
list for decolonial museology in East-Central Europe that acts as a crucial reminder
to European nations that did not formally participate in colonial exploitation (and
which were themselves the object of colonisation through multiple empires until
the end of the twentieth century) to consider their own complicity in and benefit
from such ventures. If museums are the manifestation of colonial technologies and
cognitive maps that upheld Eurocentrism, then their location does not exonerate
their implication. In Decolonising German and European History at the Museum,
Katrin Sieg’s contention is that ‘the racial inscriptions and Eurocentric underpin-
nings of cosmopolitanism must be addressed to install racial justice as obtainable
within European societies and to visions of egalitarian world order’ (2021: 11) and
the museum is a primary site for this work. Of course, as a theatre and performance
scholar, Sieg conceptualises museums as stages and exhibitions as performance
scripts (2021: 12).
Dance, theatre, and performance studies scholars have been equally invested
in decolonisation and find compound consonances with their counterparts in cu-
ration and museum studies. In a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review,
‘Outing Archives, Archives Outing’, that brings together queer and anticolonial
performance initiatives that formulate ‘outing’ as an act of repair or a redoubling
of colonial violence, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease, and Royona Mitra argue
that as a methodology ‘the decolonial constantly questions categories and their
genesis demanding a multifaceted perspective’ (2021: 7). In her challenge to the
‘colonising and epistemic grids’ that Eurocentric disciplines impose, performance
studies scholar Diana Taylor asserts the political urgency of presence and offers
¡presente! as a fungible concept that is context-dependent and always multiple,
ranging from a commitment to witnessing or an ontological reflection on presence
and subjectivity as process to the ‘ethical imperative’ (drawing on Gayatri Spivak)
to stand up to and speak against injustice (2020: xi, 4). While museum scholars
10 Maria M. Delgado et al.

have tended to focus on objects, representation, and restitution – indeed, Hicks

has dubbed the 2020s the ‘decade of returns’ (2021: xx)4 – decolonial action in
theatre and performance centres forms of embodiment that ‘trace historical and
cultural constraints that render sex, gender, race, and sexuality culturally intelli-
gible and see subjectivity as composed by ritualised, public dramatisations of the
body’ (Blanco Borelli, Lease, Mitra 2021: 8). What is clear across the wide range
of theorisations and approaches to decolonisation across these disciplines is the
imperative to act through transnational coalitions: the ‘I’ of imperialism supplanted
by a ‘we’ that recognises that processes of restitution are themselves haunted by the
ongoing legacies of colonialism and continuing inequalities.

Transnational Refractions
The contributors to this collection demonstrate how thinking transnationally helps
to open up new questions about artistic strategies and discourses around memory
that are otherwise closed or stuck in national frameworks. This book moves away
from the ‘methodological nationalism prevalent in memory studies so far’ (Erll
2011: 2) and attempts to rethink memory in an expanded field (Huyssen 2003) that
is comparative, multicultural, and diasporic. These essays offer significant points
of comparison and contrast in their framing of history and memory of authoritari-
anism, colonialism, fascism, and communism. Considering them in tandem has
the strong potential to afford new insights into the current understanding of these
difficult pasts across local, national, and global frameworks. ‘Difficult pasts’ as a
descriptor also reroutes analyses of history that appear to be completed in terms
like postcolonial, postcommunist, post-transition, or post-conflict. Dance scholar
Anurima Banerji (2018) notes the postcolonial remains embedded in the postmod-
ern, as opposed to the anti-modern decolonial: ‘In place of the “universalizing”
gesture, the decolonial intervention is to propose “pluriversal” praxis’. Memory
studies originated out of the subject of Holocaust memory, which was created
‘through a dual process of particularisation and universalisation’ (Levy and
Sznaider 2006: 93) and has become a paradigmatic global object of remembrance
and narrative template. Indeed, Pierre Nora links the memory boom directly to
the Holocaust with his oft quoted phrase ‘Whoever says memory, says Shoah’
(Winter 2001: 57). While Aleida Assmann has demonstrated how memory of the
Holocaust has become a global reference point (2010: 97), Andreas Huyssen has
argued that the Holocaust is losing its indexical quality and has begun to function
as a ‘metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories’ (2003: 14). The US
Holocaust Memorial Museum ‘as one of the first self- described memorial muse-
ums’, too now functions as a paradigm for memorial museums across the globe
(Sodaro 2018: 7). Katrin Sieg has highlighted a further and more significant chal-
lenge when she concludes that ‘a cosmopolitan memory culture grounded in the
Holocaust reached an impasse and revealed an inability to curb nationalist narcis-
sism or racist exclusion’, which in part is a result of ‘insufficiently decenter[ing]
 Introduction 11

the nation-state as a guarantee against the persecution of minorities’ (2021: 14,

16). Our transnational focus and methodology further develop and test Michael
Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ (2009), which proposes that one discourse
of memory can enable other discourses of memory and create new forms of soli-
darity, while remaining alert to Sieg’s trenchant warning that apparently convivial
memory cultures can conceal other forms of prejudice, imperial rhetoric, or na-
tionalist complacency.
Our understanding of the transnational, as opposed to the global or international,
is grounded in a focus on the ways in which memory cultures, artistic and curatorial
strategies, and critical discourses circulate and recur across different geographical
spaces. Forms of comparison that lack nuance and sensitivity can generate more
harm than reparation. Moving beyond the national frame as the originator or propa-
gator of memory cultures, the transnational is embedded in chapters that engage
with the movement or circulation of memory that undermine interpretations of the
nation-state as singular, impermeable, or dominant in establishing common mem-
ory. Through transnational comparisons, we examine how the narratives theatre
makers and curators construct are participating in or rejecting global memory dis-
courses. As Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer (2016) note, museums emplot (a
rhetorical device) or encode narratives not only through objects, but also through a
global network of sites in which they take part, which requires a transnational com-
parative study. Such an examination offers insights into how attempts to narrate
public memory – to stage, display, exhibit, and embody memory – lodge a critical
interpretation of identity and systems of power. Within a wider context of mem-
ory studies, we develop an understandings of memory as a ‘discursive construct’
(Pethes and Ruchatz 2001: 13, cited in Erll 2011: 6), constituted through linguistic,
social, historical, national, and global contexts. Theatres and museums may engage
with memory in broader movements that contest grand narratives and undermine
monolithic conceptions of history as a ‘collective singular’ (Kollektivsingular)
(Fernández-Sebastián, Fuentes and Koselleck 2006: 122). In our examination of
three narrative registers – common histories that emphasise one identity over an-
other; relational histories that fix identities between two or more points; and shared
histories that offer space for multiple and conflicting forms of identification –
our process of investigation exposes the modes in which the staging of difficult
pasts is produced for inter- or intra-public consumption and in relation to (and in
tension with) national or cosmopolitan memory (Lehrer and Meng 2015).
This heavy investment in reconceptualisations of the audience takes into ac-
count the impact of artistic and curatorial strategies. Moving between and amongst
museal and theatrical frames, from visitor to spectator to participant, the embodied
encounters with the past explored across the collection form a critical constella-
tion offering a wide-ranging interrogation and critique of the consumption of and
engagement with difficult pasts, asking crucial questions concerning the ethics and
aims of audience experience, and bringing forth the reality of contradictions fram-
ing historical/political pasts dialectically.
12 Maria M. Delgado et al.

Overview
This investment in reconceptualisations is articulated in different, but complemen-
tary, ways in this volume. When this collection of essays is read transversally, it
can be found in James Bulgin’s reflections on the construction of the Imperial War
Museum’s Holocaust Gallery in relation to museums in North America, Germany,
and Eastern Europe; in Cecilia Sosa’s consideration of ESMA Memory Museum’s
commissioning of Polish director Wojtek Ziemilski; in Giulia Palladini’s discussion
of the Colombian group Mapa Teatro’s intervention into Spanish colonial space at
Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum; by Bryce Lease in relation to memory of Eastern
European communism and fascism; and in Joanne Rosenthal’s curatorial manifesto
that looks across a range of European practices and case studies. Furthermore, in
order to investigate these reconceptualisations non-linearly, we place chapters in
relation to one another so that they function as dialogues: Lynette Goddard’s work
on the memory of enslavement in British theatre and curatorial practices with Jor-
dan Ealey and Leticia Ridley’s embodied encounters with The National Museum
of African American History and Culture in the US; Milena Grass Kleiner and
Mariana Hausdorf Andrade’s analysis of Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos
Humanos in Santiago, Chile resonates with but diverges from Sosa’s reflections
on ESMA Museum in Buenos Aires, and the former’s methodology of juxtapos-
ing ‘live’ theatrical encounters with approaches to museal curation resonates with
Bishnupriya Dutt’s discussion of India’s Museums of Independence; Giulia Pal-
ladini’s critique of Spanish colonialism offers an intersectional opportunity to read
Maria M. Delgado’s essay on unprocessed pasts of fascism in the country; Kat-
rina Phillips’s analysis of the exploitation of Native Americans in outdoor drama
industry intersects with Nadia Davids and Jay Pather’s historical critique of eth-
nographic performances in South Africa; Michal Kobialka’s essay on interethnic
displays of ‘awkward’ objects in Poland speaks to Erika Diettes’ considerations of
the ethical responsibility of displaying objects of conflict in Colombia; there are
pertinent points of contact in the use of museums to emplot and justify nationalism
in India (Dutt) and amplify right-wing curatorial projects in Hungary, Lithuania,
and Poland (Lease); and Rabih Mroué’s work on representations of violence ques-
tions positionality in a move beyond the national as the prevalent condition of
spectatorship.
Conceptually, the book starts with a framing of theatricality in museums. Jor-
dan Ealey and Leticia Ridley walk through The National Museum of African
American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC, which is struc-
tured to reflect a progress narrative of African American life, beginning with the
hold of a slave ship to contemporary narratives of Black ‘success’. They argue
that the interactive exhibits invite visitors to become what Dwight Conquergood
calls ‘co-performers’ (2006: 359) in their exploration of African American history.
Recognising the institution of the museum as a highly curated space, alongside
the blatant nationalism of the Smithsonian institutions that the NMAAHC is built
 Introduction 13

upon, Ealey and Ridley advocate for co-performance as an efficacious framework

for navigating what they see as the dichotomy of the museum’s mission to fore-
ground ‘Americanness’ and the embodied experience of visiting the space. Draw-
ing from Black performance theory and feminisms through a queer lens, they ask
what it means to stage a history of a people while decentering the people in that
history. Bryce Lease is invested in the museum itself as the ultimate object of dis-
play. Exploring the eschewal of fascism and the Holocaust in favour of communist
terror in three museums – Budapest’s House of Terror, Vilnius’ Museum of Occu-
pations and Freedom Fights, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum – Lease addresses
the fundamental question of theatricality these sites produce. While many critics of
these museums simply point to theatricality as either offering curators the artistic
means of achieving their ideological and political ambitions or as obscuring them
through imitation or spectacle, Lease suggests that, conversely, defining theatrical-
ity as a form of material practices and dynamic relations enables a more nuanced
understanding of curatorial technique and the positioning of the spectator, while
also offering new insights into the pervasive move towards the theatricalisation
of memorial museum displays. The obverse of extravagant spectacle, he argues,
paying attention to theatricality exposes rather than conceals museums’ ideological
investments. Interpreting theatricality as the critical positioning of the spectator
then resonates in Lease’s interview with curator James Bulgin, who reflects on his
process of developing the latest iteration of the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM)
Holocaust Galleries in London. Bulgin admits that he was at first hesitant around
theatricality and when the museum sent out the design tender, he explicitly asked
applicants to articulate what they would do with the train carriage the IWM has in
their collection. More than half of the designers who applied suggested that they
would attempt to fill the carriage with sound and lighting effects in order to allow
visitors to feel they were retaking the steps of those who were transported in such
trains. Bulgin recalls that ‘[T]his is exactly what we did not want, so it was helpful
to learn very quickly the perspective from which the designer was approaching the
broader project’ (p. 57). The theatrical is rather animated through his approach to
scenographic design that employs ‘contemporaneity’ as an interpretive strategy.
Only offering the museum visitor the information a historical subject would have
known or had access to in a given historical moment demonstrates how immersion
can simultaneously offer intellectual absorption, critical distance, and affective en-
gagement without resorting to forms of emotional imposture.
Having established the contours of theatricality, the next set of essays break
traditional museal frames to explore performative potentials of collective com-
memoration. Michal Kobialka analyses Wojtek Ziemilski’s performative action,
We walked just this way, which removed an object from the Widok zza bliska. Inne
obrazy Zagłady [officially translated into English as Terribly Close. Polish Vernac-
ular Artists Face the Holocaust] exhibition at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum.
Kobialka argues that working through the past, here: the objects, representing the
Holocaust and Jewish martyrology, created by untrained Polish artists, may well
14 Maria M. Delgado et al.

be what is needed given the multiplicity of global and local crises in our present
historical moment, and the proliferation of often contradictory, ideologically im-
bued meanings of what constitutes a past. As evidenced by the performative action,
in bringing together an awkward object from the exhibition and its copy dragged
through the streets of Kraków as well as collateral memories of the past in the pre-
sent moment, a new topography of the possible can materialise. A new topography
of the possible can materialise only, however, when the causes of what happened
here and there have been worked through, since, as Adorno reminds us, ‘only be-
cause the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to
this unbroken’ (1998: 103). Cecilia Sosa also reflects on a practice research com-
mission that formed part of the Staging Difficult Pasts project which took place at
the ESMA Memory Museum in Buenos Aires. Located on the site of a clandestine
detention centre that operated in Argentina during the 1976–1983 dictatorship, Sosa
considers how ‘contemporary theatre and performance, in collaboration with mu-
seums, might contribute to a more inclusive and transnational politics of memory
and grief in collaboration with museums’ (p. 90). ‘Pasados Conflictivos en Escena’
(Conflictive Pasts on Stage) comprised of two performances that offered contrapun-
tal and entangled readings of a site of terror and ultraviolence, spanning the oppres-
sive to the playful. Sosa queries the ways in which performative interventions might
promote or propel action or offer a transformative engagement for visitors with no
direct connection to the site’s traumatic pasts. Ultimately, she argues, such initia-
tives produce what James Clifford (1997: 210) termed ‘contact zones’ in which new
trans-affiliative narratives can be formed and transnational solidarities galvanised.
The Berlin-based Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué has long been engaged with the
contemporary politics of the Middle East and the history of discord in the region,
drawing from his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990).
Committed to exploring how the images of war are circulated and absorbed by
the public, in his theatre pieces, non-academic lectures, and in gallery spaces, he
examines the mediatised processes of normalising the everyday atrocities of war by
investigating a complex relationship between memory, fiction, and political reality.
In conversation with Michal Kobialka, Mroué, referencing his theatre/performance
and visual works, talks about his process of writing/staging history affected by the
work of an Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian, Ibn Khaldun; about the
repressed or forgotten images of war, which, like a flash, unexpectedly come back
to haunt us; about representation, which becomes pixelated, blurred, and abstract;
about his relentless homage to the phantom presence of the dead; and about the
state of unrest as a necessary condition for bringing the difficult past to the present
time. Mroué conceptualises what he calls the ‘in-between’ – a mental or physical
site or a territory that is undetermined; a non-place – where the known categories
and actions lose their pre-assigned meaning imposed upon them by the cultural or
political norms; and need to be defined anew, as if outside of the dominant status
quo; or as if withdrawn from life, but deferring death at the same time.
 Introduction 15

This ‘in-between’ reverberates through Giulia Palladini’s discussion of De los

dementes, ò faltos de juicio (Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity), a site-specific
project by the Colombian artistic laboratory Mapa Teatro in Madrid’s Reina Sofia
Museum. She argues that ‘the strategy of Mapa Teatro has been to take responsibil-
ity for the position they occupied as artists, and as inhabitants of this territory in
between spaces, in between histories’ (p. 122) through the production of a ‘tempo-
ralisation of space’ in a museum that has unspoken colonial presences. Harnessing
the concept of artes vivas (live arts), Palladini reasons that while the wandering
body in the museum activates Mapa Teatro’s dramaturgy, bodies are neither fet-
ishised nor conditioned as the object of inquiry. Instead, Palladini addresses Reina
Sofía as a ‘living organism’ in which the artists evoke the museum’s embodied
memory as both a hospital that treated those returning from Spain’s colonies to an
art institution that benefited from the colonial ruination of Colombia, the ruthless
extraction of its resources, and the imposed labour of its indigenous populations.
The chapters that follow discover points of tension between and take up critical
perspectives on the constitutive mediating roles of theatre and museal practices. In
her analysis of the four new museums located within the grand Mughal era monu-
ment in Old Delhi, Bishnupriya Dutt shows how the ultraright Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) is distorting the historical record and collective memory through its
commissioning of these museums in an effort to advocate a homogenous vision of
India tied to religious affiliation and narrow communitarian identities. The museums
in the Red Fort selectively display convenient episodes of anti-colonial pro-nation-
alist historical struggles. Against this co-opting of history for political advance-
ment and cultural hegemony, Dutt champions a theatre practice that counters and
resists such narratives and ‘regressive cultural tendencies’ in postcolonial states (p.
151). Lynette Goddard also finds fault with museum curation in their exploration
of artworks and objects that document and memorialise histories of enslavement at
the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool. While two plays by Black
British women – Selina Thompson’s salt. (2018) and Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets
and Blue Lights (2020) – bear witness to legacies of enslavement, sexual violence,
coercion, and brutalisation, Goddard concludes that the ISM lacks the ‘embodied
dramatic and performance strategies to create space for Black women to speak back
to past histories of racial injustice’ (p. 155). Goddard invites curators to critically
reconsider ‘sedate, sterile, and disembodied’ narrations of such histories (ibid.) and
argues that museums must work against exhibitionary habits that fail to fully ac-
count for ‘a shared responsibility to address the afterlives of slavery’ (p. 169), from
anti-black racism to enduring structural inequality. Milena Grass Kleiner and Mari-
ana Hausdorf Andrade in their chapter ‘Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human
Rights: Long Life to the Theatre!’ also examine how a consensus on Santiago’s new
Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMHR) was mandated that presents the
Pinochet dictatorship’s human rights abuses through a very particular agreed nar-
rative. A curatorial strategy with respect to the permanent collections sees evidence
16 Maria M. Delgado et al.

trump interpretation and this is contrasted with the theatrical productions that are
presented in the venue’s Central Square that have ‘provided a counter-narrative
to counterbalance the limited monolinear discourse conveyed by the permanent
exhibitions’ (p. 186). Grass Kleiner and Andrade locate in the performing arts a
flexibility to enter into a dialogue with timely current concerns, including the 2018
feminist movement, the 2019 Estallido Social (social upheaval), and longstanding
and ongoing repression of the Mapuche people. Indeed, these three essays (by Dutt,
Goddard, and Grass Kleiner and Andrade) all show the ways in which nationally
funded museums can be seen to capitulate to the nationalist agenda, and they cham-
pion the potential of theatre to provide a destabilising space of critical engagement.
The essays in the concluding section turn to acts of remembrance and emerging
approaches to mnemotechnics. In a conversation with Vikki Bell that stretches over
a calendar year, the artist Erika Diettes describes the unfolding process of her first
site-specific work, an oratorio built on a hillside in Colombia. Diettes has produced
arresting visual works in response to the histories of armed conflicts in the country
and her most recent pieces are the result of dialogic processes of engagement with
the relatives of murdered and disappeared persons. Bell argues that Diettes offers
her resources to communities as an artist rather than drawing on them as the object
of her artworks. The construction of the oratorio inaugurates a new artistic phase
that spreads memory through landscape, materialising an on-going and unbroken
process of grieving in Colombia. Maria M. Delgado also explores the commemo-
rated body in the landscape by presenting a treatment of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021
film Madres paralelas/Parallel Mothers centred on its call for restorative justice.
By considering its parallel narratives as intersectional – dealing with gender poli-
tics as well as issues relating to the disappeared who lie in Spain’s Civil and post-
Civil War mass graves – Delgado argues that the film offers a mode of recognising
the role that artistic interventions can play in framing difficult pasts in what has
been a politically divided public sphere. The invocation of Federico García Lorca’s
dramaturgy is not incidental here but rather part of a carefully woven referential
framework on theatrical presence/absence and forced disappearance.
The question of burial and commemoration then frame an interview with Na-
dia Davids and Jay Pather through a discussion of their theatre productions What
Remains (2017) and Hold Still (2022). What Remains – a multidisciplinary work
encompassing text, dance, and movement that interweaves theatrical and museal
strategies – tells the story of the unexpected uncovering of a slave burial ground in
Cape Town. When the bones emerge from the ground, everyone in the city – slave
descendants, archaeologists, citizens, property developers – is forced to reckon
with a history sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten. Tracing unspoken
histories of enslavement through a repertoire of contemporary cultural practices,
Davids and Pather tie forms of generational memory to political activism.
Katrina Phillips examines outdoor dramas, which focus on the reconstruction
of native or indigenous histories, and how these reconstructions could be seen not
 Introduction 17

only as examples of the reinterpretation of public memory often effacing conquest

of Native lands and Native nations by American governmental officials, missionar-
ies, and militaries, but also as hallmarks of dark tourism. As such, she avers, these
outdoor dramas, because they are often staged to boost regional tourism, must offer
to their audiences an escape from reckoning with American history in order for the
site to maintain its status as a viable tourist destination.
While our inter-sector engagement with project partners and collaborators
primarily takes the form of critical reflections and extended interviews, Joanne
Rosenthal’s epilogue offers an artistic manifesto that is meant to be of practical use
for curators. Her ten principles consider how to display or represent objects and
narratives which relate to trauma and loss, particularly in relation to issues of iden-
tity, family, sexuality, and kinship. While drawing upon a wide spectrum of interna-
tional case studies, Rosenthal shows how museums, curators, and artists have made
creative use of the limitations and opportunities involved in exhibiting absence and
loss in expanded landscapes. Her ‘menu’ of strategies is not intended to function as
an exhaustive survey, but rather to provoke further questions for the curator.
Globalism has not produced a post-national (or even post-nationalist) world and
nation-states continue to manipulate and weaponise their stagings of the past to
achieve their own political ambitions. In Colombia, November 2016 acts as a sym-
bolic end to over 50 years of armed conflict in the country when the government
ratified the Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the
People’s Army (FARC-EP). In reality, the violence that has officially claimed the
lives of more than 8 million people has continued at pace, which makes the des-
ignation post-Accord Colombia more accurate than the oft-cited ‘post-conflict’.
Laura Rodriguez Castro argues that the Accord has not brought an end to the vio-
lence because the roots of the social conflict have not been addressed (2023: 44).
A Truth Commission was created in 2017, but the construction of a Museum of
a National Museum of Memory of Colombia (MCM) has failed to open despite
a constitutional mandate (the Victim’s Law 1448 of 2011). Although the original
project team of the MCM embraced transformative strategies and sought to build
public trust through dialogic encounters with communities impacted by violence
and to curate galleries that did not take sides in a country brutally divaricated be-
tween left and right, the controversial change in museum directorship in early 2020
brought progress to a halt. The election of Iván Duque Márquez and his ultraright-
wing government in 2019 resulted in ‘state-sanctioned denialist politics’ (Rodri-
guez Castro 2023: 46) that has left most of the exhibition rooms unfinished and the
community projects unfunded. The politicisation and state control of memory sites
and institutions threaten and curtail the work of activists, artists, and curators who
seek to generate plural and inclusive spaces.
On the other side of the globe, as the Soviet Union was slowly collapsing in
the late 1980s, Memorial International was set up to document forms of politi-
cal oppression, which included a database of victims from the period of Stalinist
18 Maria M. Delgado et al.

terror and the gulags. In late 2021, the controversial ‘foreign agent’ legislation was
evoked in a Russian court to force the country’s longest-standing human rights
group to close just two months before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
This assault on public memory was performed in tandem with the crackdown on
political criticism and resistance in Russian civil society to Putin’s regime. Memo-
rial’s lawyer, Genri Reznik, argued, ‘The Memorial Society promotes the health
of the nation. To eliminate this from the history of the country now means to con-
tribute to the idea of “the state is always right”’ (cited in Roth 2021). Theatres
and museums play a crucial role in defying the state’s self-flattery and attempts
to claim ownership of difficult pasts by activating publics and reaffirming the sig-
nificance of articulating historical implication and responsibility. For Bonnell and
Simon, ‘difficult’ explicitly draws in the cognitive and affective aspects of visitor
experience and the ways in which the museum might animate a critical historical
consciousness. What is ‘difficult’ is the ‘engagement with the experiences of oth-
ers that radically calls into question the adequacy of one’s concepts to tie down
the significance of the lessons of the past’ (2007: 81). This collection inscribes the
labour and fortitude of those curators, artists, and theatre and filmmakers who are
exploring how theatrical and performative encounters with difficult pasts generate
new forms of public knowledge. The voices of those making work are often at the
forefront of the collection – their contribution to these forms of public knowledge
articulated in their own words, predicated on the questions about performance/
performativity; performance and power relations; the formation of museum and
theatre spaces in today’s geo-political and cultural landscape; and on archives –
that are shared but not necessarily mutually understood – in spaces that link people
who might not otherwise find common ground.

Notes
1 Volodymyr Zelensky also evokes the Second World War in his rhetoric. One key exam-
ple was his address to the UK House of Commons on 8 March 2022 in which he called
up Winston Churchill’s legendary speech in June 1940 after the evacuation of Allied
troops from Dunkirk to create a parallel between the war in Ukraine and Second World
War – thus working against Putin’s claim that the Russian goal was the denazification
of Ukraine. The specific reference to Churchill can be easily detected in Zelensky’s
speech when he states, ‘We will not give up, and we will not lose. We will fight till the
end – at sea, in the air, we will continue fighting for our land whatever the cost. We
will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets’. Indeed, the Second
World War functions across this volume as a powerful point of reference and a site of
origin for discussions relating to the navigation of borders, the Cold War and its bina-
ries of East and West, postcolonial movements and the collapse of the British Empire,
and the European dictatorships consolidated (Spain) and established (Hungary) in the
post-War era.
2 See, for example, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris’s (2023) reflections on this
trend.
3 For comprehensive overviews of the museum, see Bennett 1995, 2017.
 Introduction 19

4 It is worth contrasting Hicks’ comment of the 2020s as ‘decade of the returns’ with UN-
HCR’s designation of 1990s as the decade of repatriation – responsible ethical repatria-
tion that takes into consideration the rights of refugees (Fredricksson and Mougne 1994);
this shift of focus from political subjects to objects merits closer consideration.

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1
STAGING THE STORY OF A PEOPLE
The Politics of Co-Performance at the National
Museum of African American History and Culture

Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

On September 24, 2016, The National Museum of African American History and
Culture (NMAAHC) opened in Washington, D.C. With an opening ceremony led
by President Barack Obama and an ocean of visitors wanting to experience the
long-awaited site, the NMAAHC was nothing short of a cultural feat.1 The mu-
seum featured exhibitions on historical markers and events such as enslavement,
the tragic murder of Emmett Till, sit-in counters, Chuck Berry’s iconic red Cadil-
lac, among other significant artifacts and materials in African American history.
It is structured to reflect a progress narrative of African American life, beginning
with the hold of a slave ship to contemporary narratives of black ‘success’. Draw-
ing from black performance theory, black feminism, and our own lived realities as
African American people, we query: What does it mean to be stanchioned off from
black history? To gaze upon it from behind a sheet of glass, to be both in intimate
contact with but also deliberately siphoned off from it?
These questions continued to preoccupy us as we both visited and revisited the
NMAAHC individually and together.2 Out of the numerous times we have had the
opportunity to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture
or as we have taken to calling it the ‘Blacksonian’, one sticks out in our collective
memory as illuminating what we see as the tensions of the museum. Two weeks
preceding its much anticipated theatrical release, we saw Black Panther (2018)
at the Oprah Winfrey Theater, which is housed in the museum. We had already
secured our tickets to view the film as fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
(MCU). However, upon learning that the exclusive event would include not only
an early screening of the film but also a panel with Ryan Coogler, the film’s direc-
tor, alongside some of the folks involved in the film’s process, we jumped at the
opportunity to attend. Following a series of mishaps (sold-out tickets, persistent

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-2
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Staging the Story of a People 23

phone calls), we were finally able to solidify our attendance. At the event, there was
a predominantly black audience who were just as excited as we were. We felt that
this was the ideal way to experience the film for the first time.
Black Panther was a significant cultural moment within the United States, par-
ticularly for people of the African diaspora. It is both a celebration and contestation
for black people. As the first film in the commercially and critically successful
MCU to feature a majority cast of black actors, the possibilities of what this repre-
sentation could mean for the future of black film in Hollywood were incalculable.
However, many were also skeptical of the fraught politics of Black Panther – from
its alleged homogenization of African culture to its blatant nationalism that ap-
peared to further the diasporic divide between Africans and African Americans.3
Much like Black Panther, then, the NMAAHC attempts to toe the line between a
project of American patriotism and contending with the histories of anti-blackness.
A part of the Smithsonian museum conglomerate, the NMAAHC is always already
entangled with American nationalism.
As we experienced this film, we were forced to reckon with how we were in-
terpellated into these projects. Could we as African American queer people disrupt
these projects? Or was the space of the museum curated in a way that invited per-
formance, but only if and when it aligned with the goals of the museum? Black per-
formance theorist Brandi Wilkins Catanese reminds us, ‘Museums are inherently
performative institutions, affecting the narratives and ontologies that they purport
merely to commemorate’ (Catanese 2007: 93). Performance, then, becomes an
operative strategy employed by museums to articulate a legible narrative of the
histories that it attempts to capture. We are reminded here of E. Patrick Johnson’s
contention that blackness ‘is a simulacrum until it is practiced – i.e. performed’
(2006: 446). Johnson complicates this notion slightly, adding – following black
cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott – ‘blackness offers a way to rethink performance
theory by forcing it to ground itself in praxis, especially within the context of a white
supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, homophobic society’ (2006: 446). By establish-
ing the NMAAHC as a ‘black’ space, blackness becomes attached to a set of mate-
rials located within the institution and, thus, performance is the embodied practices
that accompany the engagement with said materials. Patrons of the NMAAHC,
regardless of their own cultural identity, are asked to engage with the artifacts and
histories of African American people with a lack of specificity to how their own
identitarian location affects how one responds to and engages with the histories
held within the museum. In this engagement, we contend that co-performance
is a strategy for investigating both the superstructure of the museum and the po-
tential for embodiment to challenge that structure. In the course of this chapter,
we examine three artifacts within the museum – the hold of the ship, the replica
slave cabin, and Emmett Till’s memorial – in order to wrestle with the politics and
potential of co-performance to capture the paradox of institutionalizing African
American history.
24 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

The Dramaturgy of Co-Performance, or How to Do Things

with Bodies
Billed by Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director, as ‘America’s story […]
for all Americans’, we view the NMAAHC as a ripe space for exploring the politics
of co-performance. Recognizing the institution of the museum as a highly curated
space, alongside the palpable nationalism of the Smithsonian institutions that the
NMAAHC is built upon, we argue that co-performance offers an efficacious frame-
work for navigating what we see as the dichotomy of the museum’s mission to
foreground ‘Americanness’ and the embodied experience of visiting the space.4 The
interactive exhibits in the NMAAHC invite visitors to become what Dwight Con-
quergood calls ‘co-performers’ in their exploration of African American history.
Conquergood writes: ‘The power dynamic of the research situation changes when
the ethnographer moves from the gaze of the distanced and detached observer to the
intimate involvement and engagement of “coactivity” or co-performance with his-
torically situated, named, “unique individuals”’ (2006: 359). Here, we understand
Conquergood’s definition of co-performance as requiring an individual to shift from
the distant and detached observer to an intimately involved and engaged performer.
Co-performance raises the individual stakes for each witness, encouraging audi-
ences to move from simply spectators to active participants. In this chapter, we
expand upon Conquergood’s original ethnographic context to encompass the visual
and embodied lexicons of the museum. In so doing, we argue that co-performance
is a productive concept to frame our experiences of the Blacksonian because it at-
tunes our attention to the way the curation both works on our bodies and the way
our bodies work on it. In doing so, we are aware that this term is not neutral and
that it carries histories, contexts, and cultural memories that can problematize its us-
age, which we will turn to in the last section. This chapter looks at the relevance of
co-performance as a strategy for African Americans to make, remake, and unmake
prescriptive narratives of blackness that are located within the NMAAHC. Part of
these prescriptions fall into what we see as the museum’s dramaturgy.
Dramaturgy, as both a theory and a practice, is ultimately concerned with the
relationship between the textual and the embodied. Just as theatre is about how a
given text is taken from the page to the stage, so, too, does the museum wrestle
with this same consideration. However, dramaturgy also considers the fraught re-
lationship between intentionality and impact. This deep dramaturgical understand-
ing brings to mind the work of African American theatre scholar and practicing
dramaturg, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, and what she calls ‘activating the asterisk’.
Carpenter explains this concept as ‘a mandate and a multifaceted methodology that
charges one to have a f[i]erce awareness of inside/outside audiences, the politics of
inclusion/exclusion, and the dramaturgy of intentionality’ (2018: 137). Examining
this dramaturgy of intentionality using rapper Jay-Z’s song and video, ‘The Story
of O.J.’, and his usage of racial epithets, Carpenter explores the multiple inten-
tions and contestations of how Jay-Z uses the n-word as well as the intentions and
impacts of his references to harmful stereotypes of Jewish people. In so doing,
 Staging the Story of a People 25

Carpenter is clear that dramaturgy can be used as a tool to consider the subjec-
tive experience of any narrative – be it play, song, or museum – in interrogating
the impact of creative choices. Following Carpenter, we examine the NMAAHC’s
intentionality to generate a celebratory narrative of African American history and
culture and the real, material impact of how that narrative is performed. We, like
Carpenter, activate the museum’s asterisk by challenging and critiquing its nation-
alist project while also understanding its clear intentions in uplifting the invisible
and erased narratives of African American contributions.
We consider the museum to demonstrate what Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita
Gonzalez refer to as ‘a palpable black familiar’, which they describe as ‘the micro-
economics of gesture that cohere in black performance’ (DeFrantz and Gonzalez
2014: 8). In so doing, we argue that the NMAAHC is a site that invites a familiar
corporeal grammar that is recognized as black performance culture, but specifi-
cally rendered within artifacts and materials. This does not mean that there is a
singular black experience in the museum, as we realize that nation, culture, gender,
and language, among other identities, shape one’s own performance in the space.
Following DeFrantz and Gonzalez, we argue that black performance can manifest
without the presence of black bodies, while also noting the importance of black-
ness (‘black sensibilities, black expressive practices, and black people’) to these
enactments. We suggest here that the NMAAHC is a site where the pliability of
performance and blackness is present, thus fashioning various possible encounters
among bodies, objects, and space.
The museum, like performance, relies on a process that infuses symbols with
meaning. This conscious meaning-making is not unidirectional from creator to
spectator, but rather multi-directional, allowing spectators to infuse their own in-
terpretations that may run counter to the intended message. Performance becomes
a viable approach to read the museum because of its focus on the body and how it
moves within space. The embodied experience of the visitor becomes primary to
navigating the museum, as dance and performance theorist Melissa Blanco Borelli
reminds us, the ‘body becomes a tool, vehicle, site, and example that demonstrates
its active position in culture, destabilizing popularly held notions of it as a passive
receptacle of culture’ (2016: 16). To Borelli’s point, the body offers new ways to
consider how black people who have had limited mobility within the United States
employ their body to subvert commonly accepted prescriptions of our history. We
recognize that embodiment must be primary to any analysis of a museum because
of its reliance on the engaged, subjective co-performer.

Locating the NMAAHC: The Political Complexity of the

Nation’s Capital
The importance of the National Museum of African American History and Cul-
ture’s sitedness cannot be overstated. Located on Washington D.C.’s Constitu-
tion Avenue, the museum itself sits right on the National Mall, which includes
iconic monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Capitol, and the
26 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

White House. It is also surrounded by other Smithsonian museums, including

the National Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, and
the Museum of the American Indian, to name a few. Close to the building is also the
infamous Tidal Basin, a popular D.C. tourist attraction due to the cherry-blossom-
lined paths that can be seen in early spring. Here, then, through the museum’s location
and its relationship to other institutions in the area, the NMAAHC is geographically
folded into a national project of Americanness.
Returning to Catanese, who writes that space is ‘a register of power’ that ‘in-
vests buildings with memory and meaning’ (2007: 91), the NMAAHC’s location in
Washington, D.C. is one that is imbued with a distinct cultural memory. According
to the museum’s website, a large part of its significance is due to its association
with particular historical figures. Being on the National Mall puts it in close prox-
imity to memorials and monuments celebrating people such as Thomas Jefferson,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, ‘whose con-
tributions to African American history and culture are told in the museum’ (‘The
Building’). Notably, only one of these figures, Martin Luther King, Jr., is African
American, which further leads us to question who this institution is for and why as
well as how historical ‘greatness’ is codified through objects such as memorials.
But beyond the American project that is embedded in the museum’s intentional-
ity, Washington, D.C. has a storied history for African American people. Outside
of the scope of the museum being under the Smithsonian umbrella, we find that
the specificity of Washington, D.C. is critical to understanding the politics of co-
performance within the space.
In 1957, D.C. was the first place in the United States to become majority black,
the reasoning behind its famous nickname of ‘Chocolate City’ (Bump 2021). As
most places in what is now known as the United States, Washington, D.C. is a
product of Indigenous genocide. Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove
identify D.C.’s Anacostia River as ‘the first racial struggles in the area we now call
the nation’s capital’ due to Native tribes of the Nacostines, the Piscataway, and
Powhatan contestations over the geographic space (2017: 7, 8). After the English
colonists arrived and swindled the Powhatan out of their land, thus began the colo-
nial takeover of what would become Washington, D.C. Though not a linear history,
the colonization of this area led to enslaved Africans being forcibly removed from
their homes and brought to the United States. Commissioned by George Washing-
ton, Pierre Charles L’Enfant devised a plan for the city that was rigid and segre-
gated. One place, LeDroit Park, defied such expectations.
A few metro stops and one will be right in the heart of black life in the D.C.
metro area. Places such as LeDroit Park and U Street showcased then and now
the deep roots of black culture that happened within the D.C. area. D.C., after
the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the so-called end to the institution of
slavery, became a hub for rich African American life. It attracted a bevy of the Af-
rican American intelligentsia, including Anna Julia Cooper, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
 Staging the Story of a People 27

and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Ralph Bunche. Many of
the aforementioned people lived in the famous LeDroit Park, which is near How-
ard University. Howard, as a premier Historically Black College and University
(HBCU), has a legacy that surpasses its home of Washington, D.C. but is specifi-
cally enhanced by its position there. Black theatre and performance culture also
have a particularly resonant history in the District, from the historical theatres on U
Street to the founding of theatres such as the D.C. Black Repertory Theatre and the
African Continuum Theatre Company. Black life, history, and culture are deeply
embedded within the history of the nation’s capital.5 This suggests that there is a
contradiction between the importance of Washington D.C.’s strong black history
and its location on the National Mall firmly situating the museum within a national
project of Americanness. We see this as a reflection of the contradictions that exist
in the museum itself and the complexities inherent to African American life in the
United States, which are explored through the NMAAHC’s staging of slavery.

Started from the Bottom…: ‘Slavery & Freedom’ Interrogating

the Progress Narrative
Architecturally, the NMAAHC’s shape is inevitably a part of its dramaturgy. By
this, we mean that the literal shape of the museum itself supports its mission to il-
lustrate the story of African American life. Lead designer David Adjaye and lead
architect Phillip Frelon, both of whom won a global competition to find the mu-
seum’s creative team, generated a shape that pulls from many influences and in-
spirations in order to design the building’s structure. According to the museum’s
website, the building itself blends elements of Greco-Roman design, Yoruban art,
the American South, and the Caribbean (‘The Building’). This blend of European
artistic oeuvre with elements of diasporic blackness speaks to how forced displace-
ment necessitated African American culture’s quilting of various global cultures.
The museum’s narrative begins, as to be expected, with that of chattel slavery.
Visitors are encouraged to begin the museum at the Slavery & Freedom gallery,
which is located on the museum’s basement floor. To access this particular exhibit,
one must take an elevator that fits about 20 people, 70 feet down. As the elevator
is descending, visitors watch a timeline scroll past them as they plunge back into
the year 1400. The elevators stop and visitors find themselves instantly transported
back in time to a colonial America. Visitors step out and, thus, begins ‘Slavery &
Freedom, 1400–1877’.6 The exhibit begins with a 2005 quote by John Hope Frank-
lin that reads: ‘We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth’. The ‘truth’ in question is the
history of slavery in the United States and the important role it plays in the land-
scape of United States history and the construction of African American identity. It
is split in two: the Atlantic world ‘before’ the advent of chattel slavery and ‘after’
the slave trade began to capture the capitalist engine that valued profit and power
over the lives of people.
28 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

What we wish to interrogate here, alongside the politics of co-performance,

is the museum’s reliance on a progress narrative and the ensuing dissonance that
happens through performance. Primarily, our understanding of the progress nar-
rative derives from work by philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who, in his essay ‘Narra-
tive Time’, critiques and interrogates the link between narrativity and temporality.
Ricoeur writes: ‘both the theory of history and the theory of fictional narratives
seem to take it for granted that whenever there is time, it is always a time laid out
chronologically, a linear time, defined by a succession of instants’ (1980: 171).
As he is specifically discussing the problem in the telling of history, we find his
critique of chronology to be resonant with our own interest in dissecting time as
progressing linearly and that linearity as being something associated with positiv-
ity and growth. We also draw our understandings from queer theorists who critique
the ‘progress narrative’ particularly as it pertains to rights-based discourse, rep-
resentation, and visibility.7 We recognize that African American life and culture
deserve to be recognized on the grand level that the NMAAHC has acquired and
that this visibility serves as a reminder of all that black people have contributed
to the making and sustaining of this country. However, we question the linearity
with which the museum presents this history and for whom this history is being
displayed and why.
In the design of the Slavery & Freedom gallery, visitors are meant to notice the
tightness and narrowness of the basement floor, which eventually opens out. De-
voted to capturing the experience of the hold of the slave ship, in this conscientious
architectural choice, bodies are choreographed to move through the space. Visitors’
movements take on added meaning as they become aware of their restricted mobil-
ity in the tight quarters, but we also are attuned to the other bodies that surround us.
This design tactic requires not only careful consideration of the other people who
we are sharing space with but also shifts the museum experience from a solitary act
into a communal one.
During our visits to the museum, we found ourselves intrigued by the bounda-
ries set on our embodiment due to this exhibit’s architecture. In her separate ex-
perience, Leticia recalls that the space itself was packed so tightly with so many
bodies that it was hard to move, causing her to want to rush past this portion of
the museum. By contrast, Jordan’s first experience of the exhibit was that it was
not as constricting because there were not as many people within it, and this al-
lowed them to loiter in the space longer. While we recognize that these are only
two possible outcomes in a host of responses by visitors, we argue that these two
experiences speak to the politics of co-performance. Here, the design tactics invite
us to make conscientious decisions that require us to retract our gaze and reflect
on our own affective experiences. This recognition of our own bodies calls for us
to shift our engagement with the space and artifacts from merely one of consump-
tion. Instead, we must wrestle with the bodies in the space that share it with us, but
also acknowledge the hidden bodies whose material objects touched. It is in the
 Staging the Story of a People 29

Slavery & Freedom gallery whereby dramaturgy and co-performance are solidified
as co-constitutive entities that shape the museum; to achieve the dramaturgical in-
tention of the exhibit – which is to acknowledge the phenomenological experience
of slavery – one must have the ability to perform and from that ability comes one’s
ability to co-perform. There is a space set apart from the videos, material objects,
photographs, and primary sources in the exhibit that is deliberately putting all of its
dramaturgical intentions to specific use.
For the most part, the Slavery & Freedom gallery follows the usual logics of a
museum space. Most of the material objects are protected by glass cases, creating
the primary mode of engagement to be a visual one. This is disrupted in the space
dedicated to honoring the Middle Passage set apart from the rest of the exhibit in
a darkened alcove that uses the sonic and the visual to create an immersive expe-
rience for the visitor. Once inside, the visitor might notice that the ground below
them has shifted; no longer are they standing on gray concrete, but dark wood
paneling as the repetition of ocean waves hits their eardrums. Similar to the rest of
the basement design, the room creates a feeling of claustrophobia (from which Jor-
dan admittedly suffers). Even though we were the only people in the space on our
shared visit, we remarked on the lack of ability to turn and see with just two people.
The intention of this immersion is not to recreate; it is clear that this is mere
fabrication as sounds from the rest of the exhibit seep into the room. While mu-
seum specialist for the NMAAHC, Mary N. Elliot, notes that the goal is to invite
acknowledgment and not replicate the experience of enslaved peoples; it is hard
not to make that correlation (Hobson 2022). The room’s lack of clear markers or
framing mechanisms leaves it up to the visitor to deduce the meaning of this expe-
rience. Moreover, markedly different than the rest of the space, the disorientation
that one might feel in the hull of a ship is an organizing principle. Here, perfor-
mance is merely a tool for representation, but performance can never be deduced to
just that, it is also involved in the projects of creation, enactment, and transmission.
This particular experience of this portion of the Slavery & Freedom gallery
brings to mind ongoing debates around representation, especially within black
critical theory, theatre studies, and performance studies. Charlotte Canning and
Thomas Postlewait reflect on this debate specifically through the lens of perfor-
mance historiography, contending that:

[a] representation, apparently, is simultaneously a facsimile and a simulacrum, a

copy and a counterfeit. This polarity seems to be the case with any discourse or
code of representation we use (such as languages, drawings, and photographs).
The representation makes a show – a deceptive performance – of the original,
as if the reality of the thing itself is possessed by a disruptive Doppelgänger.
The same thing is delivered as another thing. The historical representation seeks
to be an objective image of the thing itself, yet it cannot avoid being, in some
capacity, a subjective distortion of that thing. Even the most objective code
30 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

articulates a subjective perspective or formal order. If not similitude, the histo-

rian aims for verisimilitude in the representation of the past. Of course, the aim
may be easy to articulate, but the method of achieving such a representation is
difficult. The aim of telling the truth about past events is a necessary first princi-
ple of historical inquiry, but whose truth, what truth, which truth?
(2010: 11)

We quote this at length as we find Canning and Postlewait’s provocations to be

relevant for interrogating what we see as the complicated politics surrounding the
Slavery & Freedom gallery. As it aims to create a direct link between the past and
the present through the body, we are left wondering about the effects of the repre-
sentation. The critical difference is that as co-performers in the museum, we have
the option to snap back into our present, in a way that the histories we touch do not –
they are captured and static, unable to speak on their own behalf, they are contained
by the meaning of the curators and co-performers who deduce significance from
them. While the NMAAHC does not require that you enter into a relationship of
co-performance for one’s entire visit, the interactive exhibits do. Visitors need not
be aware of co-performance; we argue that the museum’s dramaturgy still compels
them to co-perform. Entering into the hold of the ship, for example, the visitor
is already becoming a co-performer through simply experiencing the exhibit and
subsequently making meaning in that space. On the other end, we understand that
co-performance can be a source of personal agency in the NMAAHC, which we
wielded in our own visits to the site. In the curation of the interactive exhibits, the
museum invites one to enter into the agreement – while you may choose not to
interact with these experiential components of the NMAAHC, the active choice to
avoid these exhibits is still a performance that shapes and asserts an individual’s
position.
Canning and Postlewait’s inquiry about ‘whose truth, what truth, which truth’
needs to be prioritized in historiographic work and this leads us to question repre-
sentation and reproduction from the perspective of empathy. To consider the Slav-
ery & Freedom gallery’s intention to foster a physical environment that replicates
the conditions of the slave ship and its constrictions on the body, we look to the
work of cultural historian Saidiya Hartman. In her groundbreaking text, Scenes of
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hart-
man interrogates what she refers to as ‘the precariousness of empathy’. Beginning
the text with a provocative and rigorous critique of Frederick Douglass’s recount-
ing of watching Aunt Hester’s beating and the graphic descriptions that accompany
it, Hartman challenges and implicates the authorial intent to re-present the violence
(in this case, Douglass) in the spectacle and asks us to ‘look elsewhere’ in order to
‘defamiliarize the familiar’ (1997: 11). Hartman’s critique of Douglass lies in ques-
tions around the efficacy of reproducing harm. Why must one re-produce and name
unspeakable horrors and retraumatize in an effort to empathize? This interrogation
of empathy continues in Hartman’s discussion of John Rankin, a white abolitionist
 Staging the Story of a People 31

and minister, and his own narrative where he imagines himself and his family as
slaves in order to create empathy. Of this, Hartman writes:

[B]y exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses,
thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvert-
ently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel
slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much
due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility
of the captive body.
(1997: 19)

In other words, Hartman explains that by Rankin surrogating the black body of
the enslaved person with his and his family’s white bodies, the violence of racial
terror is made ‘visible and intelligible’ (Hartman 19). This is problematic because
it assumes that the knowledge of the horror against black people is not enough;
the violence is only legible if it is attached to whiteness. The ability to recognize
unspeakable terror outside of one’s own experience is the exact reason as to why
Hartman characterizes empathy as precarious. We bring up Hartman’s provoca-
tions around reproduction and empathy to further question the dramaturgical inten-
tionality and whether co-performance itself is really enough to push back against
these narratives. As the museum itself seeks to consider American history from
the black perspective, we ask: Who is this all truly for? What good might it do
to re-produce an experience of slavery for a black person? As African Americans
ourselves, the embodied experience of slavery lives within us so much so that the
recreation of the scenario of the slave ship in the museum has the potential to fa-
cilitate trauma on our experience, as it did there. Co-performing in the space, then,
facilitated an intimate experience of slavery. In our own encounters with the hold
of the ship, questions of empathy kept coming up between us. Notably, the exhibit
does not house a lot of artifacts that sit behind glass or have placards that provide
historical context. Therefore, we recognize that the choice to sit in this exhibit – as
we did – is one that is active. What keeps someone there? Why would they stay?
We lingered in the space for a moment, noticing that others chose to move through
it rather quickly. Our co-performances allowed us the agency to choose to be still
and soak in the experiences that our ancestors had during American slavery and
ponder the histories of violence that led us to that moment.

Climbing Alongside History: ‘Defending Freedom, Defining

Freedom’
The Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom gallery leans into the performance of
history and allows intimate contact with the artifacts. Unlike the Freedom Now
gallery, visitors are invited to touch, interact, and perform alongside the objects and
moments in history. While stanchion and glass still protect most of the artifacts, the
32 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

NMAAHC stages encounters between the museum visitor and museum objects,
which are the focus of this section.
When ascending from the ground floor Freedom & Slavery gallery, visitors
walk up a ramp and approach a large black panel that reads, ‘Defending Freedom,
Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation, 1877–1968’. Marking a transition for
the visitor, the museum attempts to toggle between the immediate past/present of
slavery, while also asserting that the hardships faced during the era of segregation
changed the United States for the better. As the visitor moves closer to the panel,
the smaller script comes into view, and the visitor is confronted with their first
decision – do they stop and read further, or do they move swiftly past it in favor of
other artifacts? The spatial location of the panel invites the visitor to become a co-
performer in the exhibit. To enter the rest of the exhibit, we must make a conscious
decision about how to interact with the panel. The visitor is not detached from this
choice. They cannot simply continue to walk straight past it but must choose to re-
direct their body to brush up against a replica slave cabin directly behind the panel.
This placement of the slave cabin is not circumstantial; it is an effort by the curators
to capture the fraughtness of African American history and memory. The inclusion
of the slave cabin in this portion of the museum, rather than the Freedom & Slavery
gallery, is a notable reminder of the remnants of slavery that shaped 1877–1968,
but they also continue to shape the present.
If one does stop to read, the visitor enters further into a dialogic relationship
with the curator’s intentions. The paragraph frames the historical moment that this
section of the museum hopes to illustrate as ‘hopeful and disheartening’ for African
Americans, while also explicating new resistances that African Americans faced
in their pursuit of citizenship. The paragraph concludes: ‘Through their struggle,
they challenged the nation to live up to its ideals of freedom and equality’. This
concluding statement displaces the African American museum visitor by anticipat-
ing the non-black subject. It is not ‘our’ struggle, but ‘their[s]’. The NMAAHC
eschews the specificity of African American witnessing to be subsumed under a
larger national rhetoric. This aligns with Faun Rice’s categorization of the museum
as embodying a space of ‘new integration […] wherein all Americans can see their
country through the lens of the African American experience’ (2017: 250). This
new integration model displaces the African American museum visitor for a gen-
eral subject who is not racialized as black, thus potentially severing the kinship ties
that the African American visitor might feel with the collections of the museums.
On our visits to the museum, we questioned the rhetorical distancing. We articu-
lated our inability to separate ourselves from our connection to this history as we
ran our hands across the wood of the replica slave cabin. As one of the few artifacts
that is not stanchioned off, it entices the visitor to quite literally touch history. The
ability to engage directly with the cabin and to walk inside it asks us to recall our
earlier experiences in the tight pathway of the ground floor of the museum. As
co-performers, we recognize the fraughtness of the process; the slave cabin is a
fabricated replica that is a mere stage prop for us and other visitors. But the lack
 Staging the Story of a People 33

of authenticity is not unimportant; embodiment plays a crucial role in establish-

ing a connection between the historical moment and the present. We are reminded
here of cultural theorist Alison Landsberg’s idea of the museum as a ‘transferential
space’ where it ‘impose[s] a corporeal, experiential logic [that] might be exactly
the inverse of the psychoanalytic process’ (2004: 135). To this idea, Landsberg
suggests that though a visitor did not live through the event being staged, their cor-
poreal relationship to its reproduction creates a real experience even in the artifice
of the museum space. Therefore, we agree with Landsberg – the visitor becomes
primary to their experience, building their personal repertoire. These embodied
acts that occur in the NMAAHC become a location that can stage histories, sustain
colonial power, and where the individual can participate in the creation of meaning.
For Diana Taylor, the archive is insufficient in capturing the myriad of ways that
meaning is made. Therefore, Taylor proposes that the archive must be considered in
tandem with embodied acts, known as the repertoire (2003: 19–22). The repertoire
(performance) plays a role in enacting memory within the NMAAHC. Perhaps the
site where performance is most heavily leaned on in the NMAAHC is the exhibit ded-
icated to Emmett Till.8 Till’s casket was donated to the museum to be preserved and
refurbished in 2005 after his remains were exhumed and reinterred. In 2009, a com-
memoration ceremony was then held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in
Chicago, Illinois, the same church where Till’s 1955 funeral was held, which found-
ing director Lonnie Bunch III attended (Jones 2017). Bunch notes that his attendance
at this commemorative event served as the inspiration for Till’s exhibit, as he hoped
his re-creation would be able to capture the spirit of the gathering (Jones 2017).
Performance is the organizing framework for this exhibition, employing theatri-
cal techniques such as set construction, sound, and projections to offer an affective
engagement with Till. The exhibit is tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the
rest of the museum. Intimate contact with Till is curated by the museum as an em-
ployee of the museum stands on guard outside the exhibition, allowing only a few
visitors at a time. Visitors enter a small corridor located in a corner enclave of the
museum’s second floor, where they find themselves in a small room divided by a
wall that creates separation between the displays of the coffin and contextualizing
videos and photos. Sonically, the exhibit is somber, despite the competing sounds
of Mamie Till’s describing the body of her son after his attack and Mahalia Jackson
singing ‘Amazing Grace’.
Black studies theorist Christina Sharpe provides two terms that we find useful in
engaging with this exhibit at the NMAAHC: Black annotation and Black redaction.
Sharpe writes:

Black annotation and Black redaction are ways to make Black life visible, if
only momentarily, through the optic of the door. Black annotation and redaction
meet the Black anagrammatical and the failure of words and concepts to hold in
and on Black flesh.
(2016: 123)
34 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

Sharpe’s description of black annotation and black redaction questions vision itself
as she invites us to think about what is seen and how other logics infiltrate our ways
of seeing. To this point, black annotation becomes a strategy for adding or high-
lighting other grammars of being that exist within the site, while black redaction
exercises the dominant logics to push Black subjectivity to the forefront. In the case
of Till’s memorial, black redaction is utilized as an intentional practice of removing
Till’s mangled face from the view, destabilizing its spectacularized nature. While
a photograph of Till’s face after his attack is positioned inside the coffin, visitors
must stand on their toes to catch a partial view. On the other hand, the memorial
also offers annotations via Mamie Till’s voice and supplemental documentation by
other civil rights leaders to offer visitors a way to think about the metadata that ex-
ists in images and performances. At the same time, we are denied personal archival
remnants of our visit to Till’s memorial.
Despite performance organizing the exhibition, the staging of Emmett Till’s
memorial is not meant to be meta-theatrical; visitors are encouraged to stay quiet
and photography is not allowed inside the exhibit. Visitors are asked to join in the
performance of the funeral gathering, processing past the child-size coffin. The
exhibit captures the ephemerality of performance as memory is only what the visi-
tor can leave with since photography and video is restricted. Even in revisiting our
notes on Till’s memorial, it fails us. The details are not quite clear. Memory and
embodied performance meet to redirect the co-performer to the fraughtness of the
museum project as there is no redemption story to be found in the murder of a
14-year-old black boy. As Kinshasa Holman Conwill, the founding deputy director
of the museum, stated in response to displaying the casket: ‘What this museum is
going to do is make sure that America remembers that, at one point – and unfor-
tunately some of that still goes on – we killed our children’ (Thompson 2016).
Co-performance, in this instance, is facilitated through allowing visitors to grieve,
mourn, and heal from this violent history. Though our memories fail us of the spe-
cifics of the exhibit due to its limitations around documentation, we remember the
effect it left us with: a profound sense of loss.

Conclusion: The White Supremacist Intrusion and the Other Side

of Co-Performance
If, as we have hoped to argue in the course of this chapter, co-performance has the
potential to make and re-make a space through embodiment, then it is not always
in ways that are supportive of the black radical project we sought in our embodied
experience with the museum. It is not rare to be accosted with red ‘Make America
Great Again (MAGA)’ baseball caps, often worn by pre-teens and teenagers visit-
ing the museum with what appears to be their school group. The hats, which feature
a slogan of 45th president of the United States Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential
campaign, now infamously symbolize and encapsulate a fidelity to white cisheter-
opatriarchy, a denial of black and minoritized oppression in U.S. history, a refusal
 Staging the Story of a People 35

to engage with the continuing struggle for civil rights, and a glorification of white
supremacist cultural values. The presence and frequency of these hats in the ex-
hibits and in the entrance of the NMAAHC could not have been anticipated when
the museum opened in 2016, but now they, too, appear to be permanent fixtures
among the other exhibits of racial violence. Unlike the KKK hood or the shackles,
the ‘Make America Great Again’ hats are not static; they walk with us through each
gallery, and, if we are lucky enough, we only encounter them as we enter or exit the
front entrance of the building.
Each time that we have visited the museum, we have come across these symbols
of white supremacy that connote an allegiance to the very histories that created and
sustained institutions such as enslavement, segregation, mass incarceration, and
other forms of anti-black violence. The intention, either conscious or unconscious,
by the wearer, is to exercise their own counter-performance as a means to remind
black folks that this history is still all too present, despite us physically ascending from
the basement to the main floor in an assumed progress narrative. Seeing these hats,
worn mostly by young folks, reminds us that co-performance is also a performative
based upon its conditions. If a person wearing a MAGA hat stands beside an Afri-
can American visitor in the Emmett Till exhibit, for example, the African American
visitor’s intention to experience healing is disrupted by the presence of this white
supremacist symbol. It can conjure the feeling of danger and risk for the African
American visitor; it has a different meaning altogether. What does it mean to think
of something like the MAGA hat wearer as the oppressor to Till as a victim of white
violence? Even in these sacred spaces, co-performance serves as a tactic across the
political spectrum and shifts dramaturgical meanings. While our co-performance
with material objects and other people might activate an asterisk to the narrative of
progress that the museum’s ethos dearly clings to, it can be insufficient in counter-
ing the antagonism one might feel when confronted with white supremacy.
So, what does the co-performance afford us in the space of the museum? We
suggest that co-performance is at its best when it operates on the affective registers
moving the museum from a space of commemoration that is stagnant and unaf-
fecting to a site that is constantly changing and adapting according to the bodies
that occupy it. In this way co-performance regards the entanglement of historical
logics and memory as an opportunity that can be reconstructed and engender new
understandings about our past, present, and future. Our own co-performance with
the NMAAHC illuminates how the mission of the museum is always already in
turmoil with competing symbols and logics, and perhaps, these conditions create
the opportunity for a memory based in affect to rise alongside a ‘truthful’ history.

Notes
1 After numerous proposals dating back to 1970 to establish a national museum of African
American history and culture, the NMAAHC was established by an Act of Congress on
December 16, 2003. Thirteen years later, the museum opened to the public on September
24, 2016.
36 Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley

2 The first time that Leticia visited the museum was during the historic opening weekend
and returned to the museum twice with her family when they were in Washington DC to
visit. Jordan’s first time was at the Black Panther screening, but has visited the museum
twice with Leticia after their initial visit.
3 For more on this particular discussion, please see Robert A. Saunders (2019), ‘(Profitable)
Imaginaires of Black Power: The Popular and Political Geographies of Black Panther’.
4 We understand the ideas of ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ to be problematic as they often
are in services of imperialism, colonialism, and empire. To produce nationalist narra-
tives is to promote a superiority over colonized communities and to advance a patriotism
means to perform complicity under these projects. For more nuanced articulations of
nationalism and patriotism in American contexts, see: Karen Shimakawa (2003) National
Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, Durham, NC: Duke University Press;
Gretchen Murphy (2010) Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the
Problem of the Color Line; and Riché Richardson (2021) Emancipation’s Daughters: Re-
imagining Black Femininity and the National Body, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
5 For more information regarding Black theatre history in Washington, D.C., see Briana
Thomas (2021) Black Broadway in Washington D.C., Arcadia: Arcadia Publishing as well
as the transmedia, digital humanities project, Black Broadway on U, curated by Shellée
M. Haynesworth, which is accessed here: https://blackbroadwayonu.com/.
6 Though this exhibition is titled ‘Slavery and Freedom’, we would like to note that the ex-
hibit encompasses historical and temporal context that is pertinent to understanding how
slavery came to exist in the United States. US chattel slavery ‘officially’ began in 1619;
however, the Slavery and Freedom exhibit focuses on colonial America and establishes
the global network of the transatlantic slave trade.
7 For more on queer approaches to interrogating the progress narrative, see Jasbir Paur
(2017) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press and Dean Spade (2015) Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical
Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8 Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy who was murdered in 1955 while on a trip to visit
family in Mississippi after he was accused of whistling at a white woman.

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Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press.
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2
THEATRICALITY & SPECTACLE
The Museum as Object

Bryce Lease

Before visiting the House of Terror, I spent a few months while residing in Bu-
dapest walking past the museum, feeling its chilly aura. The ominously shuttered
windows and awning placed at the top of the building with the two large cut-outs
of the eponymous word ‘terror’ that cast shadows on its own façade and the pe-
destrian pavement beneath distinguishes it from the other imposing and elegant
edifices on the impressive Andrássy Boulevard in central Pest, which was mod-
elled on Paris’ Champs Élysées. This offers the impression that the building still
holds the same performative register it had generated under fascist (1944–1945)
and communist regimes (1949–1989) of the twentieth century when it housed
the secret police of these political systems. This is signposted as an ‘evil’ place,
a haunted house of horrors, a building that invites you to cross the street to avoid
its encompassing aura. Although the entrance to the museum is marked by two
memorials of equivalent size that signify the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow
Cross, and the hammer and sickle of Soviet-backed communist governments, the
first document the visitor encounters while standing in a long and claustropho-
bic queue for an entrance ticket is a video that plays on repeat. The black and
white archival footage shows Mózes Mihály, a Hungarian professor specialising
in the 1956 revolution, weeping dramatically while asking, ‘One has to forgive,
no?’ While the visitor is offered no further information, Mihály’s reference to
teenagers with different or rebellious political affiliations suggests that this is an
indictment of communist terror. This impression is then solidified in the first ex-
hibitionary space that is dominated by an imposing Soviet tank in a pool of oil
and a wall of portraits of ethnic Hungarians, with the singular word ‘Áldozatok’
(victims) (Image 2.1 and 2.2).
This curatorial strategy of displaying portraits explicitly co-opts the display of
Jews within the symbolic smokestack in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-3
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 39

IMAGES 2.1 AND 2.2 The central hall of the House of Terror Museum (Budapest, Hun-
gary) with portraits of ‘victims’ and a Soviet tank in a pool of oil,
and the building as object. Photographs by Zoe Belton.

in Yad Vashem, thus creating a visible associative referent that is then denied to the
commemoration of Hungarian Jews. The commitment to exposing home-grown
Hungarian fascism and collusion with the Nazis is undermined by the establishing
frame of the museum as one of anti-Communism. I, as the visitor, am hailed as a
witness of atrocity committed through communism by communists.
I start with this museum as it opens up the primary arguments I will pursue in
this chapter through a focus on three museums. Exploring the eschewal of fascism
and the Holocaust in favour of communist terror in The House of Terror, Vilnius’
Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum
allows me to consider the fundamental question of theatricality these sites produce.
While many critics of these museums simply point to theatricality as either offering
curators the artistic means of achieving their ideological and political ambitions
or as obscuring them through imitation or spectacle, I would like to suggest that,
conversely, defining theatricality as a form of material practices and dynamic rela-
tions enables a more nuanced understanding of curatorial technique and the posi-
tioning of the spectator, while also offering new insights into the pervasive move
towards the theatricalisation of memorial museum displays. The museums can be
differentiated in their intention to retreat to nationalist frames and to inscribe anti-
Communism into the essential practice of democracy and democratic action, while
redirecting attention away from histories of fascism and anti-Semitism.
After beginning above ground, I walk downstairs to the museum’s base-
ments to demonstrate how attending to that which is under our feet reveals the
40 Bryce Lease

commemorative theatricality of these sites more explicitly than the singular focus
on their displays that puts the theatrical on trial – a process that typically fails to
differentiate between forms of media, scenography, script, immersion, and embodi-
ment, all of which are uncritically absorbed under the rubric of theatricality. In sites
of terror, it is precisely the display of authentic history that is persuasive. Basement
prison cells are often simultaneously rooms dedicated to torture: either too low to
stand up in, or too narrow to sit down, guides explain with humble solemnity how
prisoners were deprived of food or light, or hung up in cripplingly painful positions
or forced to lie in several inches of freezing cold water for hours at a time. Specta-
tors peer into these darkly lit rooms only to physically recoil or flinch with horror.
The fact that the rooms resemble theatre or horror-film sets does not undermine the
authenticity of the narrative but rather redoubles it. The affective message of the
theatrical space is: life under communism was so heinous that it bears no resem-
blance whatsoever to our own.
The binary of above and below ground is a crucial one for performances of
veneration and the hierarchisation and symbolic spatial arrangement of memory
in museum environments. In Budapest’s House of Terror and Vilnius’ Museum of
Occupations and Freedom Fights, visitors descend into the basement to discover
new or unknown knowledge. The forms of torture and imprisonment of dissidents
that took place in the basements are already ‘known’; it is the open (dirty) secret
of the regime that guaranteed the functioning of the ideological system. In all of
these museums, ‘depth’ is required and the physicalised trip downwards is key to
experiential knowledge. While in Budapest and Vilnius, I want to argue, it is the
depths humanity will go to fortify itself against difference and to defend a racist
ideology, in the Warsaw Uprising Museum the basement contains the history of
the Nazis in Warsaw and a replica of the sewage canals – which were themselves
subterranean – recasting the canal as a venerated ‘tomb’ of historical knowledge.
Through its cleansing, the visitor experiences history’s veneration, both histori-
cal time and space are thus mythified. Like Lenin’s mummy, this is death without
decay, and the bleaching of these environments bespeaks their unacknowledged
symbolic investment in honouring a version of history that reinforces the political
and ideological aims of the museums’ founders. Their theatricality, as I will argue,
exposes such investments rather than obscures them.

The House of Terror

First opened on 25 February 2002 in the months preceding a major election, the
then Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, inaugurated the House of Terror with a speech
that set the tone for its anti-Communist agenda that perfectly mirrored the Fidesz
party’s intention to produce an ultra-right-wing historical narrative of communism
as an undifferentiated period of political terror committed against the Hungarian
citizenry. As the museum director Maria Schmidt claims, in ‘60 Andràssy Boule-
vard, we found a site that, through its sinister historical experiences, was virtually
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 41

melded with the concept of terror’ (cited in Jones 2011: 98). Between the years
1944 and 1956, the building housed offices for the secret police within both fascist
and communist authoritarian political systems, as well as detentions cells where
prisoners were detained and tortured. A video of Orbán’s speech concludes the
visit to the museum, suggesting both narrative closure and the end of Hungarian
communist period and influence through the museum’s establishment. This struc-
ture supports Zsolt K. Horváth’s analysis of the museum’s teleological function,
the main aim of which is ‘the affirmation and confirmation of a political identity’
(2008: 270).
Amy Sodaro has argued that while history museums aim to ‘impart knowledge
about the past’, memorial museums are designed to ‘make visitors feel that they
have had a personal experience of the past that will shape their present moral sen-
sibility’ (2018: 25). The curators of the House of Terror were indeed invested in
affect as the primary mode of historical pedagogy, and they explicitly intended to
create a museum that defied the conventions and curatorial strategies of many his-
tory museums, which rely too heavily on text and make too little use of ‘spectacle’
that often results in boring displays that fail to ignite the interest or curiosity of
younger generations who did not live through the exhibited historical periods.1
Scenographer Attila F. Kovács, a neo avant-garde theatre maker in the 1980s, was
employed to design the permanent exhibition in collaboration with constructivist
architects László Rajk and Gábor Bachmann. As I will show, the museum (i) estab-
lishes its authenticity on the historicity of the building and its use by both fascist
and communist authorities, (ii) attempts to reproduce the outdated and problematic
aims of ethnography museums to represent cultures in their totality, and (iii) em-
ploys both theatrical spectacle and spectatorial reception into the working aims of
reproducing an anthropological frame that has been widely discredited.
Péter Apor couched one of his primary criticisms against this museum in rela-
tion to the curatorial choice not to establish any material evidence; objects on dis-
play can ‘equally be original, found, facsimile, or fictive scenery’ (2014: 329). This
argument implies that a larger collection of objects would be able to represent these
histories with less theatrical displays that allow for a seemingly self-identical in-
structional presence. I want to suggest a different but fundamental problem. Apor’s
argument goes in two different directions. On the one hand, he claims that the ‘in-
novative audiovisual technology and the abundance of spectacle simply conceal
that virtually there are no objects in the exhibition area of the House of Terror’
(ibid.: 341). However, Apor suggests precisely the opposite problem when mak-
ing a comparison between the Budapest museum and the 1932 Exhibition of the
Fascist Revolution in Mussolini’s Italy: the ‘overwhelming abundance of objects
hindered the audience from appropriately assessing the historical events displayed
in the exhibition’ (ibid.). So, it is not the number of objects – too few or too many –
that undergirds the argumentation about objects and museum display. The ob-
jects the House of Terror has collected are already mobilised to tell the decided-
upon narrative and it is unlikely that further objects would undo these ideological
42 Bryce Lease

ambitions. Indeed, the curators ‘considered their exhibition to be the critique of

historical knowledge based on objects’ (ibid.: 331). In some part, this is due to their
perception that the history they wish to communicate is poor in material evidence,
but it is more importantly connected to their interest in collective memory over
historical narrative. Apor is highly sceptical of the co-option of the epistemological
claims of memory discourses in museums such as the House of Terror, voicing his
concern that the performed display of ‘social remembering’ in the museum offers
memory as equal in authenticity to historical interpretation. Such curatorial acts of
remembering not only justify their ideological aims but also make it easy for the
past to entirely disappear within the museum’s walls.
While I value Apor’s conclusion, I also think this argument is in danger of rein-
forcing a reductive binary of history as text and memory as visual index – only in
this way is it possible to neatly separate spectacle from evidence. One only needs
to look at law courts to be reminded that evidence can be presented in spectacu-
lar form, and it is a standard practice for museums to elevate objects as evidence
through their exhibitionary display. To pit historical interpretation against visual
narrative already implicitly returns us to history as objective science and not as
narrative (historiography), while also eschewing the materiality of text itself in
museum display – that is, historical interpretation as text is also a crucial element
of visual narrative. From my perspective, it is not that memory ‘break[s] through
the concealments of the visible towards the invisible’ (Apor 2014: 339), as the
curators intend, which would position the museum as a stage; rather, I want to sug-
gest that the ‘authentic’ object is the museum itself. The aims of commemoration
are then divorced from knowledge and connected to an experience of terror. There
may indeed be ‘nothing to remember’ here and only the visualisation of a political
message, but how can we understand this in relation to theatricality as a medium?
Apor highlights the curators’ associations of the museum with the theatre, which
is described as ‘theatre-like’: ‘a theatre where the overall visual design and the
consequent emotional reactions are believed to guarantee the authenticity of the
experience of the past irrespective of the authenticity of individual objects’ (2014:
338). This is a highly fertile ground to explore further – the suggestion that ‘thea-
tre’ might guarantee authenticity. Rather than follow Apor here in his conflation
of spectacle and memory as the source of the occlusion of the historical record,
I would like to change the focus of what is being authenticated. While I agree
that memory offers a different inroad to the past than historical interpretation, we
should not lose sight of objects in the curatorial strategies that employ spectacle.
When visiting a site of terror, audiences tend to desire a particular emotional ex-
perience, a desire which can either be validated or disappointed in their experi-
ence of the space. The most fundamental change we see in this museum is the
very notion of the museum object – while an object is typically embedded in a
particular museal frame, the House of Terror’s object is inverted. The building as
object is framed from within, and it is precisely such an inversion that is theatrical.
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 43

The museum brochure advertised 60 Andrássy Boulevard as a ‘sculpture of terror’

in its establishment as a public memorial. In other words, it is not that this is a
‘theatre-like’ institution in which objects and narratives are staged like a play, but
rather that the curators have produced this space as a legitimation of visitors’ desire
to experience the ultimate object, that is, a fascination with the building itself as a
site of evil that is satisfied through affective intensification.
Theatrical displays could actually have afforded the kind of distance between
the site and the production of historical knowledge Apor and I both value if this
were not the case. Indeed, theatre has the ability to produce such critical distance
between audience and stage, but the visitor is not offered any such positionality ei-
ther spatially or conceptually. The problem then is not theatricality, and ‘spectacle’
need not be wholly condemned in the historical museum; rather, the instrumen-
talisation of spectacle towards political ends in this museum actively erases the
distance between audience and stage.
At the conclusion of the visit, one has to take a lift that moves deliberately
slowly to the bottom of the building. The creeping passage of the lift produces
queues and crowd jams in a space devoted to the display of religious intoler-
ance and martyrdom, a section of the museum that visitors might otherwise hurry
through. This imposed wait generated a split feeling of dread and eager anticipation
about the basement itself. The experience is not unlike waiting in a long queue for a
roller-coaster ride, which simultaneously produces pleasure and physical anxiety –
the aim of such a wait is to intensify the amusement, delight, and shock of the
experience. Once inside the lift, a former attendant at executions gives testimony
on a flat screen, describing an encounter that apparently occurred within the base-
ment. The testimony starts abruptly behind the visitor, which compelled me to turn
uncomfortably in a crowded lift and watch over my shoulder. This strategy couples
emotional distress with physical discomfort. I had the impression that the witness
was a cleaner – he describes an execution and his superiors ordering him to mop
up blood – but the witness’ own position within this narrative and his potential
culpability is not addressed. Indeed, his tone of voice and the condemnation of the
violence of the execution in his testimony position him in the difficult position of
the bystander, the one who sees but does not bear responsibility for a witnessed
event. This position is at odds with his work, to clean up the after the execution
is carried out. What is also confusing is that executions were in fact not carried
out in this building – though displays of gallows in the ‘execution room’ give the
clear impression that they were – so this testimony is not directly connected to the
site despite the explicit curatorial associative strategy. This geographical displace-
ment functions as a broader erasure of the historical record. The site does not offer
execution, which is crucial to the decided-upon narrative, so execution is staged
spatially (the gallows, the execution room) and historically (testimony).
Within the basement, testimony itself is then switched off. While there is the
presence of black telephones embedded in the walls, unlike in the upstairs galleries
44 Bryce Lease

the dial has been removed that allows visitors to listen to first-hand accounts. The
imposition of silence in this space has a twofold effect: on the one hand, silence is
shared by visitors, it is the appropriate response to the reconstructed scenography
of terror, and on the other, it condenses history in a mode that refutes contestation
or questioning. The placement of the historically inaccurate gallows in one of the
basement rooms further requires silence as the respectful gesture of mourning and
commemoration. While the basement is intended to stand as the witness, it has in
fact been reconstructed rather than unearthed, given the fact that the prison was
removed after 1956.
In contrast to the basement, the only room in the entire building that the mu-
seum claims was not reconstructed is a prison cell on the first floor. There is no
information offered to explain the sudden presence of the cell, which does not
coherently adhere to the exhibition’s narrative flow. The disruptive presence of
the cell is reinforced by its clean walls and the display of instruments of torture
on the wall. A soundtrack of dripping water is at odds with the sterile slickness
of the display. Stumbling across a room that works beyond the narrative frame
allows the visitor to regain the spatial grounding of the historical site. This cell
should be in the basement, but it is clumsily and confusingly shoved between a
narrative display on deportations and the betrayal of the Hungarian peasantry by
communist governments. Its inability to tell the ‘right’ story spatially counteracts
the museum’s tendencies to aestheticise violence and momentarily breaks the ex-
hibitionary reliance on kitsch. For this reason, I was genuinely horrified when
coming upon it. The cell forsakes the aesthetic codes set out by the museum:
prison cells are meant to be grimy, darkly lit, mouldy, grey, and faded, while this
is brightly lit, freshly painted, and clean. The potential evocation of kink or sexual
violence for one’s own pleasure in the clean lines and displays of black instru-
ments does not contradict the forms of (creative) violence meted out on prisoners,
but offers a further point of historical understanding: interrogators took (or might
have taken) pleasure in the violence they inflicted. Conjoining horror and pleasure
offers a much starker and more shocking picture of surveillance, power, control,
and terror, and one which opens out the emotional stakes of suffering depicted
elsewhere. In other words, this (misplaced) ‘unreconstructed’ room offers an af-
fective understanding of violence on the side of the perpetrator in a space in which
affect is only attributed to the victim. It also then breaks an unintentional aesthetic
relation established between suffering and kitsch. The result is highly theatrical,
but in a mode that contrasts the display of suffering as gloomy or poignant in the
basement. The pleasure of violence is much more shocking and disturbing. What
I find particularly critical here is how this inversion has the potential to confront
the visitor with their own potential pleasure in the consumption of suffering and
also to critique or critically reflect upon the mode in which suffering positively af-
firms their national, political, or ethnic identification through the theatrical space
of the displays.
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 45

The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights

The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Lithuania’s capital city of
Vilnius was for many years called The Museum of Genocide Victims. It is located
on the wide central Gedimino Prospektas, one of the city’s main boulevards for
shopping, cafés, and entertainment. This museum also demonstrates a profoundly
one-sided version of history that is ultimately precedes and competes with Jewish
suffering. The museum was established in 1992 by order of the Minister of Culture
and Education and the President of the Lithuanian Union of Political Prisoners and
Deportees, and as with Budapest’s House of Terror, it is located within a former
site of ideological terror, the past headquarters of secret police services such as
the Gestapo, NKVD, and later the KGB. The building held 25,000 prisoners in
the years between 1944 and 1953. While this history entails the brutal repression
of society and culture and of political resistance, neither the Nazis nor the USSR
imposed a genocide on ethnic Lithuanians; conversely, nearly the entire Jewish
population in Lithuania was exterminated during the Holocaust with the substantial
and well-documented cooperation of ethnic Lithuanian auxiliaries.
Before entering the museum, it is made evident by a plaque outside the entrance
that the Lithuanian ‘freedom fighter’ equates to resistance against the Soviet oc-
cupiers rather than Nazi Germany. The complicity of broad Lithuanian society with
Nazi occupiers is never detailed, described, or explained; such complicity is indeed
erased through the very figure of the anti-Soviet ‘freedom fighter’. While western
democratic countries did not come to the aid of Lithuania against Soviet invasions,
there is no ‘liberation’ story offered for the conclusion of the Second World War.
Countering the dominant historical narrative, the museum then insists that 1945
did not see the end of the war, but its continuation through Soviet occupation. The
museum then stages the Soviet occupation of Lithuania as a genocidal event. For
this reason, the original name of the museum was a misnomer – this is not the story
of genocide, but rather one of an occupation that ruthlessly punished dissidents
through deportation, exclusion, or murder. While the brutal repression of society
and culture is juxtaposed with the valorisation of political resistance, the only ac-
tual historical occurrence of genocide – Hitler’s Final Solution – is relegated to a
single room in the basement. Paradoxically then, it is genocide itself that is evacu-
ated from a museum dedicated to the victims of genocide.
Genocide loses its indexical quality and functions as a metaphor for suffering
and death. In this regard, a number of signs throughout the museum point the visi-
tor towards instances of competitive or equivalent suffering, which are frequently
determined through statistical evidence. In 1940–1941, during the first Soviet oc-
cupation, a sign explains that the ‘Lithuanians suffered the most’, making up 68.1%
of victims. In another room, visitors are informed that during this same occupation
‘people suffered the most from deportations’, and in the labour camps to which
they were exiled ‘children suffered as much as the adults’. Clearly missing in the
represented hierarchy of suffering are Jews, who are excluded wholesale from the
46 Bryce Lease

designation ‘Lithuanian’. Two further examples demonstrate this exclusion. First,

in the room dedicated to the 1940–1941 Soviet occupation, there is a small, elusive
sign that requires the visitor to squat down in order to discern its diminutive text,
which offers directions to the Holocaust exhibition should the visitor wish to learn
more about the experiences of Lithuanian Jews.
This exhibition is less than a kilometre away but is housed in a much smaller
and less publicly visible building, the ‘Green House’, named for its painted wooden
walls, which unlike this museum is not an originary site of terror or genocide. Al-
though the current site was the headquarters of the Gestapo and Sonderkommando,
the Holocaust exhibition is indicated as the appropriate space to learn about the
Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1944. This spatial displacement of Nazi terror
and Jewish extermination represents a constitutive inability to co-represent Lithu-
anian and Jewish suffering and I would argue this is the fundamental thrust of the
underlying logic of the museum’s display strategies and ideological commitments.
The history of the German occupation is spatially distanced so as not to contami-
nate or dilute the history of the suffering of ethnic Lithuanians.
Descending down the stairs, one passes out of the constructed narrative envi-
ronment of the upper floors to the ‘authentic’ prison that offers its own affective
encounters. Visitors are invited to experience the space through an empathetic ap-
proximation of the ethnic Lithuanian prosecuted by communist authorities. In the
room in which prisoners were photographed and fingerprints were taken there are
mug shots displayed. These are exclusively of ethnic Lithuanian prisoners. The at-
mosphere of the basement is highly visceral. There is very little to no natural light,
the lack of heating guarantees the underground prison remains (authentically) cold
and there is a sharp stench of dampness and mould. Following the footsteps of a
prisoner, the visitor first encounters two narrow, shallow cells, where inmates were
detained before interrogations and strip searches. The doors to these are left open,
inviting visitors to sit down in the cramped space and imagine what it would mean
to wait, threatened with an uncertain future. In my multiple visits, I have witnessed
museumgoers gasp and shake their heads upon entering this space. Some people
take out handkerchiefs and cover their mouths, either to disguise their horror or as
a protection against the invasive smell, or both. While the smell permeates the en-
tirety of the basement, the strongest scent resonates from the bags of shredded files
that the KGB attempted to destroy between 1988 and 1991 (between perestroika
and the dissolution of the USSR) to conceal their activities. These unreadable files
generate a sensory overlap between the evidence of the cruelty, criminality, and
corruption of the Soviet regime and its material decay, both of which produce a
feeling of disgust in the visitor. The effort to conceal is also emphasised on the
walls. In one room, a palimpsest of 18 layers of paint is revealed under the poor
artificial light with a sign explaining that the prison was frequently repainted to
cover over former prisoners’ graffiti.
Moving along the corridor, visitors are required to lean down to look into the
hole in the substantial cell doors through which food or messages were passed
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 47

to prisoners. The appearance of a mirror in one cell door slot offers an affective
encounter that is highly ambiguous. Confronted by one’s own face – in lieu of the
anticipated view of the cell – places the visitor in a spontaneously self-reflexive
position. In line with the prevailing objective of the museum to offer both spatial
and temporal proximity between the visitor and the ethnic Lithuanian martyr, the
alleged genocidal victim, presumably the intention of the curators here is to allow
the spectator to imaginatively locate themselves within the cell, to envisage the
prison guard seeing the spectator looking out from within. This then collides the
theatrical setting of the basement with the theatricality of the spectatorial position.
While my first impression coincided with this projected reaction – I did indeed
see myself as the victim of terror – after a short interval, I realised that the mirror
was in fact placed to position me as a perpetrator: as the guard, the interrogator, or
the agent of the State. Standing on the same side of the cell door as the Gestapo, the
NKVD or the KGB officer, I was what the prisoner saw when looking out from the
cell. The sudden shock of the encounter was signalled by this dual positioning that
I only fully comprehended on later reflection (Image 2.3).
The position of perpetrator is again offered to visitors within the ‘eavesdropping
room’ that exhibits techniques of KGB surveillance. In this space, one encounters
a series of black and white monitors that display fellow visitors in the museum’s
galleries. This is ‘live’ surveillance at work. Inviting museumgoers to survey each
other without mutual awareness of the encounter and without their consent, the eth-
ical encounter forecloses dialogism or exchange in favour of individualised affect.
In the eavesdropping room – a name that already reinterprets surveillance in terms

IMAGE 2.3 Visitors are confronted by a mirror when peering into a cell in the base-
ment of the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. Photograph by
Naubertas Jasinskas.
48 Bryce Lease

that are harmless or non-threatening – taking on the role of the perpetrator is a lu-
dic experience, which frequently causes visitors to laugh with delight or surprise.
The museum’s offer of the perpetrator’s subject position is problematic for several
reasons. While, on the one hand, it articulates the institution’s own unconscious or
repressed anxieties about victimhood in relation to widespread anti-Semitism and
culpability in Jewish extermination, it also resorts to affect in order to rhetorically
energise and experientially reinforce its claims to ethnic Lithuanian suffering and
martyrdom. The ruse in both the Budapest and Vilnius examples is predicated on an
affective encounter that obscures rather than fortifies the visitor’s critical engage-
ment with the display’s underlying intent.
Sophie Nield prompts a consideration of theatrical space beyond the confines of
the mimetic, the imitative, or the ‘not-real’, all of which point towards a ‘political
impotence’ and instead conceives of the theatrical as a set of material practices con-
ditioned through ‘presence, participation, rhetoric and representation (2014: 550,
555). This undermines and reroutes a long-established mode of differentiating the
performative (discursive, iterative, transformational) as doing and the theatrical as
simply showing (ibid.: 552). If the theatrical has its own materiality, she argues,
then practices that are symbolic or representational are nevertheless real and affec-
tive. The simple delivery of a message from a stage to an audience suggests display
and imitation as mere spectacle, ‘not a real politics at all’.
In these museum spaces, we see how the representational indices of the displays
are indeed constructed as stage sets and that we are not only spectators but also
actors briefly assigned roles (perpetrator, victim, implicated subject). Not only is a
theatrical space one in which things are ‘seen to be done’, they are also conditioning
the actions, the affects, the gaze, and the experience of the subject. This does not ne-
glect the ‘doubling’ involved through theatricality – for example, in Vilnius, I look
into the mirror of the cell and I see myself in a way I do not recognise, while I am,
at the same time, the seeing subject alienated by my own image and act. This is what
Nield calls ‘theatricalised dislocation’, which is ‘expressed through the doubling of
the self; the awareness of the self somehow spectated, even if only by its own self’
(ibid.: 555). In other words, this doubling should not be dematerialised. Theatrical-
ity then is the experience of being available to be seen and not merely the dispersed
relationship between performer and spectator. It is in this way that the ‘theatrical
space, once “produced”, can coerce through its existence’ (ibid.: 554) as a material
set of practices and not simply as an imitation. This helps to foreground the way in
which we need to invert these museums as their own objects – they produce theat-
rical space and thus implicate us in the production of their own ideological aims.

The Warsaw Uprising Museum

Equally problematic is the subterranean space and the positioning of the Nazi and
Communist sections of the Warsaw Uprising Museum exhibition. The museum
was opened on a day of commemoration, signalling that the declining milieux de
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 49

mémoire now required a supplementary site. Is this museum dedicated to a legiti-

mating history or a history of mourning? Processes and duties of mourning are of
course tied to legitimation. The museum clearly intends to operate as a cohesive
force for a national memory community – as a tribute to those who fought and
died for an autonomous, liberated Poland and its capital city – which requires the
positive self-image of the partisans who fought in the Warsaw Uprising. Made up
of over 1,000 exhibits and 1,500 images and films, the permanent exhibition illus-
trates the horrors of occupation, the struggles before and during the uprising and
its aftermath, and the fate of insurgents in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). The
communist era is unreservedly represented as a time of terror that both undermines
and demoralises the work of the partisans in the uprising against their fascist oc-
cupiers. The very material existence of the museum, which is housed in a former
trams power station, exerts both the legitimacy and authority of the proposed his-
torical narrative that is extended to the site of the Wola District of Warsaw, to which
it might not otherwise be accorded.
Unlike the House of Terror in Budapest or the Museum of Occupations and
Freedom Fights in Vilnius, this museum is not located in a former site of terror,
such as the headquarters of the Gestapo, KGB, or other secret police services. In
sites of terror, it is precisely the unveiling of authentic history that is persuasive.
The Warsaw Uprising Museum is equally invested in the anti-Communist politics
of display that at times minimises Nazi atrocities to focus visitor’s attention and
emotional investment in Soviet Russia. From its conception, the museum has been
embroiled in a tense power play between Polish anti- and post-Communists. The
latter group, who participated in and benefited from the communist regime, prefers
to place emphasis on the political implications and reverberations of the Solidar-
ity movement, which they associate with the formal conclusion of communism
and the realisation of liberal democracy. Anti-Communists, who were victimised
under communism and see its continued legacies in the present, see the Solidar-
ity Movement as betrayed and defeated. For this reason, anti-Communists sup-
ported the museum as a marker of the heroic efforts of 1944 that could be ‘written
into a longer-term national narrative of resistance to occupation and the fight for
independent statehood’ (Mark 2010: 16). Although Home Army insurgents were
defeated by the Germans, there was at least a clear and heroic effort that could
be commemorated and celebrated without the messy compromises with occupiers
that were later associated with Solidarity. The process of history-making in the
PRL is framed as always being a cipher for an explicit ideological agenda, while in
contrast, the anti-Communist museum is both a pedagogic and salutary exposure
of suppressed, suspended, or denied truth. The museum then implicitly purports to
reconstruct ‘what really happened’, rather than to stake a moral claim ‘behind the
scenes’ in the mode of communist manipulation.
The Warsaw Uprising Museum’s essentialist impulses with regard to ethnic iden-
tity and its key legitimating claim to historical truth are not openly or explicitly dis-
closed. The fact that the museum is evocatively contiguous with an anti-Communist
50 Bryce Lease

agenda – it performs as a social remedy to the evils of the communist period – may
not immediately strike the uninformed visitor. Confronted with the aftermath of the
uprising and the persecution of its leaders by Soviet forces may easily produce an
impression that the Warsaw Uprising was against Soviet communists rather than
German fascists, and that the Polish insurgents were in fact successful in their
campaign rather than overwhelmed and defeated. The resignification of history
in the exhibition is experiential rather than factually erroneous, which means it
can be explicitly denied by the museum’s organisers. This is a crucial strategy of
constructed memory environments. Visitors can be blamed for leaving a museum
with the wrong impression if the curators can point to the accuracy of the displayed
facts, although the environment has lucidly (if implicitly) constructed an alterna-
tive narrative. This conflict between facts and experience should not be seen as
an exception to the experiential museum but one of its potential constitutive and
distinguishing features or characteristics. While theatricality is often bemoaned as
a dubious or false medium, the desire to employ theatrically immersive environ-
ments can actually disguise the aim of being purposefully misrepresentative. Such
troubling ambiguities are easily disavowed by historians and curators.
Upon entering the permanent exhibition, the visitor is confronted by mood-
establishing music, the reverberant thud of a heartbeat, reminiscent of a thriller
or horror-film soundtrack. The visitor then circulates through the space, exiting at
the point of entrance, returning to the sound of the heartbeat. History here, I would
suggest, follows the logic of myth. This circulation – which is mirrored in a 3D film
shown within the museum that gives spectators an affectively intense experience
of an airplane’s circulatory aerial passage around destroyed Warsaw at the conclu-
sion of the Uprising – is not concerned with dialectic, but is tightly proscribed and
bounded. The circle closes in on itself. This is the very dramaturgical movement
of melancholic attachment, which always stages its own loss. In the museum’s
performance of melancholic attachment to traditions of patriotism linked to vic-
timisation, there is an attempt at interpolation. The problem with this museum is
not theatricality but rather the production of ‘melancholic commemoration’, which
is always established through circulation rather than exchange and is in opposition
to forms of commemoration that are oriented towards and foster historical critique
and consciousness.
While the Soviet refusal to help in the uprising and their subsequent occupation
of Poland, Stalin’s puppet government, and the fate of the Polish resistance in post-
war communist Poland are all depicted in the main rooms of the core exhibition,
the horrors of the German occupation and the atrocities committed by the Nazis
and their collaborators during the uprising are singled out in an underground room
that I entirely missed on two separate visits to the museum and only discovered
when speaking to a Polish guide. This basement then offers the base point of a hi-
erarchy of suffering and heroism (which are themselves co-organised on the super-
terraneous floors) that places the Nazis beneath the Soviets. Behind a heavy black
 Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object 51

velvet curtain, the visitor may access the basement, which contains the history of
the Nazis in Warsaw and a replica of the sewage canals, which were themselves
subterranean, that Polish partisans used to move between different districts of the
city during the Uprising. It is surprising to encounter the reconstructed canal in
the basement of the museum given that another reconstruction already exists on
the first floor, replete with signage familiar from Andrzej Wajda’s epic film Kanał
(1957) that documents the partisans’ usage of the sewage systems in the Uprising.
Although the canal in the basement lacks such historical accessories, it requires a
differently embodied experience. The tunnels are smaller, more narrow and claus-
trophobic, requiring the visitor to bend down. This begs a question of the ‘direct’
experience of history this promises the museum visitor. What is missing from both
experiences of the canal (in the basement and on the first floor) is of course the sew-
age itself that necessitates the subterranean caverns. In this way, the reconstructed
canals are what I would call a ‘bleached’ experience of history that is suggestive
of the interactive display in the Washington DC Holocaust Memorial Museum of a
railcar that transported Jews to concentration camps. Visitors are permitted to step
inside the freight car to envisage the terrifying claustrophobia of sharing the space
(8 metres) when crammed with people. What is ‘bleached’ from this immersive ex-
perience includes, for example, physical contact between tightly compressed bod-
ies, smells and tastes, the movement of the train, the blend of darkness and light,
the freezing cold and the suffocating heat, crippling thirst and hunger, the presence
of human excrement and urine, intense and persistent fear and anxiety, and the real
threat and presence of death. This is supplemented by the visitor’s agency of choos-
ing to freely enter or exit the railcar.
I choose to end on the Uprising Museum’s replicated canals precisely because
it is the absence of shit – both its material and olfactory presence – that recasts
the canal as a venerated ‘tomb’ of historical knowledge. Through its cleansing –
comparable to the pristine torture utensils gleaming on the wall in the House of
Terror – the visitor experiences history’s veneration, both historical time and space
are thus mythified. Although such embodied strategies in the history museums I
have analysed in this chapter may offer an experience of affective intensification
as a pedagogical collision between knowing and understanding, the bleaching of
environments bespeaks an unacknowledged symbolic investment in honouring
particularised history that is anything but shared.
It is of course always the case that museums reveal more than their curators
intend. I am not suggesting that these commemorative spaces are melancholic be-
cause they are explicitly spaces of sadness, but, on the contrary, their production
of melancholy is tied to their failure to generate acts of mourning that encourage
the expansion of alliances. The attachment to these histories demonstrates their
ongoing significance for current regimes of power, particularly with Fidesz in Hun-
gary and PiS in Poland, and they function as arbiters of nationalist authority. In-
vested in first invoking hierarchies of suffering that place victims of communism
52 Bryce Lease

(literally) above those of fascism reinforces their symbolic investment in commu-

nism as the establishment of their own regimes. To mourn communism and to
allow it to enter the past would therefore undermine and destabilise the very invest-
ments that make current identity politics and social arrangements possible. To cri-
tique these museums as overly theatrical, as overblown spectacle, is to misinterpret
both their intent and affect.
These three museums are indeed theatrical, but their theatricality is a set of
material practices that either expand or narrow our position and experience and,
thereby, our concerns with history; and for this reason, it is precisely by redirecting
visitor experience through an understanding of self-reflective theatricality that their
political and affective investments are revealed. Theatricality thus exposes rather
than obscures our understanding of these museums as their own objects.

Note
1 For a full description of the Hungarian curatorial team’s aims and strategies, see Péter
Apor (2014).

Works Cited
Apor, Péter (2014) ‘An Epistemology of the Spectacle? Arcane Knowledge, Memory and
Evidence in the Budapest House of Terror’, Rethinking History 18(3): 328–344.
Horváth, Zsolt K. (2008) ‘The Redistribution of the Memory of Socialism: Identity Forma-
tions of the “Survivors”, in Hungary after 1989’, in Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor
(eds), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and
Museums after 1989, Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 247–273.
Jones, Sara (2011) ‘Staging Battlefields: Media, Authenticity and Politics in the Museum of
Communism (Prague), the House of Terror (Budapest) and Gedenkstätte Hohenschön-
hausen (Berlin)’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 4(1): 97–111.
Mark, James (2010) The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in
Central-Eastern Europe, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Nield, Sophie (2014) ‘“Speeches that draw tears”: Theatricality, Commemoration and Social
History’, Social History 39(4): 547–556.
Sodaro, Amy (2018) Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Vio-
lence, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Wajda, Andrzej (1957) Kanał. Zespół Filmowy “Kadr”.
3
CURATING THE EXPERIENTIAL
The Imperial War Museum’s Revised
Holocaust Galleries

James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

The Holocaust Exhibition first opened at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in June
2000. While many Holocaust survivors visited the museum in this period, the ma-
jority of visitors today do not have direct, lived memory of the Holocaust. The
IWM decided to change the curation of the exhibition in light of new research on
Holocaust histories and global developments in their curation. After several years
of preparation, the new Holocaust Galleries opened in November 2021 under the
curation of James Bulgin. In this interview, Bulgin discusses the dynamic between
the Holocaust and Second World War Galleries in the museum, the renewed focus
on landscape and ecology, the approach to experiential design and ‘contemporane-
ity’ as an interpretive strategy, and concerns over theatricality and immersion that
shape his approach to curation.

BL: The Imperial War Museum (IWM) will become the first museum in the
world to house dedicated Second World War Galleries and Holocaust Galler-
ies under the same roof. Why do you think this is so rare?

JB: To be clear, there are museums that have both subjects within a single Gal-
leries, but the idea of separating them out into two discrete but interrelated
purpose-built galleries is original. Within the previous iteration of the IWM,
there were Second World War and Holocaust Galleries, but they were com-
pletely independent projects and there was no attempt to explicitly relate
them to one another. The design of the new Holocaust Galleries was part
of a much broader master plan within the organisation, which started with
the First World War. The Second World War and the Holocaust followed as
phase two of the master plan, and the Cold War and contemporary forms
of conflict will come next at some point. Our Galleries were very much

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-4
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
54 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

informed by the work of David Cesarani. Just as he was advocating for a

recontextualisation of the Holocaust as a contingent history, the museum
was also beginning to think in this direction. When I was first employed in
2016, they were thinking about simply making an edit to the original exhibi-
tion, but this plan changed quickly. When we sent the projects out to tender,
exhibition designers were invited to pitch either for both galleries or for one
of them. A few did pitch for both, and part of the tender process was to ask
designers to consider the relationship between the two galleries. Designers
came up with various different suggestions on how that was to be achieved.
This is a practical factor that you might not consider at the start: if you ask
a design agency to consider the connection between the Second World War
and Holocaust Galleries and they are pitching for both galleries, then that is
an organic part of their holistic design. However, if they are only designing
one of the galleries, then one set of designers has to modify the original con-
cept to respond to the other galleries – that is, the ones which are not their
own. It might sound obvious, but actually the full extent of what it entails is
pretty challenging to deal with. The initial connection between the galleries
was meant to be a box, a cinemaette, that tips through the floor. From the
perspective of the Holocaust Galleries, which is above, the audience would
look down to see footage of the liberation of the camps. Visitors to the Sec-
ond World War Galleries would look up above them to see the same footage,
but from an entirely different perspective. We held onto this idea, which had
originated from Casson Mann, who designed the Holocaust Galleries. How-
ever, as the Second World War Galleries developed it became clear the foot-
age did not align with their design and they were being forced to incorporate
something which really didn’t work for them.
Other ideas also had to be abandoned along the way. For example, there
was going to be a shared opening for the galleries. The Holocaust Galleries
open with a media piece we call ‘The Presence of Absence’, which is com-
posed entirely from contemporary footage of European landscapes that bear
the traces of this history in some capacity. Initially, this was intended to go
straight through a slot in the floor as part of a shared single screen so visitors
to both galleries would encounter the same artwork, thus speaking to the
absences evoked by both these histories. However, it was forcing the hand
of the Second World War curatorial team to implement this object which we
had commissioned – and stylistically, it was attuned to our whole approach
in a way that it wasn’t to theirs’. In the end, it was not possible structurally
to include this piece. Indeed, trying to identify moments of a shared physical
relationship between the galleries remained tricky for a number of reasons.
In the final curatorial plan, the connecting object is a V-1 flying bomb,
also known as a doodlebug, that points downwards into a void between both
galleries. Visitors in the Holocaust Galleries encounter the V-1 in a space
dedicated to slave labour and the subcamp system, while visitors to the Sec-
ond World War Galleries look up and see the bomb looming above them. The
 Curating the Experiential 55

object functions as what I call an ‘interpretive lightning rod’. From the per-
spective of the Holocaust, the V-1 is about the construction of these bombs
within the camp system, while from the Second World War perspective it is
about the experience of being bombed – and is also a way of them introduc-
ing the Holocaust into their narrative. The object then also functions as a
helpful provocation for visitors who feel that British history has little to do
with the Holocaust. The doodle bug, so central to the British experience of
the war, is also in part a product of the Holocaust. The idea actually emerged
during a day-long session with both sets of designers and all of the curators
in a room together, so it was something that was mutually agreed on and
didn’t come from one set of galleries specifically (Image 3.1).
In terms of curation, it did raise an issue of interpretation. We did not want
to hang this doodlebug from the ceiling, which would give the impression
that the object ‘belonged’ to one of the galleries rather than to both. As a
result, we had to come up with a complex system to mount the V-1 bomb
and embed it within the floor between the galleries. This prompted numer-
ous conversations about the angle of the object and the mode in which it was
encountered from these different perspectives. Having collaborated with the
curators for the Second World War Galleries, I have realised that the nar-
rative they have to tell is very different from the one we need to tell. The
Holocaust is a vast narrative, but they have to try to explain how the war
happened as a global conflict. The museum moved away from just narrating

IMAGE 3.1 A V-1 flying bomb, also known as a doodlebug, that points downwards into
a void between the Holocaust and Second World War Galleries in the Impe-
rial War Museum. Copyright Imperial War Museum.
56 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

the British and Commonwealth experience of the war in the development of

the new Second World Galleries. As soon as you start to explain the Eastern
Front and the Pacific, you are dealing with vast narratives of history involv-
ing millions and millions of people. Having an object that links the galleries
means that you need to find a coherent connection point between the two
narratives. In the Holocaust Galleries, you do not come to the outbreak of
the war until you are 40% of the way through the exhibition, while the war
begins in the first room of the Second World War Galleries. As they have
evolved, the galleries are very different in terms of interpretive principles,
aesthetics, language, design, film, and mood.

BL: Could you tell us more about ‘The Presence of Absence’, the media piece in
the opening room of the Holocaust Galleries?

JB: The museum’s media team spent cumulatively about two to three months in
Europe filming. They worked from a brief I produced, which was about identi-
fying traces of Holocaust histories in a myriad of forms. We identified a range
of locations that we wanted them to capture before their departure, but there
was flexibility for them to be responsive once they were there. They did an
amazing job and spent a lot of time liaising with local experts that they met
on the ground and local information that wasn’t findable through pre-visit re-
search. The one rule, from my point of view, was that they could not film any-
thing from an angle that could not have been seen by a Jewish person in this
historical context. For example, there are no shots from the guard room in the
death gate at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there is no use of drones, and no shots
from outside the fence of a camp. And at no point does anything we film adopt
the subject position of anyone in that context. It was not about taking the same
steps as a historical subject, ‘walking in their shoes’. It was about the position
from which it is considered, not about the specificity of the individual subject.
We did not want to include the perpetrator perspective. From the outset, we
wanted to be clear about denying the centrality of the perpetrator perspective.
In fact, when we sent out the tenders for the exhibition, I asked designers to
suggest what they would do with the train carriage we have, which is the type
used for transportations. I wanted to use this as a test. We only have half of a car-
riage, and about 60–70% of designers suggested that they would attempt to fill
the object out with sound and lighting effects to allow visitors to feel they were
retaking the steps of those who were transported in the trains. This is exactly
what we did not want, so it was helpful to learn very quickly the perspective
from which the designer was approaching the broader project. Casson Mann, the
company which was ultimately appointed, absolutely understood what we were
looking to do – and more importantly shared the same intention and instincts.
‘The Presence of Absence’ was edited together by a company called
Squint/Opera, who have made about 75% of our AV design. The footage
itself came from our in-team led by a brilliant man called Damon Cleary. On
 Curating the Experiential 57

the whole, it cites pre-war life and not sites of persecution. For example, they
film the shadow on doorways where a mezuzah used to be, an abandoned
synagogue in Orla, or the Hackescher Hof in Berlin that had been a Jewish
department store. We have had many conversations about whether we should
caption the film. I resisted this because I wanted visitors to encounter it as
an arresting visual object, suggesting an ‘in-our-worldness’, without explicit
explanation of the sites. I didn’t want it to be reduced to having an actively
deterministic interpretive function. Watching the footage, you see this mas-
sively disparate range of landscapes, so it intuitively communicates the enor-
mous scale of this history with an immediacy that we had not anticipated.
But you also have an intuitive sense of how embedded in the world these
traces are and so by inference how embedded are the events and their legacy.
I always liked the idea too that there is an implicit sense within the film that
the landscapes captured exist in the temporally specific moment that they are
filmed which is analogous too, to the interpretation. In the same way that as
the years pass, the landscapes will evolve, so too will Holocaust historiogra-
phy. In the end, we only captioned the film with the present-day name of the
city and country where the footage was shot. The other part of the brief for
the editing team was that it should not have any implicit sense that the piece
is about memorialisation or reflectiveness because that turns into something
that might be mawkish and is not what the piece was ever intended to do.
The museum has a very active remit that it is not a memorial and we are
very careful about avoiding any overt suggestions of memorialisation. I al-
ways think of the final episode of Blackadder and the way it moves from
the battlefield of the First World War to a poppy field and birdsong, as what
we wanted to avoid with this piece. Rather, ‘The Presence of Absence’ is
a reminder that we walk amongst the traces of the world in which this oc-
curred and that – in very simple and direct ways – this is our world too. You
then walk directly into another room called ‘Jewish Life’, and the sound
from this space is deliberately allowed to spill into the ‘The Presence of
Absence’. We have to consider how much we need to lean into this sound
connection – it should feel like the sound arriving on a breeze – faint but
discernible, there but only just. It is like when you work in the theatre, some-
times you have to actively do something in order to make it look like you
haven’t done something.

BL: How many rooms are in the new Galleries?

JB: It is deliberately worked around, so it is quite circuitous. There are 15 rooms.

One of the challenges of the project is that the building already limits the way
the space can be manipulated. Sometimes with the route becomes tight in
ways that came seem suggestive, but are not necessarily a curatorial choice.
Halfway through the design process, two large beams showed up, which had
not been present in the architectural drawings. This also created a spatial
58 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

challenge. This is the difference between working with an existing building

and a museum that is specifically created for an exhibition. Despite surveys,
the building is constantly imposing conditions that you have to work around.
In practical and more esoteric ways, it meant we had to find a way of estab-
lishing an ongoing dialogue with the building.

BL: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) uses a variety of curato-

rial strategies to increase audience empathy and identification. Did you con-
sider adapting any of these curatorial strategies?

JB: As soon as you enter the lift in the USHMM, you start to wonder: what are you
suggesting to me here and what are you insinuating this space is? It is such
an active first intervention on the visitor journey. It has become something of
an axiom amongst curatorial museum professionals to talk about the distinc-
tion between experience and the experiential – even if it necessarily framed
it in that way explicitly. The IWM had two exhibitions that closed around ten
years ago, called ‘The Blitz Experience’ and ‘The Trench Experience’ which
curators squirm about now because of the claims that these exhibits made
about providing an authentic experience of the past. The challenge is that
visitors loved them and still ask about them. As a curator, it is hard because if
this is something that visitors enjoy then this is something you need to try and
respond to or work with rather than to simply dismiss. Coming at this project
from an academic perspective, I was very concerned about qualifying or lim-
iting any claim we were making within the Galleries about the extent to which
the experiential encounter within them offered authentic experience of the
past in any way. Indeed, it’s something we wanted to counter, so we worked
hard to deny that we were making a claim to authenticity of experience that
we couldn’t and shouldn’t substantiate. That said, I am also interested in ideas
of affect and I think the idea that museums do not create experiences at all is
nonsense as well. Otherwise, why go to a museum? My focus, though, is on
the experiential, not experiences. The key question is: how do you moderate
those two things? This is not about an academic’s abstract problem of making
a claim to authenticity – for example, walking through the train car and claim-
ing that this gives you a glimpse into the experience of those people who did
that in a paradigmatically different historical context.

We are not denying the possibility of experiential encounters with history.

The experiential should offer a visitor an opportunity to have agency in their
interpretation of the exhibition in the space, but not to suggest they have
ownership of the lived experience of historical subjects. Through ‘The Pres-
ence of Absence’ and a few other pieces in the Galleries, we are suggesting
that we do not know and cannot know what historical subjects experienced,
but there are still dimensions of their experience that are familiar to us. When
you visit a site like Auschwitz, there are familiar elements – the feeling of
 Curating the Experiential 59

the breeze, the grass beneath your feet – but then you need to reconcile this
with something that is so unfamiliar and the knowledge that the environment
now is not what it was then. We wanted to think about how to allow for a
fundamental gap to remain between the familiar and the unfamiliar, while
forming a relationship between the two. In that tension, there is something
really productive because you constantly want to resolve something which
is irresolvable, but it is active and it remains active. Whereas if you make a
claim from an experience then you close all of that off. An experience is a
completely closed, limited, finished thing. The active tension, on the other
hand, is where I think the experiential works.

BL: The USHMM attempted to bring together individual histories with broader
historical narratives. Is this something you considered in the design?

JB: One of the central issues in a Holocaust Museum is how you resolve the rela-
tionship between the micro and the macro, because either one is a problem if
it becomes overdetermined. If you only focus on volume that is problematic,
but if you only focus on individuals, you lose sight of how massive the scale
of this history is. We considered the strategy of following certain historical
individuals through the exhibition very early on. I understand the instinct to
do this, but it also seems like an answer to a problem that is taken at face
value without sufficiently thinking through the additional problems it creates
rather than solves. This is a problem for the whole museum sector. Some-
times, there is a tendency to think in very direct and literal terms and to take
the assumed efficacy of this approach at face value.
As an example, if you ask academics how we are going to invite visitors
to think about space, they will reply, ‘Use a map!’ Rather than thinking
that is the end of the question, it is actually the starting point we need to
move on from. If you ask how we might think about meaningfully po-
sitioning individuals within the narrative, the first answer is: ‘Follow a
person all the way through the exhibition’. Again, this is the starting point
to the question, not the curatorial solution we land upon. I understand the
instinct that leads towards the assumption that this is a productive ap-
proach, but I think that as you think about it more deeply, it is highly prob-
lematic. We have employed various strategies. These always end up being
described as ‘stories’ and this is one of my bugbears. I hate the way mu-
seums use the word ‘stories’. First of all, it seems really reductive to me.
Second of all, I think that it ignores and elides some really important di-
mensions of the discrepancy between the lived human experience and the
process of narrativisation. Galen Strawson (2004) writes about this really
well in ‘Against Narrativity’, and I find his idea that hyper-­narrativisation
completely elides the infinite complexities of human experience really
compelling. Particularly in this narrative, I find myself thinking that
these are not ‘stories’. I read stories to my children, but this is something
60 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

different – these are lives. I do not think of my life as a ‘story’ and if I did,
it would be a problem because clearly it doesn’t work as a story, which
has structure, form, and resolution. Lived experience does not. What we
tried to do is look at ways to engage with individual experience at various
different moments, but to ensure that these retain a sense of fragmentation.
One of the central interpretive strategies we employed is something called
‘contemporaneity’. The First World War Galleries used this as well. We only
used objects or assets that are contemporaneous to the period. We do not use
any postwar objects or postwar language. We do not use words like genocide
or Holocaust in the Galleries because they are postwar ways of encoding
these events linguistically and interpretively. If we meet an individual in the
exhibition at a certain moment, we have tried to do something to express
who what individual is or the specific set of circumstances they are in. This
was part of a broader effort to take victims out of ‘victimhood’. At an early
meeting of the advisory board, Professor Tony Kushner said that one of the
things that mattered most to him was to remind people that the chronologies
of the people targeted are not the chronologies of the perpetrators. I know it
seems like such an obvious point to make, but the way that Tony framed it
was really helpful. When I first started on the project, I thought we should
deny the hegemony of the perpetrator-determined narrative and try to reverse
this interpretive position from how these events were related. Rather than ap-
proaching from the perspective of the Nazi arriving at the end of someone’s
garden path, let’s try to see this from the perspective of the person in the
kitchen seeing the perpetrator arrive from the other direction. But this is not
actually how narrative functions. This might satisfy a very small audience,
but it would leave the vast majority of our visitors completely perplexed as to
what is going on. Instead, what we attempted to do was deny the aggressive
centrality of the perpetrator-determined narrative.
Throughout the Galleries, we use a device that we called ‘totems’ inter-
nally as a shorthand, and this appears in different forms. The main form is
to use full length photos of individuals cropped out of contemporaneous im-
ages and printed onto full-height glass structures. The original photo they are
cropped from is always positioned nearby, so we are very careful about the
claim we are making for it. The idea for this came from seeing an exhibition
at Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum. The curators took images of
Soviet POWs executed in the camp, and seeing them at eye level completely
changes your affective relationship with the subjects. It also moderates the
claim – they have not colourised them and the curators are not doing any-
thing that suggests they are somehow disinterring people to make them re-
real. It also does not suggest you are ‘meeting’ these people. It is a way of
precipitating a different physical relationship.
For the totem biographies, which are captions that accompany these pieces,
we have written the text in the present tense and I was uncomfortable with
this at first. This came from an initial exercise: when we were writing the
 Curating the Experiential 61

original narrative for the Galleries, I asked the curators to write in the present
tense. This was not because I thought we would use them in the present tense
in the final galleries, but was intended to encourage them to think contem-
poraneously rather than to anticipate future events and therefore structure
narrative based on anticipation. When we took this idea to the board, this
idea of keeping these text pieces in the present tense, I was expecting them
to reject it outright. I thought they would think it was kitsch somehow. But a
majority of them agreed to keep it – I think they were surprised themselves
to find them convinced by its effectiveness.
In many of the Holocaust museums I visited over the years, I noticed that
I was not reading about individual lives, but rather lives that were presented
as microsites of persecution. I was not reading about a person’s experiences,
but what was done to them in the guise of reading about them. We tried to
avoid this, which is difficult when you are constrained by word limits. To
give you an example, there is a man in the Galleries named Leonard Wohl, a
German Jew from Breslau whose daughters wrote about his sense of humour
in their letters. This aspect of him had nothing explicitly to do with the his-
tory of the Holocaust, but we decided to keep this material. It does not build
towards something later in the narrative in a Chekhov’s gun sort of way. We
included details that do not go anywhere, but they are there to give you a
small sense of who this person was.
We also use quotations all the way through and we had to consider how
to display these on substrates – that is, whether on plinths or wall details,
etc. There was a long discussion about how to render quotes on substrates
from people whom we know did not survive and whose quotes related to the
specific events that would lead to their deaths or were proximate to that mo-
ment in time. The question of material was important. Then, we had the idea
to display these words in light. That means there is no ink or pigment that is
holding their voices; rather, it will be the light that expresses their words. The
font that we used is taken from a pre-war Jewish typographer whose work
was stopped through Nazi persecution before he had finished developing it.
This is not a detail that we mention anywhere. This is where my work as
a theatre practitioner comes in, I think. In the theatre, you need to have an
answer down to the smallest detail for every part of the production – or that
was always the way that I worked, and the way that people whose work I
admired most worked too. The audience do not know what they don’t know,
but I really believe that somehow they know if it is not there. Therefore, it
is crucial that the director knows the reason for each decision. This acts like
invisible glue, a kind of cognitive glue that holds everything together and
gives it shape and purpose.
In the graphics hierarchy, we have section text, sub-section text, captions,
and meta-text captions where we explain meta-historical issues. The sub-
sections all have quotations on them, but the titles of the sub-sections are
almost all taken from contemporaneous diaries or letters. For example, in the
62 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

section on the ghettoes, which deals with the ghettoes being sealed off, the
sub-section is called ‘Guarded Walls Rise’, which is a line from a poem that
was written in the Warsaw Ghetto. I thought if we impose the discipline on
ourselves always to describe these things using the contemporaneous voice
of the person, then that conditions us to see events from that perspective.
Traditionally I think we would probably have titled ‘The Nazis seal the ghet-
tos’ or something like that, but by using the contemporaneous Jewish voice
to describe the event it ensures it is framed from that perspective.
Some people appear in more than one section, although most do not. In the
previous exhibition at IWM and I think all Holocaust exhibitions we visited,
if we met someone once in say 1938, the text would tell you that they were
then shot in 1942. On a practical level, this did not provide visitors with any
kind of contextual information that leads to them to understand how or why
that has happened. Also, this completely reduces that person’s autonomous
experiences to that single detail. Contemporaneity does not allow for this ap-
proach. We only tell visitors what was knowable in that historical moment.
However, we do think it is important that the Galleries hold wider contextual
information, and so in the final room, there is a large AV piece which con-
tains material about every single person mentioned in the exhibition. This is
logistically complex as it means displaying biographical information about
around 500 different people, so the script for this piece is about 20,000 words
and it runs for about three hours or so. Thinking about Strawson’s argument
again, the brief to the designers was that this needed to be about fragments
of experience so it does not seek to close off or resolve through totalising
narratives of people’s lives. It is also not interactive, so visitors cannot pick
and choose whose lives to learn further information about. It is a glimpse
into details, fragments. Importantly, we have tried to be open about what we
don’t know and that also the amount of information available could conceiv-
ably change in the future – and so the piece only reflects the record at the
period of time it was created.

BL: Your focus on multiple forms of narrative makes me think about the criticism
the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw received for
not focusing sufficiently on the Holocaust, even though it was built on the
site of the ghetto. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2015: 50) responded that
the museum was dedicated to Jewish life and not only to Jewish death and
genocide. Text in the present tense enables visitors to also focus on people’s
lives and not only the conditions of their deaths.

JB: Yes, in our new exhibition, it is important that the visitor sees Jewish indi-
viduals as autonomously defined. In a space right at the start of the galleries –
the second room in fact, after ‘presence of absence’ there is a space called
‘Jewish Life’ that I mentioned before. This is based on a digital installation
 Curating the Experiential 63

about the dynamic plurality of the lives of Jewish individuals and commu-
nities before the Second World War. There are over 1,200 different images
sourced from galleries and archives across the world that constantly cycle
screens across the space. These are supported by fixed graphics that hold
specific information about a number of different individuals. It was really
important to us before encountering the symbols and objects of persecution,
from swastikas to SS uniforms, that Jewish life should be introduced in the
centre of the frame, so to speak. Also, no two visitors to the space will see the
exact two same set of images. Years ago at a conference, the historian Neil
Gregor made a comment that really stuck with me; he said that historians still
talk about ‘the Jews’ in the same way that the Nazis spoke about ‘die Juden’.
And he is right. There is no ‘the Jews’ – there are Jewish people with various
different belief systems, practices, languages, cultures. The installation is a
challenge to that problematic way of thinking. The sound in the space is dy-
namic too; it is layered through multiple channels so that in a similar way to
the imagery it is constantly in motion; it never settles or resolves. The space
is experiential, and it is not a space we expect visitors to spend a long time
in, but it is a crucial starting point. Interestingly, early impressions suggest
that visitors spend a lot longer in it than we expected.
We also worked with various individuals from Jewish communities. A
number of rabbis advised us particularly on the display or description of
religious objects. I was surprised how little this has happened previously. I
was very aware that there have been some issues in Holocaust exhibitions
previously with religious objects being displayed in ways that didn’t neces-
sarily align with Jewish religious practices. If our committed intention and
ambition is to make galleries that meaningfully respect individuals, then we
need to work carefully with communities. Rabbi Nicky Liss from Highgate
Synagogue comes into the museum regularly to discuss the exhibition and
the information he has provided has completely changed the way we de-
scribe objects or what we are concentrating on. Rabbi Liss will also come in
and place some of the objects into the displays themselves, so we know that
it has been done appropriately through his hands.

BL: This is one of the changes between the previous and the new Holocaust Gal-
leries. The use of lighting has also been criticised as being too ‘theatrical’ in
the original curation. Why have you chosen to use brighter lighting and how
might this change the visitors’ experience?

JB: Visiting the USHMM in Washington, DC was a revelation because it sud-

denly became so clear how much that museum defined and centralised an
interpretive approach and strategy for so many global museums. I can see
that the curation has been done with such scale and bravura that other cura-
tors might feel that this is the only way to approach a Holocaust museum.
64 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

It’s my feeling that the nature of the subject and the magnitude of that pro-
ject, both politically and nationally, created a set of tropes that no one even
realised were tropes. This is the bedrock that everyone else is building upon.
They introduced a theatrical approach to lighting, but they have also used a
specific aesthetic of hyper industrialisation, which really indulges the notion
that the Holocaust is the apotheosis of industrialised genocide. I understand
how this emerged, but I think contemporarily, it has conditioned a series of
assumptions that are dangerously misleading. It somehow suggests that the
Holocaust was less a product of deliberate, conscious and sustained human
action than the process of industrialisation and the inexorable momentum of
modernity. In terms of the lighting, the spaces in USHMM and most other
Holocaust museums are typically dark with stark and stylised lighting that
nurtures a sense of drama and doom. I think that it creates a few problems
though. Darkness signifies to the visitors that everyone represented in the
exhibition is already dead and that is the only way we will think about them.
This overdetermines the narrative – the only thing that will happen to these
people is that they are going to die. It immediately communicates to the
visitor that they should forget about anything apart from the fact that these
people are doomed. I fully understand the instinct to use darkness and dim
lighting because this is a ghastly and dreadful history that includes indescrib-
able suffering – dark lighting for an extraordinarily dark subject. There is an
instinct to say that quietness and sombreness is the appropriate tone. How-
ever, darkness also suggests that the Holocaust happened in the shadows and
that nobody really knew about it, that it was clandestine and unseen. This use
of lighting also suggests that the only possible response is mournful silence
and that you are not allowed to ask questions or want to know more. Through
contemporaneity, we have used an anti-teleological approach, which is cen-
tral to our curation, and we felt that bright light enabled this and allowed
visitors to ask more questions and not to think of the progression of events
as pre-determined. We also wanted to use the lighting to support the broader
interpretive principle that these things happened in ‘our world’ – not in a dif-
ferent one that we have no access to. Somehow reading about or encounter-
ing accounts of the things that the Nazis did and that people experienced in
a space that has not led you towards a fairly determined response can serve
to generate a very different response to them. The use of bright lighting was
never intended to be provocative, but we did feel there was something about
the standard use of dim lighting we felt needed to be addressed.
All of the walls in the Galleries are painted different shades of blue, which
we chose as a neutral colour. It is almost like the sky, or a stage cyclorama.
The design concept is that the walls of the space are the neutral vessel the
exhibition sits within, so nothing is ever mounted directly on the walls. They
function almost like negative space. If we had to mount something from the
wall that will not be visible to the visitor.
 Curating the Experiential 65

BL: I brought undergraduate theatre students to the previous Holocaust Galleries

for many years. After their visit, I asked them what had impacted them most
strongly and they uniformly agreed it was the spoken testimonies. Could you
speak about how you see the curation of testimony changing?

JB: Because of contemporaneity, the testimony just could not work in the same
way that it had in the previous exhibition where it had provided the narrative
backbone. Having said that, we were obviously very keen to ensure that it
was used meaningfully but wanted to find a different way of doing so. One
of the problems with curating witness testimony is that as soon as you posi-
tion a survivor next to other content, you implicitly suggest that experiences
are survivable. One of the perhaps under-discussed aspects of the Holocaust
is that there are plenty of corners of this history for which there are no sur-
vivors. Allowing for the extent of the devastation is really important. Some-
how, there is a glimpse of hope or the suggestion that people perhaps could
have survived if they had just made different choices, which is of course not
the case. One of the terrible, terrible realities of this history is that there are
whole families or communities and groups of people for whom there is no-
body to speak on their behalf and we have tried to be really clear about that.
There was also an aesthetic question. Many of the recordings of the testi-
monies are about 20 years old and they will look like they belong to a certain
time to a contemporary audience. It is like watching Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah (1985) now, which I always think involves a three-part temporal pro-
cess: the history that is being spoken about, the time that the film was made,
and the present moment that we inhabit as we watch the film. The film is
now a historical document itself. There is a similar phenomenon with the
recordings of the testimony in our collections. The aesthetic in which they
were filmed, framed, the background, the clothing people are wearing all
impact how we engage with the testimony and this has to be acknowledged. I
was also really influenced by Professor Tony Kushner’s (2006) writing about
testimony. As he suggests, if you watch testimonies unedited, you engage
with the people in them completely differently. Rather than just listening to
the specific piece of information that the curator has chosen for you to hear,
you begin to engage with the way that the survivor remembers and with
their physicality as much as what they are actually saying; in fact, for me,
the silences are particularly meaningful. Sometimes, the silences do speak
more than the words. I sat down in the film room in the museum to watch
one piece of testimony in its entirety on one occasion near the start of the
project. I watched Roman Halter, who happened to have a cold on the day the
recording took place. You wouldn’t know that if you only watched what we
have used before, because that is an extraneous detail that was removed in
the edit. But when you listen to his snuffly voice and see how he has to stop
to drink water or blow his nose, it completely humanises him and makes the
66 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

experience of watching him feel much more personal and I suppose some-
how more intimate. That’s obviously just one small and obvious dimension,
but it’s an example.
In the final space, alongside the piece which offers information about eve-
ryone mentioned in the galleries, there are three testimony screens on which
our testimony runs virtually unedited. People can sit down in chairs that are
very comfortable with speakers mounted into the backrest and listen. Rather
than editing anything down or out, it is all there. The only exception is that
we decided to edit anything that was never meant for public consumption.
For example, if we think there is a private thought expressed between the
interviewer and the person giving testimony, then there is an ethical dilemma
in making that public that we wouldn’t want to ignore. However, we have in-
cluded everything else, which includes the repetitions, people drifting in and
out of shot, or microphones malfunctioning. It means that visitors enter the
space and sit down and just discover the interviewee midflow. There are about
30 hours of this testimony that play in the space, so it’s possible to sit there for
a long time and just watch and listen. Everything is transcribed too. The cura-
tors sat with the tapes for weeks and weeks and transcribed everything – every
word, every hesitation, every um and ah. We have also recorded second- and
third-generation testimony that also appears in this space. This wasn’t just
individuals, it was siblings, parents and children, cousins. We wanted to try
and engage with the really complex ways that different generations have re-
sponded and to show how this is not even consistent within the families. This
testimony was filmed within the opening space of the Galleries so visitors
know that the people they are seeing talking were in the same spaces that they
are in too. This makes your relationship with it feel much closer.
This follows a room called ‘Responsibility and Judgement’, which is
about postwar trials, denazification, and the development of principles
around genocide. You do not have to stop in the final room, the room with
the testimony, but can follow a pathway to the exit. However, it has a second
function and is also a space for reflection. It mirrors ‘The Life Before’ in its
shape and structure, but there are no archival images in it and this should of-
fer a reminder of the first Galleries, which represents a full and dynamic set
of communities and cultures.
A few years ago, we went to the Czech Republic to visit the museum dedi-
cated to the memory of the town of Lidice, which was razed to the ground
by German forces in June 1942. It holds one of the best exhibitions I have
ever visited. It is really strong and very simple. They also save testimony to
the very end. You walk through the exhibition with contemporaneous history
and then you are suddenly confronted with people in the present offering
their reflections on their experiences in colour. I found it an extraordinarily
affecting thing to encounter and I’m hoping we might be able to achieve
something similar.
 Curating the Experiential 67

The final room also gives the opportunity to qualify what it means to be a
survivor, to say that survival is anomalous. Rather than suggesting that survi-
vors have the entirety of the last word, we have placed the screens beside the
piece that explains what happened to everyone mentioned in the Galleries –
many of whom were of course tragically murdered – so that there are various
voices. In this final space, we have also included an object. This was a tie
pin that Marek Kellerman brought to London from Bratislava in 1938 and
deposited in Barclays Bank before returning home. After the war, Barclays
were never able to trace him and they gave the object to us, and we never
managed to trace him either. Nothing is known about Marek Kellerman and
his wife. They do not show up on any records. This object then reminds us
about the limits of historical research and that ultimately this is a history
defined by incalculable loss.

BL: You have already spoken about scale, space, positionality, and audience ex-
pectation. In which ways has the concept of ‘landscape’ been crucial to the
curation of the new Galleries?

JB: We try to work with this in different ways. At the start, ‘The Presence of
Absence’ evokes landscape. For the outbreak of Operation Barbarossa, we
have a piece called ‘Massacres’, which is about the landscapes in which
mass murder occurred.1 There are three screens: one is at tipped floor level,
another is tipped at sky level, and a third is at eye level. The team went to
film in five different places where Einsatzgruppen shootings occurred.2 The
brief was very clear that there should be no sense that we were offering
visitors a 360° environment, or a sort of virtual reality experience. It was
rather about affect, textures, materiality, and tactility. There were a number
of strategies they were not allowed to use. At no point are there any zooms
or forward tracking shots that offer a sense of ominously moving forwards,
and the camera never goes directly upwards as if you are lying on the ground.
We did whatever we could to avoid any sense that we were somehow placing
visitors into the position of the victims in these sites. This was an idea, the
idea of using contemporary footage, that one of the designers came in with
early on and it has remained with various modifications. In part, it emerged
because there are so few objects to articulate that moment in time, but as an
approach, it also belies the notion of the Holocaust as a purely industrialised
phenomenon conducted in purpose-built sites (Image 3.2).
Mass killings did not only take place in gas chambers within death camps
but also in the same environments where people lived. We have attempted
to make clear that we can in no way reproduce or understand what the peo-
ple in those situations were experiencing, but we do know what it is like to
stand in some of the environments in which it occurred. We wanted to move
away from the sort of negative sublime, as it has been described, that creeps
68 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

IMAGE 3.2 ‘Massacres’ shows the landscapes in which mass murder occurred through
three screens: one is at tipped floor level, another is tipped at sky level, and
a third is at eye level. Copyright Imperial War Museum.

into some part of Holocaust consciousness and suggests that this took place
in a different realm or a different reality. Rather, we want to say that this is
actually brutal, bloody, barbaric mass murder that took place in forests, in
fields, in meadows, on beaches. It is grotesque and despicable, but it is also
infinitely human in all its dimensions. In this space, we also have a series of
what we call ‘place texts’ – the three screens offer footage of the sites and
these images are constantly revolving, and there are five fixed case stud-
ies about the places where this happened, using a contemporaneous land-
scape graphic of that place. These are known today as Babyn Yar (Ukraine),
Chișinău (Moldova), Škēde (Latvia), Lubny (Ukraine), and Paneriai (Lithu-
ania). There is a large landscape image of that site as it was at the time and
inset within it are the smaller historic photographs of what happened there.
The ‘place note’ offers wider context; for example, for Babyn Yar, the note
tells visitors that this means Babushka’s – grandmother’s – ravine, and that
the site was popular at the weekend for visitors to walk and relax. We want
to make sure that it is clear that these landscapes existed in the world and not
just as places that were waiting for these atrocities to occur. Liepāja is now
a tourist destination as a beach resort, which is shocking when you look at
the historical photographs of people being shot in the sand dunes – virtually
in the same place as people enjoy the beach today. I’m not saying that they
are necessarily doing anything wrong by doing so, incidentally, I just find the
radical juxtaposition really striking.
 Curating the Experiential 69

On the edge of the following space, we have a fixed image of the railway
buffer at the end of the spur line leading into Sobibór, which is the only
original piece of infrastructure from the camp that still exists. In relation to
the Reinhardt camps, David Cesarani used to talk about the fetishisation of
the gas chambers. We have tried very hard to respond to this problem and to
situate these camps in real space to reinforce the fact that these are not places
of the negative sublime; actually, they were practical, shambolic spaces with
basic technology. We are displaying a tile from one of the gas chambers at
Treblinka. Some of the board were worried that this risked making the object
a sort of death relic, but for me, it is the opposite. These were not magical or
mysterious places; they were just rooms made out of tiles and brick walls,
in improvised and rapidly assembled buildings. That is, there is nothing in-
conceivable about these objects, or something beyond our comprehension.
They are the nuts and bolts of the spaces that they killed people in. So, we
are trying to engage with the materiality of those spaces.
These are the main aesthetic engagements with the landscape. On a more
esoteric level, we use AV for audiences to engage with maps, but we also
want to ensure that they have some relationship to landscape or some kind
of tactile identity. The other AV piece we use landscapes for is Lili Jacob’s
album.3 The team went to Auschwitz and filmed around Birkenau. We used
the images from the Jacob album, though we did not overlay the images to
produce a ‘now’ and ‘then’ kind of effect. I researched the album and particu-
larly some of the recent work of Dr Stefan Hördler. We used the landscape at
Auschwitz to give the real-world context and the album photographs come in
as discrete entities. We do look to identify important details in the pictures.
For example, in one image, there is a group of girls covering their noses, and
we include some text that explains that the site was overwhelming and so was
the smell. The images from the album used to bother me in Holocaust gal-
leries because people often walk straight past them. If the museum does not
offer the full context, then visitors do not realise the enormous significance of
these images – these are people who are about to be killed. There is no time
bar on the video we have, which means someone might stop for only two
minutes and they might come back and watch it for longer, whereas some
visitors might watch it for ten minutes. I have tried to avoid time bars on all of
our materials. One of the differences between the previous exhibition and the
new one is the role of AV. Today, AV is a much more integral part of the whole
aesthetic of the exhibition, and this was not possible in the 1990s. Whether
this is because of advances in technology or design intent, I am not sure.

BL: For many curators today affect and immersion are important factors to con-
sider. How would you situate these terms in relation to the new Galleries?

JB: The Galleries is a space, so it is necessarily immersive. It really depends

upon how we define what that immersiveness means. It has become clear
70 James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease

to me that all of these spaces are a nexus of a range of different factors: the
underlying design, the use of AV, the text, but also the lighting and the sound
and the shaping of space itself. All of these are informed by the same phi-
losophy, but how they behave in relationship to each other is something else.
Sound is deconstructed, non-literal, non-mimetic, but it is still attempting to
create a sense of something concrete. What is difficult about sound is that
I think it is even harder to define than the other factors. I think it has to be
immersive – it is just really important that this immersiveness does not some-
how resolve itself. Again, I suppose it’s about the allure of mimesis and the
problems that emerge from that. I find mimetic sound, literal soundscapes,
really obstructively cliched and overdefined. You want visitors to leave the
Galleries with more questions than they had when they arrived, in a produc-
tive way.
People often ask me: how do you expect people to feel when they leave?
I have no idea, and I genuinely never have had. That is because I believe
people will behave within the spaces in different ways and respond to the
nature of the design and content in highly personal and personalised ways.
However, we have worked hard not to create anything that is explicitly emo-
tionally manipulative. These histories are too sensitive, they are too real, and
our responsibility to the people involved is too profound for us to engineer
their suffering in any way that would precipitate an emotional response. It
is intrinsically emotional because it is a dreadful history of suffering. So, it
should be emotional because of the history, not because we have attempted
to engineer that affect.
I would like people to leave the Galleries and say, ‘I have heard the word
Holocaust before and had a sense what that was, but I have never thought
about it like that’. And that might mean the human dimension, the way that it
happened and developed so iteratively, the role and responsibility of particular
individuals, or how it impacted people in different contexts. In terms of im-
mersion and its role, I think it’s important to be clear with ourselves that we are
not saying anything in the Galleries that someone could not find out for them-
selves on the internet. These histories are publicly available, and that is a big
difference between the historical moment in which the previous exhibition was
created and now. The information is so widely available. We have navigated
a route through that information, in a mode that hopefully is authoritative but
is not final – an authoritative account, not the authoritative account. The way
we have designed the text in the Galleries is supposed to allow for the fact that
our interpretation is only one of a series of different possible interpretations.
It is highly informed by Hayden White’s (2015) ideas about emplotment. We
have been very dogmatic about the display of text, which always has a specific
holder that shows a curator has placed it there, rather than giving the impres-
sion that the text ‘belongs’ to the displayed material. Another curator could
come through and lay out a different set of captions – or emplot it differently.
 Curating the Experiential 71

There is, clearly a difference between reading texts in space and reading text on
the page. Visitors come to the museum because of the experiential dimension
and, in that respect, it has to be immersive.
Our approach is Brechtian in some respects – we show our working pro-
cess and we show how the exhibition itself has been constructed. Visitors
can see the reverse side of flats – I often think of them like theatre flats – and
all of the large graphics have 3D form so that they are leaning against walls.
Every aspect of the Galleries has a tangible form. We did this to foreground
the act of constructing the narrative and assembling the assets, to literally
and figuratively to show the seams. We also did it to allow for and acknowl-
edge the gaps that exist between the constituent elements from which narra-
tive is constructed.

BL: There is always a critical distancing between the material and its interpretation?

JB: Yes, of course, we do this in theatre all the time. The work can offer criti-
cal distance but still be impactful and emotional. One does not preclude the
other, but it certainly determines where it is coming from.

Notes
1 Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi
Germany and some of its Axis allies, which started 22 June 1941.
2 Einsatzgruppen were the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany
that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting.
3 Also known as the Auschwitz Album, this is the only photographic evidence of Jews
arriving in Auschwitz or any other death camp.

Works Cited
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2015) ‘A Theatre of History: 12 Principles’, TDR:
The Drama Review 59(3): 49–59.
Kushner, Tony (2006) ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’,
Poetics Today 27(2): 275–295.
Strawson, Galen (2004) ‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio 17(4): 428–452.
White, Hayden (2015) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
4
THE MEANING OF WORKING
THROUGH THE PAST
Of Awkward Objects and Collateral Memories

Michal Kobialka

This chapter’s title is a reference to Theodor Adorno’s essay, ‘The Meaning of

Working Through the Past’. I argue that working through the past may well be
what is needed given the multiplicity of global and local crises in our present his-
torical moment, and the proliferation of often contradictory, ideologically imbued
meanings of what constitutes a past. More specifically, I propose to revisit the
2018/2019 exhibition, Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady [officially translated
into English as Terribly Close. Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust], cu-
rated by Erica Lehrer, Roma Sendyka, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych at
the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków and Wojtek Ziemilski’s performative action,
We Walked Just This Way, which was presented on 23 February 2019 in Kraków as
part of the Staging Difficult Pasts project. I shall focus on a moment of the encoun-
ter between the exhibition’s object, a wooden truck, and the performative action
of moving this object from the museal space to the Cricoteka, housing the Polish
theatre and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor’s objects and machines. By holding them
theoretically alongside, I will investigate the different approaches to objects, which
reference difficult pasts or awkward memories, while moving through the historical
and archived spaces of the post-war European history. This movement will touch
upon, one, Walter Benjamin’s, Theodor Adorno’s, and Henri Lefebvre’s forceful
statements about history and historical objects and, two, the work of Kantor with
awkward objects and collateral memories of the past in his present moment.

Theatre/Performance Historiography and the Object

With the post-1968 ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv), the
idea of a single, or universal, history had been displaced by multi-perspectival
pluralism of historical approaches projected from different, other, points of view.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-5
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 73

Thus, for the last few decades, feminist and lesbian studies, gay and queer stud-
ies, cultural and ethnic studies, and postcolonial and subaltern studies have been
engaged in a systematic analysis of coercive and disciplining modes of representa-
tion stored in the archive in order to combat a series of erasures and to recover the
‘Other’, traditionally marginalized, or silenced, subject. Employing various strate-
gies, scholars working in these fields of study have been reexamining dominant
institutions of knowledge and power, both real and symbolic, which control, shape,
and reproduce structures – the archives – whose very assembly and organization,
as is forcefully argued today, occlude certain historical subjects (Helton et al. 2015:
1). This occlusion draws attention to the irresolvable tension between recovery as
an imperative, which is fundamental to historical writing and research infused not
only with the cognitive values that solidify the practice of history in the academe,
but also with political urgency by scholars-activists, and the impossibility of recov-
ery, because the very assembly and organization of the archive dematerializes, not
to say, excarnates, historical subjects (Biddick 2016: 30).
The very awareness of the archive trouble, as outlined by Laura Helton et al and
by Kathleen Biddick, may help us realize that the meaning of staging a difficult
past or working through the past must not solely focus on a Manichean construc-
tion of meaning and an examination of the flows and imperfections of a system
of knowledge production or on erasures and occlusions of human and non-human
objects. Rather, it should critically confront that which determines the structure of
the past and its archivable contents (Derrida 1998: 90).
Bearing this in mind, let me ask: how are we to think about the ways of housing
the past (the archive, the event, and the object) as well as about the experience of
the past (time, space, matter) in our working through the past? And to be more pre-
cise, consider how increased attention to the meaning of working through the past
and the archive itself brought forward the possibility of treating the archive not as
a source of ‘a trustworthy reconstruction of the past’ but a subject that poignantly
reveals that, indeed, ‘nothing is more troubled and troubling […] than the concept
archived in the word “archive”’ (Derrida 1998: 90).
Thus, for example, since the 1960s, when the nations in Southeast Asia and
Africa were winning freedom from colonial powers, many researchers turned to
the eighteenth century in order to reconstruct pre-colonial histories. They did so
in order to build both indigenous and national narratives as well as archives for
the newly independent states as well as to offer the mode of counterreading of
the colonial archive, which interrogated the existing archives as artifacts of co-
lonial bureaucracy and imagination. Postwar historians of Germany emphasized
the toleration, liberalism, and internationalism of the Aufklärung’s bold motto of
sapere aude (dare to know things through reason) as a sort of antidote to Nazism’s
disdain for liberal democracy or the parliamentary system; and promotion of fer-
vent antisemitism, anti-communism, and scientific racism. However, in the after-
math of the reunification of Germany in 1990, they have been more skeptical about
any notion that the states of eighteenth-century Germany shared an enlightened,
74 Michal Kobialka

liberal culture and value system (and, thus, emphasized distinctive and fragmented
Enlightenments in different German regions). After 9/11, the attention of many of
the American academics was turned to the study of the Muslim–Christian relations.
In recent years, many scholars embraced new materialism, environmental history,
eco-criticism, performance as social practice, performative commons or collec-
tivities, and trans-perspectives, evoking the idea of mobility of identity, gender,
or ethnicity. In the year of the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2019,
scholars and cultural critics interested in the vagaries of historiography considered
a number of possibilities of how to think about that so-called post-historical condi-
tion as well as about the different pathways of how to address the idea of staging
difficult past by focusing on the performative and historiographic aspects of the
commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall on both sides of the divide. While
commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans
in the English colony of Virginia, The 1619 Project aims to reframe the US history
by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans
at the very center of the United States national narrative (Hannah-Jones 2021: xvii–
xxxiii). The book project explores the legacy of slavery in present-day America to
illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance as well as to show
how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American
society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion,
and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to the current moment,
contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which America operates today.
While precise motivations are subject to much debate, the war raging in Ukraine
and Gaza and the highly dynamic political war economy remind us that ‘essentially
it is a matter of the way in which the past is made present; whether one remains at
the level of reproach or whether one withstands the horror by having the strength
to comprehend even the incomprehensible’ (Adorno 1998: 100).
However, it is not only that the archive is treated as a subject and not just a
source, which is important, as these shifts and transformations in historiography
unequivocally suggest. I would like to add to this one more essential requirement:
that is, how one thinks about the (past and present) storing of the past cannot be
separate from the (past and present) experience of the past.
In ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, Giorgio
Agamben notes that

Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience

of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated.
[…] The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to
“change the world”, but also—and above all—to “change time”. Modern politi-
cal thought has concentrated its attention on history and has not elaborated a
corresponding concept of time.
(1993: 91)
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 75

Following Agamben, it could be argued that every conception of history is invari-

ably accompanied not only by a certain experience of time, but also by a certain
experience of space and objects/matter, which are implicit in and condition history.
That is to say, objects positioned in or moving through space are not passive
receptacles that fascinate us; rather, they draw attention to and are imbued with the
objective conditions that engendered them in time and space or to the ideologies
framing their structures of presence or our emotional structures. Briefly, in his 1937
essay ‘Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin investigates the
objects, which Fuchs possessed, that ruptured what was perceived at the time as
the continuum of a cultural development. Exploring Fuchs’ impulse to collect and
to archive the history of caricature, erotic art, and of the genre picture (Sittenbild) –
the ‘insignificant’ art forms as he calls them – Benjamin draws attention to a break
in the continuum of a cultural unfolding, which he explains using the distinction
between historicism and historical materialism (2002a: 225).
Historicism, according to Benjamin, is linked to the notion of history defined
as a meaningful narrative of progress in the West – a coherent and linear process,
which was described in detail by Leopold von Ranke and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel in the nineteenth century. Benjamin calls Ranke’s and Hegel’s history an
epic history. It is a history that promotes a contemplative attitude toward the ob-
ject and the past. It places the object along the narrative itinerary, which infuses
both the object and the past era into a linear totality that produces and justifies the
present.
Historical materialism is an antidote to this historicism. That is to say, works of
art, or objects, in a historically dialectical mode, illuminating a continuous process
of change, demonstrate how their reception becomes a component of the effect that
a work of art, or an object, has upon us today. Benjamin refers to this condition
of a continuous process of change as the state of unrest, which demands that the
contemplative attitude toward the object be abandoned in order for us to ‘become
conscious of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past
finds itself in precisely this moment’ (2002a: 227). In other words, as he states in
another context, the human sense of perception is determined by physiology/nature
and by historical circumstances as well (1988: 222). The goal of historical materi-
alism is therefore to replace the epic element with the constructive element, which
will liberate the forces that remain captive in historicism’s ‘once upon a time’. It is
directed ‘towards a consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of
history’ (2002a: 227). Thus, historicism presents the eternal image of the past; his-
torical materialism presents a given experience with the past, an experience which
stands unique.
As this last sentence suggests, historical materialism is connected with the ex-
perience of the present: with the desire of the subject for self-understanding as well
as for the understanding of the historical world-object. Rather than perceiving this
process as a structure of modernist emancipatory reason, which is delimited either
76 Michal Kobialka

by the anticipation of the future or by the preservation of the purity of the patrimo-
nial or theological heritage, it is a dialectical relationship with that world defined
by specific materiality existing here and now (jetztzeit). In his version of historical
materialism advocating a nonlinear historical temporality, Benjamin offers a dou-
ble gesture of bringing historical practice to the point of disruption. This disruption
reveals that ‘the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of [the] objects.
Ordered, however, according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding,
incomprehensible connection’ (1999: 207).
Benjamin’s comment about the world or world-historical events being present
and ordered in a specific way in and within the object, bring to mind a different
nuanced reading of objects in post–World War II Poland as well as, as I will argue
in the second part of this essay, today under the sign of a different historical and
ideological pressure. After the war, in 1947, the Polish visual and theatre artist
Tadeusz Kantor wrote:

While I was in Warsaw, I saw a piece of an iron bridge, which must have been
hit by a bomb.
I was struck by the sight of this incredible
c o m p r e s s i o n.
[I had] a shocking sensation of the force, which had done it;
unimaginable as a human force. […]
A thought crossed my mind that if someone, a joker, placed this piece of iron
as a monument on a public square,
in the future, the historians would, in its entangled form,
decipher the f o r c e s which governed our time.
(2005: 1:97, author’s translation)

For Benjamin and Kantor, this spatial experience of constellation lets the object/
fragment slip away from both the imperious presence of the metaphysical and
the presence of the regulated temporality, which structure their narratives along
a historical trajectory. This spatial aspect of a constellation resonates with Henri
­Lefebvre’s notion of spatial dialectics as discussed in The Production of Space.
Unlike dialectics based on an analysis of historical time and of temporality
(Hegel and Marx), in spatial dialectics, the notion of contradiction is not restricted
to temporality or historicity but draws attention to contradictions and conflicts in
space as well as to contradictions of space. As Lefebvre asserts:

Contradictions of space envelop historical contradictions, presuppose them,

superimpose themselves on them, carry them to a higher level, and amplify
them in the process of reproducing them. Once this displacement has been ef-
fected, the new contradictions may tend to attract all the attention, diverting
interest to themselves and seeming to crowd out or even absorb the old conflicts.
The impression is false however. Only by means of a dialectical analysis can
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 77

the precise relationships between contradictions in space and contradictions of

space be unraveled, and a determination made as to which are becoming attenu-
ated, which accentuated.
(1991: 334)

Following theses insights about the meaning of working through the past in
general – that is, about the archive and the object; about time, matter, and space;
about contradictions in space and contradictions of space revealing objects in the
state of unrest, I want to discuss the event, which was co-curated by the Staging
Difficult Pasts team, the Cricoteka and Roma Sendyka with the support of Kolek-
tyw Kuratorski in Kraków on 23 February 2019.

Awkward Object and Collateral Memories

This part of the essay is about a wooden toy truck.
In October 2018, the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków opened an exhibition,
Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady, curated by Erica Lehrer, Roma Sendyka,
Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych. It showcased the objects created by the
so-called folk or vernacular artists, also referred to as ‘naïve’ artists in Poland, and
how they attempted to represent the events they witnessed during World War II. The
collection of objects gathered by the curatorial team was unparalleled in its attempt
to examine the work produced by ordinary people, untrained Polish artists, hitherto
labeled unproblematically as folk or naïve artists. It drew attention to the variety of
motives and pressures that influenced the artists’ individual choices to represent the
Holocaust as a specifically Jewish event or framing it as Polish Catholic martyrol-
ogy or as a universal human tragedy (Lehrer et al. 2017: np). Faced with the objects
born of complex and different, often awkward, impulses, the curatorial team posed
a series of questions, which haunted the exhibition spaces: How did objects come
about? Who made them and why? What do they actually depict? How should we
look at them today? Can we treat them as witness to murder? Ultimately, how do
these objects, the awkward objects, participate in the staging of difficult pasts?
The exhibition space consisted of four galleries. The first gallery, called ‘Too
Close to See’, introduced artworks made by eyewitnesses to events of the Holo-
caust, whether it be watching their Jewish neighbors rounded up by the Germans
in their hometown, or someone imprisoned in a Nazi camp seeing the treatment of
other prisoners. The second gallery, titled ‘Histories’, was structured around two
parallel trajectories on the walls. The first trajectory began with a folk Polish bal-
lad, suggesting some form of a ‘cultural memory’ regarding what happened to the
Jewish neighbors; and continued with a kind of historical ‘timeline’ made up of
photographs of works not physically on display in the exhibition to show how each
major ‘phase’ of the Holocaust was depicted in Polish vernacular visual arts – from
persecution, ghettoization, and hiding to mass shootings, imprisonment in camps,
gassing, and cremation. The other trajectory comprised three works, from three
78 Michal Kobialka

different decades: a 1948 painting of village massacres of Jews by German soldiers,

a 1962 bas-relief series that copies iconic images from a 1958 photo-documentary
album about Polish martyrology, and a 2017 sculpture of the Jedwabne pogrom
(a massacre of Polish Jews on 10 July 1941) made by a Polish carver on commis-
sion by a German collector (Image 4.1).
In the third gallery, there were six tables, on each of which a single sculpture
was surrounded with archival documents and news clippings the curators came
upon in their research: the biographies of the makers, collectors, commissioners,
sellers: Poles, Germans, Jews; the Communist politics and propaganda; Polish
Catholicism; and popular cultural clichés – kitsch, violence, and sado-masochism.
In the fourth gallery, there were objects selected by the curators for their makers’
possible gestures of empathy coded into these objects (http://www.terriblyclose.eu/
exhibition/iv-emotions/). It is here that a wooden truck, described as truposznica,
as it was categorized by the Warsaw Ethnographic Museum, or a corpse carrier,
which was by Franciszek Wacek, was parked in the middle of the room.
In its design, the exhibition attempted to address the problem of the intolerability
of Holocaust images in terms of a politics of metonymy – to show how these objects
complicate accepted depictions of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; conflate

IMAGE 4.1 
A wooden bas relief from Gallery 2 of Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy
Zagłady [officially translated into English as Terribly Close. Polish Ver-
nacular Artists Face the Holocaust]. Photograph by Michal Kobialka.
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 79

Catholic and Jewish tropes of suffering; or challenge the perception of these objects
of yesteryear as ‘minor’, ‘peripheral’, or ‘awkward’ memorial objects of today.
But what to do with truposznica? Further research into its provenance revealed
that it was a copy of a real truck used in Kraków during World War II to transport
the dead bodies of the Polish Jews; and that it was built as a wooden toy truck by
Wacek to illustrate wartime stories and to teach history to local children, as noted
by his daughter (Lehrer and Sendyka 2019: 16). Let me ask again – what to do with
truposznica: leave it in the past as part of mnemohistory concerned with the past
as it is remembered by the very few who might have witnessed a corpse carrier on
the streets; leave it in a gallery space as part of that difficult past forcing us today to
acknowledge historical misdeeds; leave it in in the present as a material object of
reproach; or withstand the horror prompted by it by having the strength to compre-
hend even the incomprehensible; or give in to a cold forgetting, which had already
enveloped the oft-invoked scrutiny of the history of World War II, so that we can
contemplate the analogue or pixelated images of other genocides that crowd the
past and current historical moment (Adorno 1998: 98).
Taking a cue from Adorno, let me suggest that this toy in place of the specta-
cle of horror, this awkward object, beyond and above being a material object of
reproach, discloses historical and material tensions, contradictions, and inadequa-
tions, which are being made visible and concrete by its sheer presence in the gallery
space. Or, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, it is an object in the state of
unrest (2002a: 227); that is to say, an object which demands that the contemplative
attitude toward it be abandoned in order for us to ‘become conscious of the critical
constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past finds itself in precisely
this moment’ (2002a: Ibid.).
Let me elaborate on this last statement using the Kraków’s Staging Difficult Pasts
project, executed ‘in precisely this moment’, on 23 February 2019, as an example.
The Kraków’s Staging Difficult Pasts project was designed to explore multidi-
rectional memory housed in the object. By drawing together academic and artistic
imaginations and their singular modes of materializing thought, the ‘Staging Diffi-
cult Pasts’ research team, Maria Delgado, Bryce Lease, Cecilia Sosa, and I, wished
to bring forth hitherto marginalized or awkward memories of difficult pasts.
Truposznica, the focal point of the project, was to be removed from the facticity
of a gallery space and moved to the Cricoteka, housing the objects/machines and
the archives of the artist Tadeusz Kantor, whose objects used in the productions
from The Return of Odysseus (1944) to Today is My Birthday (1990) were to chron-
icle and register the troubling historical events of the twentieth century (Kobialka
2009). The encounter between truposznica and Kantor’s objects was to activate
traces of memory in these precarious objects inflicted with the violence of war – a
kind of necroperformance based on revitalizing historical remnants and the memo-
ries of excarnated bodies (Sajewska 2019: 378–380). Truposznica’s awkward pres-
ence in the space of the gallery was framed by a conceptual framework for the
exhibition. As such, it contributed to the current debates about ‘difficult heritage’.
80 Michal Kobialka

Truposznica’s awkward presence in the space of the Cricoteka was to activate a

temporary alternative culture archive, evoking its multilayered ‘objectness’ in the
encounter with other historical remnants – Kantor’s documents, artworks, and ma-
chines. Placed among Kantor’s historical remnants, Truposznica called attention to
itself and demanded that it be given a place in this non-canonical reflection on our past.
In collaboration with the curators of the exhibition and the Cricoteka, the ‘Staging
Difficult Pasts’ research team invited a Polish visual and performance artist, Wojtek
Ziemilski, to create a performative action of moving truposznica from the Ethno-
graphic Museum to the Cricoteka on 23 February 2019.
Truposznica’s movement between the two sites was momentous. Not only did it
link these two institutions together, but, and maybe more importantly, truposznica’s
spatial trajectory through Kraków’s urban space inadvertently drew attention to its
differential character – how this urban space was used during World War II and
how it is used in the twenty-first century. The urban space – a street outside of the
Ethnographic Museum, which leads to the bridge across the Vistula River to the
other side, where the Kraków Ghetto used to be during World War II, but whose
absence is now marked only by empty iron chairs standing scattered around on a
square-monument near the Cricoteka – became thus a mechanism of anamnesis
producing cultural spectacle whose effect/affect could not be fully anticipated.

We Walked Just this Way

While working on the conceptual framework of this performative action, Ziemilski
abandoned his initial impulse to structure this action as a funeral cortege, a sort of a
religious dirge or theatre of death, when it became clear to him that truposznica is a
copy. ‘A copy repeats that which is to be understood by us today. […] It translates
and localizes the past into that which is the representation of the present intelligi-
bility’ (2019: np). A copy, thus, as it could be argued after Plato’s and Aristotle’s
treatment of the relationship between the model and its representation, is a legible
text that speaks of history (the past) while being situated in history (the present).
However, a copy, to paraphrase Jacques Rancière, is also ‘an organization of the
sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single
regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness
on all. [A copy] means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside,
reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification. To reconfigure
the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the
possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities. […] A new topography
of the possible’ (2009: 48, 49). And it is this aspect of truposznica as a copy that is
of interest to me.

This is how Ziemilski describes his performative action, We Walked Just This Way:
I don’t have access. Not to the experience of other people. Not to the events.
Not to the source. I had heard about the original sculpture—Truposznica.
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 81

This is how it was named by its author, Franciszek Wacek. Trup means corpse.
This truck, as the description reads, transported the dead bodies of the Jews for
burning. (Yes, across this bridge, too.)
I am looking at it now. The tangibility of the wood, its sensuality—it is not
the driver’s features that impress me, but the features of the wood.
I do not, fortunately, have access to the suffering of other people.
I am safely hidden behind my sympathy. It protects me.
Slowly, the numbers game meets sympathy: how many were they? How
many passed through? How many stayed behind? How many on which side?
The algebra of absence.
This is no longer a single toy. This is no longer a singular experience. It’s
growing into an entire constellation of sympathies—our contemporary constel-
lation, with so many features washed out, only slightly engraved by our own
stories.
We carry the burden.
But not on our shoulders.
Because this is not our burden. Our contemporary bodies will not be burdened.
Let us then drag it behind us. The absurd toys, dispassionately symbolizing
suffering. […]
And so it happens: we haul the burden.
If at all possible, together. If at all possible, consciously.
The burden is light, as we are of this lightness made.
(2019: np)

Indeed, 90 3D printer copies of truposznica, reminiscent of an old-fashioned toy

on a string, were pulled behind the participants, young and old, who came to the
Ethnographic Museum.
They pulled them along the streets and across the bridge to the Cricoteka. It
was not the sight of 90 people dragging a little toy-size truposznica that stopped
the traffic. It was the noise they were making on the cobblestones; a scratching,
unsettling noise giving rise to a more acute sense of hearing obliterating the aes-
theticized perception of a copy and awakening the state of unrest caused by unre-
solvable dissonance. Once they reached the Cricoteka, 90 truposznicas were placed
among Kantor’s objects and machines. The wooden truposznica was also trans-
ported from the Ethnographic Museum to the Cricoteka. It was carried in a wooden
box evoking Kantor’s Emballage (from the French emballer to wrap, pack), whose
content ‘must be isolated, protected from trespassing, ignorance, and vulgarity’
(Kantor 1993a: 81). Upon the arrival at the Cricoteka, truposznica was placed next
to Kantor’s Trumpet of the Last Judgement, an object from Where are the Snows
of Yesteryear cricotage (1979) and its soundscape – ‘Es Brent’ [it is burning] by
Mordechai Gebirtig who was murdered in the Kraków Ghetto in 1942.
The bringing of truposznica to the Cricoteka was not accidental. Kantor was one
of the visual artists who contributed to our understanding of what is or constitutes
82 Michal Kobialka

Truposznica on display in the Ethnographic Museum. Participants

IMAGES 4.2 AND 4.3 
walking from the museum to the Cricoteka, Kraków, pulling 3D
printer copies of Truposznica. Photograph courtesy of Michal
Kobialka.
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 83

‘difficult’ in the historiography of staging difficult pasts. In his case, the problem
addressed in his productions, such as The Return of Odysseus (1944), The Country
House (1961), or Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes (1973), is not whether genocide
can be put into images or performance. It is how it is and what kind of narrative is
woven by a particular representational practice; what kind of empathy is prompted
by the construction of a particular image; what kind of gaze and consideration are
created by them; and what history is pushed into the background? These questions
were relevant then and are equally relevant in the twenty-first century, if we are to
save the past from degenerating into its own caricature and forgetting.

In ‘Milano Lessons: Lesson 1’, Kantor noted:

1944. KRAKÓW. CLANDESTINE THEATRE. THE RETURN OF ODYS-
SEUS FROM THE SIEGE OF STALINGRAD.
Abstraction, which existed in Poland until the outbreak of World War II,
disappeared in the period of mass genocide. This is a common phenomenon.
Bestiality, brought to the fore by this war, was too alien to this pure idea….
Realness was stronger.
Also, any attempt to go beyond it came to naught.
The work of art lost its power.
Aesthetic re-production lost its power.
The anger of a human being trapped by other human beasts cursed
A R T. We had only the strength to grab the nearest thing,
THE REAL OBJECT
and to call it a work of art!
Yet,
it was a P O O R object, unable to perform any functions in life, an object
about to be discarded.
(1993b: 211)

While confronting us with Penelope, sitting in a chair, in the 1944 production of

The Return of Odysseus, Kantor seemed to suggest that the chair – the real object –
in a room destroyed by World War II not only existed outside of the dominant artis-
tic conventions defining it as a theatrical prop, but also exploded the epoch out of its
reified historical continuity. In other words, the staging of The Return of Odysseus,
and the bodies as well as the objects in it, took place in the war reality (­Kobialka
2009: 40–47). However, the event and the bodies as well as the objects were not
of that reality, which stripped them of their historical and cultural signifying fea-
tures. Bereft of their identities, these useless objects – a cartwheel smeared with
mud, a decayed board, a scaffold spattered with plaster, or a kitchen chair – named
themselves in this present, resisting ‘by their form alone the course of the world’
(Adorno 2002: 3004). They were formed in history without surrendering either
to the sovereignty of what came before (the past) or to the implacable exigencies
of the utopian performative (the future). The uncompromising radicalism of this
84 Michal Kobialka

work refused to play along with the culture that had given birth to murder; or with
the realm where genocide had already become part of the heritage archived in the
photomontages that one does not want, or knows how, to see.
Remembering Kantor’s words about the 1944 production of The Return of
Odysseus and how lucid consciousness prompted by the objects found in the war
zone breaks the contemplative attitude toward history and forces his audiences
to face the forces that governed their and our time, let us return to the Cricoteka
gallery space where truposznica landed. Here, in this gallery, truposznica, placed
near The Trumpet of the Last Judgement, shared the space with the school-desks, a
cross, a bed, a soldier’s uniform, a frame, an oven with a chimney. These objects,
which helped spectators grasp an epoch from small symptoms, crowded the space
of Kantor’s annexed reality, challenging a traditional concept of representation af-
firming life; of his Autonomous, Informel, Zero, Happening, and Impossible thea-
tres, whose function was to depreciate the value of reality through exploring its
unknown, thus far hidden aspects, or its marginalized, degraded, everyday objects;
or of his theatre of intimate commentaries, in which his room of imagination, that
was never stable and always in flux, became a storeroom for objects from past
encounters and bio-objects, which created an indivisible totality with the actors
(Kobialka 2009: 27–94). These objects, like the objects in The Return of Odysseus,
were always determinate negations that would illuminate a continuous process of
change; reveal the object’s state of unrest and the consciousness of the present,
which explodes the continuum of history; and intimate that, indeed, the world is
present, and ordered, in each of the objects.
Kantor’s impulse to collect and to archive the insignificant or useless objects,
which ruptured the smooth surface of cultural and historical conditions, and the
praxis of deciphering from the objects the forces that governed their and our epoch,
have a potential to challenge the spectator.
Similarly, the 1967 truposznica by Wacek and the 90 3D printer copies of tru-
posznica by Ziemilski are a reminder of that civilization and power regimes that
rationalized the existence of the willing executioners, who turned human bodies
into soap and ashes in Auschwitz some 40 miles from Kraków. Kantor’s and Ziem-
ilski’s materialization of an object brings to mind Jean-François Lyotard statement
in ‘Music, Mutic’ that ‘[t]he art of the work of art is always a gesture of space-
time-matter’ (1993: 217). The question is: what space; what time; and what matter?
This gesture cannot be a semantic or ethnographic sign operating with a particular
culture or an emphatic movement of the body. Neither is it a necroperformance
striving to revitalize historical remnants; nor a Brechtian gestus conveying particu-
lar social attitudes adopted by the speaker toward other people (Brecht 1986: 104).
Looking at truposznicas in the Cricoteka gallery, I became aware that it is not
the archival accumulation of the traces of a history in those objects that matters.
Rather, these objects cancel their original function and are transformed into mes-
sages of protest. An object, associated with a specific activity, culture, language,
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 85

politics, and the labor of people, is also saturated with the experience of a world
and, as such, identifies its complex, multilayered history. This object draws atten-
tion away from its immediate experience and use-value to its historiographic struc-
ture. It does so by exposing a differential character between the function imposed
upon it and the newly acquired force of negation, which is also a critique of the
politics of historical amnesia in Poland at the time of the growing nationalism and
populism. Truposznica in the Cricoteka space, where it is surrounded by Kantor’s
objects and machines, is both truposznica in history (which references its World
War II history) and truposznica of histories (which references its place in the past
and today’s troubling political environment in Poland).
Thus, as evidenced by Ziemilski’s truposznica, the role of the work of art/per-
formance is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to expose inter-
nal contradictions, including the contradictions within a historical reality. If such
a possibility is tenable, Ziemilski may have escaped the trap of the ‘pseudo-reality
and actionism that aggravate [themselves] for the sake of [their] own publicity’
(Adorno 1998: 291). He did so by establishing a different trajectory of thinking
about art already intimated by Benjamin in his 1937 essay, ‘The Author as Pro-
ducer’. In it, Benjamin contends that the revolutionary strength of artworks con-
sisted of their ability to test art for its authenticity and ability to exist contrary to
the apparatuses of production and publication which aim at the aestheticization of
reality. Brecht’s Epic Theatre is offered as an example of a process, which coun-
teracts the bourgeois and the established view of art by disclosing the factors and
the forces which aestheticized the possible alternatives to the dominant status quo.
Epic Theatre counteracts Aristotelian Theatre; montage of scenes counteracts a lin-
ear plot development of illusion in the audience. ‘The task therefore consisted of
an Umfunktionierung of the form’ (Benjamin 2002b: 263) – of not reproducing
the situation, but of astonishing the audience at the circumstances and conditions
under which they functioned. This discovery of the conditions under which they
functioned would take place through the interruption of the events unfolding before
them and the paralysis of the audience’s readiness for empathy.
I wish to argue that Benjamin’s comments on the technique of a work of art and
on an Umfunktionierung of the form, as well as Kantor’s remarks about the forces,
which governed a resurrected, post–World War II culture, are most relevant to the
political and ideological conditions under which Ziemilski encountered the materi-
ality of this object. We Walked Just This Way, if it is to be critical, should be viewed
in terms of an Umfunktionierung of the form.
Dragging truposznica behind me and seeing it together with Kantor’s objects
surrounding it, I become conscious of the constellation in which truposznica bears
witness to non-synchronous temporalities, which refer to bodies that are an object
of speech without themselves having a chance to speak. I become conscious of
the constellation in which truposznica bears witness to asymmetrical spatialities,
which reveal contradictions between spaces of representation (the street used to
86 Michal Kobialka

transport the dead bodies and the street today – the uncanny archive of the excar-
nated) and within a space of representation, where, though we can no longer see
suffering bodies, a new distribution of the visible changes the landscape of the pos-
sible. Such might be the suspensive response to this brief inquiry into the ‘difficult’
in difficult pasts.
Ziemilski’s performative action, We Walked Just This Way, ruptured the smooth
surface of cultural and historical conditions that governed the past and the pre-
sent epoch. The presence of these objects in Kraków unequivocally suggests ‘that
what is conscious could never prove so fateful as what remains unconscious, half-
conscious, or preconscious. Essentially, it is a matter of the way in which the past
is made present’ (Adorno 1998: 100).
Thus, truposznica’s movement between the Ethnographic Museum and the
Cricoteka on 23 February 2019 evoked the idea of truposznica moving through
the streets of Kraków during World War II and the Holocaust. Like Kantor’s poor
object from 1944, truposznica houses the past and the experience of the past. Tru-
posznica’s movement between the Ethnographic Museum and the Cricoteka on 23
February 2019 activated the tension between memories at once past and present.
Truposznica’s movement between the Ethnographic Museum and the Cricoteka on
23 February 2019 activated ‘collateral’ memories – the memories of the excarnated
or the memories of those which refuse to fall victim to cold forgetting while digital
addlement reduces them to just another horrific event “somewhere” – unless we
are ready to accept that working through the past, as recent events in the world
can attest to, will always inadvertently degenerate into the repetition of the worst.
Kantor’s 1968 ‘Emballage humain’ (Human Emballage), presented at what used to
be the Nazi party rally grounds in Nürnberg, is a reminder of an empty and cold
forgetting trying to gloss over the conditions that engendered fascism. His words
probe deeply into the current situation:

It is to feel Tantalus’ torment to see that we did not do

What should have been done.
That we did not act on what could have been acted upon
That we did not protect that which could have been protected
That we did not hide, wrapped and taken away
That which could have been hidden—before the deluge came
Before the first shot was fired
Before a crow shrieked
Before a car drover over the image of a human—
We could have done other things, too, before….
Will we be saved from re-membering, or?
Perhaps, it was possible to destroy that which destroys us today
It would have been necessary to push aside what is on our path today
It would have been necessary to look at the rosy pictures again
Deception, false comfort, and attempts to calm us down
 The Meaning of Working Through the Past 87

And chase them away

It would have been necessary to wrap and hide
What is the most precious, so that we could have it again.
An artist protects and destroys, destroys and protects the feeling.
(Kantor 1968: np; author’s translation)

Let me live with and walk with these awkward objects and collateral memories of
the past in the present moment of working through the past. As Benjamin, Adorno,
Kantor, and Ziemilski unambiguously state referencing the discourses in their
times of awkward objects and collateral memories, only when the trauma of the
loss of representational reality and the temporal duality of a construction of mean-
ing are eliminated, is a new topography possible. In other words, a new topography
of the possible can materialize only when the causes of what happened here and
there have been worked through, as Adorno would have it. Since is not it true that:

The past will have been working through only when the causes of what hap-
pened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist
does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.
(Adorno 1998: 103)

And this insight may be the mandate bequeathed to us all.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor (1998) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W.
Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press.
——— (2002) ‘Commitment’, in Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt (eds), The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, pp. 300–318.
Agamben, Giorgio (1993) Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter (1988) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed), New
York: Schocken Books.
——— (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
——— (2002a) ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Geb-
hardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, pp. 225–253.
——— (2002b) ‘The Author as Producer’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, pp. 254–269.
Biddick, Kathleen (2016) Make and Let Die, Middletown, DE: Punctum Books.
Brecht, Bertolt (1986) Brecht on Brecht, trans. John Willett, New York: Hill and Wang.
Derrida, Jacques (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2021) The 1619 Project: A New Origin, New York: One World.
Helton, Laura, Justin Leroy, Max A Mishler, Samantha Seely, and Shauna Sweeney (2015)
‘The Question of Recovery’, Social Text 33(4): 1–18.
Kantor, Tadeusz (1968) ‘Emballage humain’ (unpublished ms).
88 Michal Kobialka

——— (1993a) ‘The Emballage Manifesto’, in A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays
and Manifestos, 1944–1990, trans. and with the critical commentary by Michal Kobialka,
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 77–81.
——— (1993b) ‘Milano Lessons: Lesson 1’, in A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays
and Manifestos, 1944–1990, trans. and with the critical commentary by Michal Kobialka,
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 208–212.
——— (2005) ‘Klisze przyszłości’, in Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz (ed.), Tadeusz Kantor:
Pisma, 3 vols, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, vol. 1, p. 97.
Kobialka, Michal (2009) Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre, Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Lehrer, Erica, Roma Sendyka, Magdalena Zych, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Diana Marsh (2017)
‘Awkward Objects of Genocide’, Anthropology News, 58 (27 February): 240–246.
Lehrer, Erica and Roma Sendyka (2019) ‘Arts of Witness or Awkward Objects? Vernacular
Art as a Source Base for “Bystander” Holocaust Memory in Poland’, Holocaust Studies
25(3): 1–29.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1993) Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele, Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.
Sajewska, Dorota (2019) Necroperformance: Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body,
Zurich: Diaphanes.
Ziemilski, Wojciech (2019) We Walked Just This Way (manuscript, np). See also: https://
www.stagingdifficultpasts.org/objects-in-the-state-of-unrest.
5
ON CRYING PERPETRATORS AND
SUBVERSIVE LAUGHTER
Trans-Affiliative Encounters inside ESMA
Memory Museum

Cecilia Sosa

Two decades ago, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett proposed thinking of the museum

as a ‘theatre, a memory place, a stage for the enactment of other times and places, a
space of transport, fantasy, dreams’ (1998: 139). Since then, different elaborations
have been produced to account for the provocative encounter between museums
and theatres, including the note of alarm raised by Johannes Birringer, who argued
that participation has become the current fetish in museums and galleries and visi-
tors are just compelled to follow the script (2011: 48). In parallel, from the field
of cultural memory, museums have been thought of as sites of political engage-
ment where affiliate and empathic narratives can be created and displayed for pub-
lic consideration and debate (Assmann 2014, Landsberg 2004, Arnold-de Simine
2019). Museums can be thought of as strategic spaces for developing affiliative
narratives in response to traumatic pasts (prosthetic memories) and experiential
and immersive forms of engagement for wider audiences, who might not necessar-
ily be contemporary to those historical events.
With these intersectional considerations in mind, I analyse a series of performa-
tive interventions that took place in ESMA Memory Museum in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, in 2019 under the title, ‘Pasados Conflictivos en Escena’ (Conflictive
Pasts on Stage). These events were part of the project ‘Staging Difficult Pasts:
Of Narratives, Objects and Public Memory’, where I was employed as a post-
doctoral researcher. The first of these, The Impossible Scene, was a site-specific
performative installation created by Polish visual artist and theatre director Wojtek
Ziemilski. The second, Cuarto Intermedio: Guía práctica para audiencias de lesa
humanidad (Recess: A Practical Guide for Trials Against Humanity), created by
local artists, proposed a guided tour around the ESMA trials that investigate the
crimes committed inside the Museum during the dictatorship. As part of our pro-
ject, Recess could be performed in the very place of the crime for the first time.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-6
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
90 Cecilia Sosa

In this chapter, I will argue that through this event, our project managed to pro-
vide a grounded exploration of how contemporary theatre and performance, in col-
laboration with museums, might contribute to a more inclusive and transnational
politics of memory and grief. The examination of the conflicting affects developed
within these two performance pieces might also shed light on key challenges and
future lines of research around museums, theatre, and transnational memory.
Performance Studies scholar Laurie Beth Clark argued that sites of trauma tend
to function as ‘counter-sites’, cut-out mirrors from the reality where the particular
social dilemmas of each society are played out with new intensity (2011: 69). Since
its inauguration in May 2015, the Memory Museum located in the former Navy
School of Mechanics (ESMA) has had a central role in this debate. The building,
which functioned as an Officer’s Casino during the dictatorship, was the largest
of the 340 clandestine detention centres that operated in the country during the
1976–1983 dictatorship, in which 30,000 thousand lives were lost.1 More than
5,000 men and women – mostly left-wing activists – were ‘disappeared’, after
being held captive, and tortured in the building, eventually drugged and thrown
alive from airplanes into the River Plate as part of the so-called ‘flights of death’.
Most of the bodies were never found. The Casino also had a clandestine maternity
ward where the majority of the c.500 babies of pregnant political prisoners born
there were stolen by military personnel, or families close to them, and raised under
falsified identities.2
When democracy was recovered in 1983, the Navy School of Mechanics, maybe
the most iconic symbol of Argentina’s dictatorship, became a focal point for public
anxieties. The ex-military compound is enclosed in one of the wealthiest areas
of Buenos Aires comprising 45 buildings within 170,000 square meters. In 2004,
the then recently elected President Nestor Kirchner promised to transform the site
into a ‘space of memory’ (Menzulio 2013). The former Navy School now hosts
national offices and archives, the headquarters of victims’ associations, including
two different sections of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the House of the Identity,
which belongs to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the House of the Militancy,
administrated by the Children of the Disappeared, the building 30 mil compañeros
Presentes, administrated by the Relatives of the disappeared, and Memory Abierta,
a network of associations promoting memory and human rights. In addition, the
space also hosts the Malvinas-Falklands war museum, the Argentine Forensic An-
thropology Team, and a vibrant cultural centre named after the disappeared writer
Haroldo Conti.
The dilapidated Officers’ Casino, the actual site of torture and incarceration,
remained empty and largely untouched for years. In May 2015, a Museum of
Memory was inaugurated in the building. After a decade of contentious debates, a
team of experts led by art historian (and a survivor from ‘Vesubio’, another deten-
tion centre) Alejandra Naftal designed and installed the curatorial script. The team
had to deal with a crucial fact: since the events that took place inside the former
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 91

Casino were, and still are, under legal investigation, the building itself could not
be modified. With no objects to be displayed, the Museum’s core collection re-
mained the testimonies of victims and survivors. ‘To enlighten without altering’
was the curatorial tagline. When I first visited the Museum in December 2015, I
was fascinated to see how the legal constraint, which dramatically narrowed the
possibilities for intervening in the space, had shaped a unique curatorial process. A
succession of different ‘stations’ guided by floating walkways, staged the historical
and (para)military uses of the building, featuring a mix of survivors’ testimonies
and archival research. Removable platforms allowed visitors to circulate around
contextual information, inscribed on information tablets. The building emerged as
an ‘unplugged’ installation, a living, intelligent artefact of screens, holograms, and
sounds that if disconnected would leave the building in the condition in which it
was found in 2004.
Despite or because of these constraints, ESMA Memory Museum managed to
emerge as a ‘counter-site’ of memory. Even during the 2015–2019 conservative
government, in which Mauricio Macri’s administration managed to actively de-
flect the public gaze from issues surrounding human rights violations, the museum
became the stage where local political dramas were enacted on a small scale. As I
have argued elsewhere, these social dramas have been mostly attached to the pos-
sibility of transferring the experience of mourning from the network of associations
created by the relatives of the victims, which I have referred to as the ‘wounded
family’ (Sosa 2014: 29), to the wider society.
In tune with other global memory institutions that have been trying to use live
performance to provide ‘an encounter’ with a past that is ‘brought to life’ (Jack-
son and Kidd, 2011: 1), the ESMA Memory Museum sought to launch disparate
exhibitions, forums, and activities to involve new audiences. One of these, La
visita de las 5 [The 5 o’clock Visit], became an established part of the muse-
um’s itinerary between 2016 and 2022. Every last Saturday of the month, special
guests were invited to take part in conversation with the audience while touring
around the museum. Survivors, relatives, lawyers, journalists, philosophers, art-
ists, and comedians all interacted with museum visitors while promoting a novel
engagement with the building. Each visit highlighted the liminal character of
the institution from disparate perspectives, including those of women and lgbtq+
survivors once held there, contributing to new possible narratives of Argentina’s
difficult past.
The Staging Difficult Pasts research team’s collaboration with the museum
translated into two of these events: ‘Conflictive Pasts on Stage’ that took place on
30 November 2019 and ‘The disappeared from Spain and Argentina: Art, Testi-
mony, and Justice’ on 25 July 2020.3 The former marked an important milestone in
the history of the museum: it was the first time that a visit was organised in partner-
ship with a transnational project and, more importantly, the first time that a foreign
artist could design and lead an artistic installation inside the museum.
92 Cecilia Sosa

The Impossible Scene and the Crying Perpetrator

It is a Saturday afternoon. The audience is seated in the empty room inside the
former Casino, waiting for the performance to start. The Impossible Scene can be
read on the screen projected onto the wall. This area of the museum, known as ‘The
House of the Admiral’, used to be the quarters of Ruben Chamorro. Chamorro was
the Navy School’s director between 1976 and 1979 and directly responsible for
Task Group 3.3.2, who handled the kidnapping and incarceration of prisoners in
the detention centre. The ‘chalet’ house had an independent entrance and its own
intercom system, which still shows traces of past glamour. Chamorro invited his
family to spend weekends in the house. ‘The everyday and the sinister’ is the cura-
torial text at the entrance, signposting that a regular family routine took place while
next-door inmates would circulate up and down the stairs, chained and hooded as
they were dragged to torture sessions.
Although it is a warm spring day outside, the room is dark and stiflingly hot. The
benches are slightly uncomfortable, the close proximity of the audience means I
can hear the breathing of the people sitting around me. A projection starts. Specta-
tors can see the huge face of a man projected on the wall. He is in his 60s and his
face looks contorted. The image is so large and detailed that it is possible to see
his trembling chin and the length of the hair of his beard. As his wrinkles deepen
through visible anxiety, he starts moaning and asking for forgiveness. His effort
feels inadequate; tears are not coming. The image is upsetting. After a few minutes
of projection, a short man in his 60s comes into the room and stands next to the
screened image. Spectators soon realise that the person on stage is the same one
whose magnified face is part of the footage projected onto the wall. The contrast is
uncanny. While looking at his improbable alter-ego, the man explains to the audi-
ence: ‘Crocodile tears. That’s what I think when I think of a crying perpetrator.
I feel manipulated’.
The silence in the room is awkward. The intervention marked the last day of
Wojtek Ziemilski’s three-week residency in the museum, which was the result of a
collaboration with Argentine actor and theatre director Rubén Szuchmacher – the
performer who stands before the audience. Today is Szuchmacher’s first time in the
building. One of his sisters was ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship. Since then,
he has been reluctant to enter the premises of the former detention centre, even
when it was transformed into a museum.4
Suspended in the darkness, projected onto the wall of the former Admiral’s
house, Szuchmacher’s face acts as the metonymic, virtual presence of the perpetra-
tor in the room, part of the immaterial traces of the past hosted in the building. The
man standing in front of his own image, says:
‘What shall I do with this? I cannot watch this. He is not human. I don’t want
him to cry’.
The performer’s inquiry – ‘What shall I do with this?’ – is effectively an articula-
tion of the core question that the research team sought to address after approaching
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 93

Naftal to ask whether there were any particular areas she and her team found dif-
ficult to curate. Naftal’s answer was straightforward: the basement, the kitchen, and
the Admiral’s flat. For his installation, Ziemilski chose the latter. He already knew
that the two-bedroom flat, with its polished floors and independent entrance, had
been left empty since the building became a museum.5 There was one exception: a
TV in the middle of the room played a fragment of a testimony from the 1985 tri-
als on a loop from Andrea Krichman, a schoolfriend of Chamorro’s daughter, who
describes a visit to the flat when she was 11 years old.6 For Ziemilski’s interven-
tion, the TV was removed from the room, but the performance managed to capture
another relentless loop, one of a failed begging for forgiveness.
The Impossible Scene unfolded as a short performance of around 20 minutes,
which consisted of an engagement between the performer and the projected image
of the same performer showcasing an endless loop of attempts to cry, accompa-
nied by the screen performer’s cacophony of convoluted words without a linear or
clear structure. The performance managed to create a ‘fracture’ in the audience’s
experience of the museum, articulated through a split. There were two characters
in dispute with each other: the image of the so-called ‘perpetrator’ projected on the
screen and the man standing in front of us who confronted the projected image: ‘I
do not need his tears. I need information and justice’. I had the sense of a growing
tension radiating between the ‘live’ and the ‘mediated’ performance. A ubiquitous
question appears to circulate through the room: might the distressing figure pro-
jected on the screen be claiming responsibility for the crimes committed inside
the building? As a significant proportion of the audience already knew, those were
crimes against humanity, crimes judged in civil trials.7 In fact, those responsible for
the crimes had never asked for forgiveness. Barely any of them had given details of
the fate of the disappeared.8 As such, the projected image of a perpetrator begging
forgiveness and attempting to cry provoked two further key questions: is this fic-
tion? And what or whose fantasies are being staged? While fracturing the figure of
the performer, Ziemilski’s intervention also fractured the present. Spectators were
lost in time. The artifice of performance generated a disturbing sense of hide-and-
seek where tears would not emerge. If the perpetrator was not able to cry, was it
because he does not really repent? Why does repentance matter? When museums
all around the world have insistently relied on emotions to provide visitors with a
closer engagement with the past, why do the crocodile tears designed by a Polish
artist in a southern corner of the world even matter? The title of the intervention –
The Impossible Scene – stood as a provocation.
As some local critics have argued (Dandán 2019, Fernández Romeral 2019), the
image of a crying represor (repressor), the traditional vernacular term for a perpetra-
tor in Argentina, seemed to be recalling a redemptive narrative, a pious invocation
which might even lean towards fantasies of reconciliation. Yet, this image contrasts
sharply with what has emerged as Argentina’s post-dictatorship imaginary. Since
1985, when the head of the Military Junta had to bear witness in civil court, the
distinctiveness of the local transition had been attached to the possibility of justice,
94 Cecilia Sosa

the main path for the still resilient and powerful mantra Nunca Más: Never again
(Crenzel 2011, Franco and Feld 2015, Salvi 2012).9 Thus, the coerced attempts at
regret coming from an improbable perpetrator, whose tears the spectators never
manage to see, were likely to be received with disbelief and scepticism.
However, the fracture of time in the performance provoked reflections on an
ethics of engagement, compelling the audience to critically assess the split of a per-
former who was at the same time the perpetrator and the entity who resisted him.
The installation thus helped to create an empathetic bond between the viewers and
the live performer who dared to confront this avatar. The figure of the perpetrator
emerged as a fictional character, something that was not there before, a process that
was activated through the performance, an amplified, confrontational relationship
which had emerged as part of an immersive experience within the context of recep-
tion. The perpetrator emerged as a sort of medium, an artificially created presence
that activated an affective platform to circulate the audience’s response to those
responsible for the dictatorship’s crimes.
Within the process of preparing the public intervention at the museum, both
the commissioned artist and the researchers involved in the project were part of
complex discussions with the Museum’s Director and the board. The latter, mostly
formed by human rights organisations and relatives of the victims – fathers, moth-
ers, and children of those held at the building during the dictatorship – were uneasy
at the prospect of having an outsider, a Polish artist, and questioned the ethics
of developing an artistic work in a former site of torture and profound trauma in
Argentina. At that stage, Ziemilski had not yet decided what form his intervention
would take. Even before arriving in Buenos Aires, he had been sketching ideas,
including the possibility of working with augmented reality and some VR applica-
tions he mostly used to play with his three-year-old son. The idea of a duplicated
perpetrator would only come later.
Ziemilski’s replies to the board’s questions involved sharing his experience of
growing up alongside diverse forms of public commemorations of the Holocaust
in Poland. As the only local researcher in the team, I reiterated the aims of creating
transnational dialogues among different traumatic pasts that could resonate differ-
ently in Argentina, Chile, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the countries
involved in our project. The board did not appear entirely convinced. The day of
the performance, Naftal also acknowledged her own fears when welcoming the
audience at the museum’s entrance: ‘Today’s Visit is a risk. We have taken this
risk on board for more people to come to the museum. Not only to experience this
initiative but also more ways of thinking about what happened here and what is
currently going on today in relation to that past’.
The meeting held with the board and the relatives of the victims left traces in
Ziemilski’s intervention. In fact, at the end of his piece, the figure of the perpetra-
tor seemed to enact a broken refrain of conflicting, contradictory demands: ‘I was
the one who cried. We were the ones who cried. We, us – mothers, us – fathers,
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 95

us – sons, us – daughters, us – brothers, us – sisters. We cried. And believe me,

now is not the time to cry’. Within that multi-layered narrative, the performer did
not embody the voice of one exclusive victim, but rather the voices of the victims
in plural. The script of the performer had been deconstructed and fragmented in
a confrontational process, as if it was articulating all the ethical concerns raised
by the different associations of victims during the meeting with the board. This
contorted refrain spoke of a victim with no specific gender; it spoke about the pain
of the victims as part of a conflicting flow of affects; it evoked various narratives
that have been spoken towards the perpetrators: those that await some gesture of
repentance and those who value only trials and legal attempts for justice. In sum,
this was a bubbling of disconnected speeches full of impossibilities addressing
not only Argentina’s transitions but those beyond. As Szuchmacher muttered in
response to the image of his avatar, the perpetrator: ‘He shall cry/I don’t want him
to cry’. Responses to such figures cannot afford to be univocal.
Ziemilski’s residency at ESMA Memory Museum attempted to dislocate some
of the pervasive clichés circulating around the figure of the perpetrator. He looked
for a wider, more fluid and humanitarian version of the ubiquitous character that
seems to embody most of the traumas of contemporary Western societies. In par-
ticular, his response went beyond Chamorro’s presence in the local aftermath of
violence to a wider exploration around the perpetrator as a transnational figure,
for whom ‘no place should be a safe haven’, as specified by the law of ‘universal
jurisdiction’ (Assmann 2014: 554). The idea of ‘no safe’ space for criminals can
be thought of as a legal elaboration of the activist actions of public shaming devel-
oped by H.I.J.OS, the organisation of the children of the disappeared in the 1990s,
when justice was sidelined by the then President: ‘Wherever they go, we’ll look for
them’, they sang during the escraches.10
Ziemilski’s attempt to find a global understanding of the figure was clear from
the very first line of the piece: evoking ‘crocodile tears’, the live performer insisted
on naming the man whose face was projected onto the wall as the ‘perpetrator’.
For the local spectators, particularly those who were familiar with the local human-
rights vernacular, the term might have sounded out of place. Local scholars have
insisted that the concept of ‘perpetrator’ was inherited from the Holocaust context,
mostly associated with the Global North’s traditions of trauma and genocide stud-
ies. Memory scholars close to our project suggested that words such as ‘repressor’
or even ‘genocida’ (genocide) might have sounded less intrusive within the Argen-
tine context, closer to the local understanding of the traumatic past. Yet, Ziemilski
wanted to keep the word ‘perpetrator’ in the script. In retrospect, I would argue
that by imposing this term and, therefore, by exposing the audience to a word
that was forged within a different context, The Impossible Scene generated audi-
ence discomfort, reflected also in the media reviews: ‘The task of making visible
the repentance of a repressor or a “perpetrator” – in the piece’s own terms – left
the uncomfortable feeling of being faced with questions as painful as [they were]
96 Cecilia Sosa

inescapable’ (Fernández Romeral 2019). ‘“How to portray a perpetrator? How to

look at them? […] Are they human? Are they monsters?”, these are the persistent,
uncomfortable, unbearable questions Ziemilski introduced’ (Dandán 2019).
A survivor commented after the event that Szuchmacher did not seem to fit the
stereotype of the perpetrator, typically working-class, heterosexual, and Catholic.11
The explicit dislocation of narratives highlighted the sense of intersectionality cre-
ated by his intervention. It shed light on different, contradictory, even ‘multidirec-
tional memories’ of trauma, to use Michael Rothberg’s term (2009), that nurtured
each other through the performance. Indeed, that conflicting mix between the local
and the transnational was also a response to Ziemilski’s own fear of being accused
of parachuting into the local landscape of trauma, as Vivi Tellas, an Argentine thea-
tre director, insinuated to him in the weeks preceding the intervention. After the
performance, Ziemilski confessed to the local media the fear of being involved ‘in
narratives of reconciliation that are not my own’ (Fernández Romeral 2019). Some
of these anxieties were visible during the meeting with the museum’s board and
were further solidified when many board members did not attend the performance.
Traumatic pasts reclaim and mobilise intricate processes of ownership. Some of
the relatives of those missing argue that sites of crimes should remain empty and
only inhabited by the testimonies of the victims. After four decades of on-going
democracy, those boundaries are still painful and difficult to navigate.
These concerns notwithstanding, I argue that something important happened
that day. While highlighting that sense of discomfort, Ziemilski’s installation also
interrogated which traumas visitors, artists, and researchers could dare to claim
ownership of. Above all, the intervention managed to accelerate the unattainable
distances that communities have in relation to their own experiences of loss. As the
artist argued during the post-performance discussion, the intervention was not for a
call for action but rather a more modest ‘window’ to create a sense of ‘disturbance
in terms of how we see reality’,12 a response from someone who had been ‘put
at risk’ and was therefore compelled to ‘give an account of [him]self’ in front of
another (Butler 2005: 23). In her work on transnational memory, Aleida Assmann
argues that ‘trans’ stands for ‘transit’, but also for ‘translations’, the cultural work
of reconfiguring established national themes, images, and concepts (2014: 547).
This was precisely what was at stake in Ziemilski’s piece. His action was a form
of exposure, a form of transit, and also an attempt at translation. In doing so, it
provided a further opportunity to test how disparate narratives of victimhood, in-
cluding Christian repentance and punishment, could intersect with each other in the
context of a memory museum.
In that manner, The Impossible Scene managed to show to what extent audi-
ences are always ‘implicated’ in processes of trauma and loss, using Rothberg’s
more recent terms (2018). By bringing the current artistic approaches to collec-
tive memory of the Holocaust into the Argentine post-dictatorship context, the
intervention dared to speak to the wider discourses that have been widely cir-
culated around the figure of the perpetrator in the Global North. At a time when
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 97

both Poland and Argentina faced internal contestations with regard to cultural and
political memory – in the case of Poland, not only refusing to acknowledge broader
societal implication in the Holocaust, but actively criminalising intimations of
collective responsibility13 – Ziemilski’s intervention provided an opportunity to
test how disparate narratives of victimhood and broader societal engagement with
the past can intersect. In that manner, the installation advocated for a horizon-
tal ‘multidirectional’ memory narrative, rather than a hierarchical and competi-
tive one. The Impossible Scene enhanced dialogues across disparate cultures of
memory and national contexts, evoking disparate resonances with other conflicts
that could nonetheless come together under the contorted gesture of a perpetrator
attempting to cry.
Fully immersed within the strange atmosphere of the performance, I won-
dered what the performative addition of the piece in relation to the audience and
its relationship with the museum might be. During the piece, the spectators were
addressed to stay in darkness, before the gigantic face of an unattainable Other,
without knowing exactly what was finally at stake in the show. As part of The
Impossible Scene, the figure of the perpetrator was also put on trial, mocked and
ridiculed before the eyes of the audience. The very space of the museum became a
‘counter-site’ in which the very idea of what it means to be a spectator was inter-
rogated. As part of the immersive character of this performance, I felt somehow
‘implicated’ within the complex mix of affect released by the dictatorship. In front
of the magnified face of a perpetrator attempting to cry, I felt the ‘risk’ of being
part of the scene, an impossible scene, in which binary answers no longer sufficed.
In this openness to uncertainty The Impossible Scene proposed a perhaps new re-
lationship between theatre and museums centred on that which cannot be known.

Laughter Beyond the Legal

In order to encourage further transnational echoes, Ziemilski’s piece ran in paral-
lel with the performance Recess: A Practical Guide for Trials Against Human-
ity, a post-traumatic perspective on the legal trials taking place in Argentina. The
piece had been performed since April 2018 in different venues, including cultural
spaces and theatres, but never at the very site of the crime.14 Once participants
exited Chamorro’s flat at the end of The Impossible Scene through the garden, they
were guided back inside the museum to find themselves in the Golden Room’s
big auditorium, the area of the Casino where the high-ranking Navy Task Force
developed kidnapping strategies during the dictatorship. Since the museum’s open-
ing, the Golden Room has become the last station of the tour and also the space
for justice. There, a video-installation lists the names of the military personnel that
were convicted as part of the on-going trials. One word is projected onto the walls,
Condenados (Condemned), while curtains come up and the light floods back into
the room revealing an expanded time of justice. The visual installation highlights
how transformative the legal process has been in the country.
98 Cecilia Sosa

When Recess was confirmed as part of the schedule of the visit, performers and
curators had no doubts that the Golden Room should be the space of performance.
Created together by the Argentine writer Félix Bruzzone, both of whose parents are
‘disappeared’, and the French-Argentine lawyer and writer Mónica Swaig, under the
direction of the filmmaker Juan Schnitman, the piece introduces a fresh approach to
the crimes committed inside ESMA from the perspective of a younger generation.
Bruzzone explains that the origin of the show was the invitation to write a chron-
icle of the series of trials that started in 2005 for a public judicial website that no
longer exists.15 It was then that he met Swaig, who did not miss a single session of
the courts, and who Bruzzone describes as the ‘joy of the trials’. Mónica makes a
loud entrance on stage playing on her accordion an ironic version of the Peronist
March, dedicated to the Argentine army general and former president Juan Do-
mingo Perón. She also advocates the need for the trials in a nontraditional way.
‘As in Star Wars, when we talk about the fight against impunity we also talk about
trilogies: Memory, Truth and Justice’, she argues in relation to the three main pillar
demands of the local human rights’ movement since the recovery of democracy.
And she goes on: ‘I even think that’s why we ended up putting together a trilogy
of ESMA trials: ESMA I, ESMA II and ESMA III. And in August 2018 ESMA IV
was launched’.16 Giggling circulates throughout the room when she proceeds to
summarise the content and particularities of each trial. ESMA I ‘was a trial with a
single accused man for which there was no sentence because the accused died a few
days before the verdict’, she explains.17 ESMA II ‘was slightly larger’, she goes on:
‘There were 86 victims and 18 military personnel being accused, all those ESMA’s
famous repressors’, she comments with irony. ‘ESMA III was indeed a super-
production, the largest trial in the country’. By now, laughter inundates the room.
Later on, as if confirming to spectators that they are in front of a southern re-
make of a Hollywood saga, the two performers use plastic sparkling spades to
embark on a crusade in the name of the Memory-Truth-Justice trilogy. Recess is
all about playful repetitions and iterations. It drew on the particularly acid sense
of humour widely developed by the generation of the Children of the Disappeared
and their contemporaries in response to loss. As I have argued elsewhere, espe-
cially during the period of the Kirchnerist administrations (2003–2015), in which
memory was transformed into a national commitment, the expansive reverbera-
tions of the comical turned out to be a powerful tool in cutting through the earnest
approach that defined so much art that dealt with the disappeared in the aftermath
of the dictatorship. The power of satire expanded the affiliative links among those
who had not been directly affected by trauma (Sosa 2013: 84).
If trials contain a theme on classic drama – the circumscribed theatrical sphere
where victims and perpetrators meet under the rule of the law – in Recess legal pro-
ceedings are light-heartedly grounded. Swaig and Bruzzone provide basic tips on
how to survive in courts. Swaig pedagogically introduces a practical ‘how to’ slide
presentation introducing shortcuts to the main judicial building, the security re-
quirements, the toilets, the café, and what to do if you run into a torturer in the hall.
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 99

At some point, volunteers from the audience are called to the stage and invited
to recreate a scene. There they are instructed to read the lines of a trial before an
ad-hoc participatory court. Spectators-cum-participants assume the role of defence
lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and witnesses. A screen shows archival footage of
the televised 1985 trials. At that point, I felt a similar sense of duplication that was
present during Ziemilski’s intervention concerning the split of the performer, and
yet here, the experience seems to be uplifting and almost restorative.
One of the volunteers re-enacts the testimony of one of the victims. The frag-
ment does not have the poignant feel of many of the testimonies heard during
the actual trials. There, witnesses have widely accounted for excruciating scenes
of torture, rape, and slave labour. Women have reported giving birth hooded and
handcuffed, before having their new-borns stolen from them. By contrast, the testi-
mony read aloud in Recess omits any reference to torture. This is ‘Luciano’s case’,
a 23-year-old who was kidnapped from the streets, taken to ESMA, and eventually
released without explanation. The volunteer who steps into Luciano’s role recalls
walking out of the detention centre and stopping the bus number 107 to find out
that he had no money to pay for the ticket.
How can this selection of testimony be justified? If the atrocities that took place
inside ESMA have become a recurrent and even an over-determined national trope,
Recess subtly nods to that legal framework. The sense of absurdity suggested in
Luciano’s lines signposts the unbearable testimonies. And it does so without bring-
ing back a sense of terror. Marianne Hirsch has argued that the main risk involved
in the post-memorial structure of transmission is that descendants of traumatic
events may have ‘their own stories and experiences displaced and even evacuated
by those of a previous generation’ (2008: 107). By contrast, in Recess, audiences
largely well-informed and educated in human rights are able to read between the
lines, and eventually empathise with the victim’s story. In this manner, the restag-
ing of the legal process liberates an extra space for collective encounter. Even when
abusive tropes and vilification are subtly avoided, the resonances of terror remain
in the air, allowing singular responses from the spectators. After finishing their
scripts, participants are applauded by fellow audience members. While re-enacting
testimonies in public, Recess creates an intermediate zone in which the value of the
evidence reveals itself as always fragmentary. Within this interstitial space, testi-
monies in particular, and experiences of victimhood in general, can be embodied
and enacted differently. In this manner, Recess creates a participatory narrative
about the trials; one in which anyone can step in and be the protagonist, if not the
hero, of a collective crusade in the name of memory, truth, and justice without
subsuming the position of the historical figure who gave testimony. And this pro-
vocative reactivation of the past becomes enacted through a simple gesture: the
communal act of reading lines of legal testimonies together.
By bringing to ESMA Memory Museum the expansive resonances of the comi-
cal, Recess suggests that traumatic memories can at least be adopted and shared by
others, even though those others are not necessarily direct victims of that difficult
100 Cecilia Sosa

past. As Henri Bergson argued, humour speaks the language of the specific com-
munity in which it arises (2008: 10). Even so, forms of trans-generational and
transnational affiliation might also create certain unexpected forms of subversive
encounters. The incorporation of creative curatorial strategies, including cinematic
projections, asphyxiating atmospheres, glimpses of scripted and non-scripted par-
ticipation as well as strands of comedy might allow participants to explore the
resonances of grief in non-traditional ways. Humour becomes the medium of an
experience of iteration, displacement, and contagion. While subverting conven-
tional narratives of trauma, the piece challenges a sense of ownership over the past,
propitiating a process of transference across wider publics. In doing so, Recess
invites new actors to play their part.

Conclusion: The Museum as a Site of Passage

While considering museums as critical sites of political engagement and spaces in
which affiliative narratives can be created, our project wanted to explore the possi-
bilities of creating novel and open debates in relation to staging difficult pasts from
a transnational perspective. Local analysts have argued that the ‘Conflictive Pasts on
Stage’ visit marked a before and after in the history of the ESMA Memory Museum
(Tordini 2020). It might have been because of the unprecedented image of a perpetra-
tor attempting to cry or because it brought laughter into a former concentration camp.
It might also have been because of the strange overlap of temporalities that both
performances generated throughout the building. In any case, the two interventions
showed how the past cannot be easily ‘museified’ or ‘put to rest’ inside the museum.
Rather, the resonances emerging from both performances revealed the extent to which
the past remains open and can be collectively activated and elaborated by using novel

IMAGES 5.1 AND 5.2 

Rubén Szuchmacher in The Impossible Scene (Wojtek Ziemil-
ski) [left] and Cuarto Intermedio (Félix Bruzzone/Mónica Swaig)
[right]: a double performance inside ESMA Memory Museum,
November 2019. Photos: Cecilia Sosa.
 On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter 101

tools and performative strategies. By hosting a collaborative transnational event, the

museum showed its visitors how they are always involved in processes of loss that
go beyond national borders. In this sense, ‘Conflicting Pasts on Stage’ became an
opportunity to explore how public memories of different traumatic pasts could be
explored collectively while still provoking different individual responses.
Both performances brought a new set of affective entanglements to ESMA
Memory Museum. The pieces were curated to operate in conversation with each
other. Whereas The Impossible Scene (re)created an asphyxiating, uncomfortable,
and oppressive atmosphere, Recess was perceived as agile and playful. While the
former confronted the incapability or insufficiency of tears, the latter sought to en-
courage laughter in the most uncomfortable of places. Together, they enclosed an
affective circuit that gave shape to some of the most critical questions that memory
museums face in contemporary times: not only whether the affects released by
the curation of traumatic pasts generates and produces actions and responses in
the present, but also whether these affective arrangements could be transformative
even for audiences seemingly not directly affected by those traumatic pasts.
In their disparate forms, both performances managed to explore the performa-
tive turn in memory museums from a very local and distinctive position. For dif-
ferent reasons, they pushed ethical boundaries, generating a variety of anxieties
among researchers, curators, victims’ organisations, and publics. Those tensions
not only concerned the way in which memory related to both national and transna-
tional narratives of trauma, but also to global cultural themes such as repentance
and forgiveness. The event at ESMA managed to act as a ‘contact zone’, to use
James Clifford’s seminal expression (1997: 210), in which the museum as an insti-
tution emerged as a ‘site of passage and contestation’.
Either in tears or in laughter, the visit on that Saturday in November 2019 showed
how a memory museum could recreate public experiences of being together in the
aftermath of loss. By encouraging the resonances of different traumatic pasts to
come together, the event also explored transnational possibilities of exchange and
solidarity. Rather than seeking forms of closure, resolution, or reconciliation, the
event provided an amplified stage upon which new trans-affiliative narratives could
be formed. As this chapter goes to press, in September 2023, ESMA Museum was
designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its importance ‘as a
privileged vehicle of the human rights policy of the Argentine State’, as argued by
UNESCO’s officials (Menzulio 2023).

Notes
1 This is the number referenced by the local human rights movement since the beginning
of democracy.
2 By January 2023, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have managed to identify 132 of
those abducted children.
3 The two events are documented on the website of Staging Difficult Pasts project: https://
www.stagingdifficultpasts.org/museums-performance.
102 Cecilia Sosa

4 Szuchmacher’s father was Polish and this connection was important in securing his col-
laboration with Ziemilski. The Argentine director was also attracted to the intervention
that Ziemilski had generated for our project in Kraków. See Chapter 4 in this volume for
a description of Ziemilski’s ‘We walked just this way’ (2019).
5 There had been a curatorial idea for the area, featuring the living space with all the fur-
niture placed upside down. The museum’s board had rejected the design.
6 In her testimony, Krichman declared having seen a hooded woman through a window
who was taken captive into the building. The testimony was considered to be crucial
since it came from someone who was not considered a direct victim of the dictatorship’s
crimes (Goldman 2016).
7 By the end of 2022, it was reported that within the last 16 years, 1117 military person-
nel have been condemned for crimes committed during the dictatorship. 717 remain in
custody, but only 168 are serving confinement in prison units (Bullentini 2022).
8 The exception was Adolfo Scilingo. A retired navy officer, he declared his participa-
tion in the ‘flights of death’, thus breaking the military’s pact of silence (see Verbitsky
2005).
9 The historic importance of that initial trial has been reflected in the film Argentina, 1985
(Santiago Mitre, 2022), which was awarded a Golden Globe in 2022 and nominated in
2023 for the BAFTA and Oscar for Best International Feature.
10 The escraches were festive and loud street parades in which the children of the missing
denounced the impunity of the murders of their parents by signposting their presence
and marking in yellow their homes in front of their neighbours (Taylor 2003).
11 As an openly gay artist of Polish-Jewish heritage, Szuchmacher was more likely to be
associated with Argentina’s political left; in other words, more closely aligned with the
victims than the perpetrators.
12 The footage of the intervention and post-show discussion can be found in the Staging
Difficult Past’s website. See https://www.stagingdifficultpasts.org/pasados-conflictivos-
en-escena.
13 For details of the Polish ‘Holocaust bill’ in English, see Tara 2018.
14 Recess premiered in April 2018 at the Casa Victoria Ocampo during the ‘Expanded Lit-
erature’ series organised by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes.
15 The re-launched trials in 2005 were not televised and received scant attention from the
media. Therefore, human rights’ sectors developed different strategies to publicise them,
including the Children of the Disappeared’s campaign ‘Come to draw at the trials’.
16 Recess’ unpublished script, author’s own translation.
17 Swaig refers to Héctor Febrés who was found poisoned with cyanide in ‘his two-room
VIP cell’, guarded by the Naval Prefecture, as described by the lawyer (Recess).

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6
REFRACTING DIFFICULT PASTS
Temporal Answers and the In-Between

Rabih Mroué in conversation with Michal Kobialka

MK: Let us consider your decades-long commitment to life as a visual and as a

performance artist exploring some of the issues we are interested in con-
cerning how narratives of difficult pasts are created, how theatre and museal
practices offer insights into the role of the object in staging difficult pasts,
and how narratives, objects, and embodied encounters expand our under-
standing of difficult pasts in transnational cultural contexts.1 I am thinking
here about Looking for a Missing Employee (2003), Pixelated Revolution
(2011), Riding on a Cloud (2013), or Before Falling Seek the Assistance of
Your Cane (2020), which you refer to as non-academic lectures; and Again
We Are Defeated (2018) and Swept Under the Carpet (2022), which were
gallery installations. I wonder if, using some of the pieces you presented in
Swept Under the Carpet, you could talk about your critical approach to his-
tory in general, and, of course, your public and private history of the Leba-
nese Civil War (1975–1990) in particular. How is history staged in these
pieces? How to write about history? How to write history?

RM: There are not just some layers but many layers in your questions. First, I
want to clarify something about some of the works you mention. Whereas
Pixelated Revolution, Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane, and
Inhabitants of Images are non-academic lectures, I do not classify Looking
for a Missing Employee and Riding on a Cloud as such. The non-academic
lectures have the same set up on stage. Riding on a Cloud I would say is a
theatre piece and I insist on this, because my concern is to raise a debate
about what is theatre and how we make theatre today. I ask: What is the
relation between the actor/actress and the character he/she is playing, or
between representation and the presence/absence of the body on stage? The

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-7
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 105

non-academic lecture raises similar questions about the body on stage as

well as the questions about the relationship between the lecture and the
performance and the academia. What is a lecture? What is a performance?
What is a lecture performance? You find the traces of this debate eve-
rywhere today because visual artists and performers are finding a ‘non-­
academic lecture’ to be interesting as a form.
To draw attention to these questions, for example, I used to present two
works as a double bill on stage: first, I would do Pixelated Revolution; then
I would leave the space to my brother, Yasser, who would come to the stage,
which was not changed, and perform in Riding on a Cloud. The first one
was a non-academic lecture and the second was a theatre work. Each in its
way, because they have a different structure, reveal how performance ema-
nates from visual arts practices, experimental theatre and traditional forms
to address my questions and reveal its vitality in contrast to the other form.
And now to come to your question about history. For me, I am interested
in the past, but I do not go to the past because I would like to bring it to the
present. It’s actually because the past is shadowing into the present time,
and at the same time, it is about how we can think about the future when
we go back to the present. We live in the present time, and this is something
very intriguing – how quickly the present becomes the past tense. In 2011,
I wrote Pixilated Revolution, and I performed the first version in Beirut. It
was a very quick response to the Syrian revolution, which had started in
the same year. As I continued to perform this, I struggled to keep my non-
academic lecture in the present tense. I wrote it in the present tense because
I believed in the Syrian Revolution, and I wanted to push this and keep it in
the present time. I still perform this piece – the only thing I have changed is
a move from the present to the past tense. There was a moment when it be-
came obvious that the revolution now belongs to the past. But I still believe
that performing it today resonates with our present time, especially with the
demonstrators shooting the images of today’s street protests…

MK: Before you continue with this question about history, I am intrigued about
the difference in time. After Pixilated Revolution, you created an installa-
tion at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis called Again We Are Defeated.
Could you talk about these two pieces in conversation? What is this relation-
ship between hope for victory in a revolutionary struggle and in the lecture
or in the installation when we are only faced with the phantoms of the dead?

RM: This is complex for me, but let’s try. There is something in Lebanon and
the region that is related to justice. The majority of murder cases are un-
solved. There are very few cases where we know what happened and a
sentence was passed by the judges – they are the exception to the rule. The
title Swept Under the Carpet refers to this – these murder cases disappear
106 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

from view; we forget about them since they are already replaced by the
new cases. We think that we forget…. But this is not true. They remain
with us—in our head, our body, our emotions, in our subconscious. They
are repressed in us. It is exactly like if you delete something on your laptop
computer; it is deleted, but if you dig around, you can find it somewhere.
We are haunted by these cases and the ghosts of the victims who are seeking
justice. We, the living, bring our dead into our world to continue fighting,
to use them as weapons. They have a big presence in our daily life, maybe
because of social media, the internet, and the spread of images.
If I perform Pixilated Revolution over a decade – from 2011 to 2021 –
it is not to tackle what has happened in the past as much as to talk about
the present time and the future. The performance comes back in a different
way, in a different context, and also as a different concept. But we carry the
dead with us all the time. In regard to your questions – How to write about
history? How to think about history – this is related to the work of Ibn Khal-
dun, an Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian, and also to Walter Ben-
jamin, who does not deal with history as an effect and reaction. In his time,
Ibn Khaldun’s method was revolutionary. The writing of history was based
on the oral transmission; on the process of going back from one person to
the next until you come to the origin; to the source which is undisputable,
like, for example, the Prophet Mouhamad or God. Today, there is a tendency
to place temporal or spatial markers in history – for example, September 11
is such a marker, which divides the time into the before time and the after
time. I do not deal with history in this way. I do not see a ‘before and after’
of the explosion in Beirut. No, there are many traumatic moments in our
personal histories, and their intensity is different in each person’s history.
Writing history is about the analysis of the relationships between these trau-
mas and our complicity, between humans themselves, between humans and
objects, between humans and technology, or between humans and our planet,
etc. One should look at these relations, develop a hypothesis, and then bring
a theory or a concept. This is completely different method than understanding
history as an action and reaction – like, I slapped you then you slapped me
back and so on. This is how the journalistic media try to deal with things, as if
writing that the Syrian protestors did this action, so the regime had to react in
this way and then the Hezbollah and the Iranian and the Russians responded
and so on. This is not the way to write, read, or to understand history. There is
a relationship between political, economic, social, and religious factors.

MK: In Swept Under the Carpet, we are encountering both images and objects
that we do not necessarily arrange in a cause-and-effect narrative, but this
encounter with those images and objects forces us to resonate with them.
I am thinking about Image(s), Mon Amour, which for me is an immediate ref-
erence to Hiroshima Mon Amour, and As If Seen By a Bird Standing On Top
Of a Cow. Those two works offer an encounter with objects and images which
forces us to think about history in space in a completely different manner.
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 107

RM: Image(s), Mon Amour is a work that is overexaggerated and overexposed

with images of wars. They are collages that I have developed over many
years, but not continuously. I leave it and come back to it. I cut out images
from the media and place them in – not in an aesthetic or narrative mode –
next to each other. Putting these images together, there is a saturation of
war, and they create something else. You see the catastrophes, but together
they are not about one catastrophe or one war, but they become like an epic.
As if you are falling into the abyss. I did not do this on purpose. Rather,
this is what I am encountering in my everyday life – I am bombarded with
these images. One image might seem to delete the previous one, but they
are not deleted, they are there. These images are posted and circulated on
social media, and it makes me wonder how we can bear this life any longer?
We delete them, or repress them, in order to continue our life. We see these
images and then we just go to work or to meet a friend or a lover and we
forget about them. The effect lasts a few hours, a day, and then it goes. This
is a human thing, which is good (Image 6.1).
In Image(s), Mon Amour, these images from Lebanon wars, and then
from Syria and all the violent images from all over the world that I thought
I had forgotten unexpectedly came back to me fragmented and like flashes.
As such, I put them together as a collage without a chorological order. This
refers to Hiroshima Mon Amour and a phrase by Marguerite Duras – the
protagonist says to his lover that she has not seen anything in Hiroshima.
By looking at these images, we do not see; maybe they actually cover what
is really happening there, although they are violent, although they pretend
that they want us to see. These images hide; they do not reveal.
In As If Seen By a Bird Standing On Top Of a Cow, I used found footage
of a drone showing a bird’s eye view of the city of Homs in Syria, which
has been completely destroyed. I flipped the way of seeing – it turns upside
down. It is not the bird’s eye from the sky, but rather from the ground look-
ing up and seeing the destroyed city. So, the visitors become the bird. It is
like hell in the sky, so we see history, the event, from a completely different
angle (Image 6.2).
To make a comparison between these pieces: one is saturated by images
and the other one has a single image, although it is a moving image, it is
one event. Image(s), Mon Amour shows a lot of events mixed up together
and it is non-linear and mixed up in a loop. It is a very long loop, so you do
not notice when it comes back; it is like an endless scroll. It is projected on
a huge screen and it scrolling as if it is an endless fall.

MK: On the one hand, you are offering a scroll of history in which the images are
superimposed on top of the other, so it becomes like transparent negatives
of various different images. But with As If Seen By a Bird Standing On Top
Of a Cow, you really force me to be in a spotlight. If with Image(s), Mon
Amour I can somehow be a bystander watching the scroll of history, with
the other piece I am in the spotlight looking up and there is no escape. There
108 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

Image(s)
IMAGE 6.1  Mon Amour, 2022. 15-minute video in loop projected vertically.
Image courtesy of Rabih Mroué.

is a different form of representation that takes me back to your fascination

with the eye of the camera and the person shooting at the Syrian protestor
in the Pixilated Revolution. This was the double idea of shooting with the
gun and with the camera. In these examples, you have the double image of
seeing the scroll of history and being seen in the spotlight.

RM: I use the spotlight in this work as it is used in the theatre, where lights are
on the performers who stand on stage and to be seen by the audience. So in
the exhibition, the spotlight attracts the visitor to come towards it. She/he
stands in the light and looks up inside the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel,
there is a destroyed city. For the visitors of the exhibition, who are standing
outside the light, whoever steps into this spotlight becomes a performer and
part of the work.
In Pixilated Revolution, there is another tunnel, but it is horizontal, not
vertical. In this piece, you see a sniper with his rifle aiming at the lens, which
means aiming at us as spectators. We see the rifle and the eye of the sniper.
It zooms in and blows up the image of the eye of the sniper, and it is so
close that in the reflection of his eye, we see ourselves as the protestor who
is trying to record what is happening with the mobile phone. This was the
eye contact in reality between the victim shooting the event and the sniper.
If we blow up the surface of the eye, then we see the reflection of the face
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 109

As If Seen By a Bird Standing On Top Of a Cow, 2018. 4:3 monitor – in loop –

IMAGE 6.2 
inside a tube hanging from the ceiling with a spotlight on the floor. Image
courtesy of Rabih Mroué.

facing the eyes and if we again blow up the face and the surface of the eye
of the protestor, then we see in it the reflection of the face of the sniper. It is
a perfect loop, except it is not a loop at all. It is a mise en abyme, feedback
that goes on for infinity: the victim, then the killer, then the victim, and so on
and so forth. If we watch this, we are stuck between two mirrors – we create
this infinite feedback. We need something to break this mise en abyme, be-
cause it is hypnotising. There are two possibilities to cut this circuit: either
the protestor understands what is happening (that the shooter wants to kill
him and he runs away) or the soldier’s bullet will kill him. As I argue in the
non-academic lecture, it takes time for the spectator to understand that this
rifle aiming at him really wants to kill him. For this reason, the sniper is
faster and is able to cut this feedback loop first. This intrigues me because
the victim is always off camera – the eye contact is between the rifle and the
phone, and the killing is documented by the camera while death is happening
off camera, so we can’t see it. But death is present by its absence. And this
is why these images are very intense.

MK: This all has to deal with staging difficult pasts, whether it is a relationship
between the Syrian protestor and the shooter or the scroll of history. In
Pixilated Revolution, you show how the history that is happening today is
110 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

presented to us through mediated images from social media, and the inter-
ruption that may be necessary for us to realise the degree to which those
revolutions are no longer emancipations from existing conditions, but it is
registering what we do not want to see or cannot be seen. You speak about
the way representations cover up the existing conditions; in a sense, they
commodify the existing conditions and show them in a different way.
In one of the pieces, you talk about who is afraid of representations – I
wonder if being afraid of representations is what history has become, if
history is pixilated so that we look not to see; we live not to live; we write
history not to deal with history.

RM: So it is like Again We Are Defeated, which is related to the title of the work
we discussed before. In Eye Versus Eye, which is part of Pixilated Revolu-
tion, I wanted to see the face of the killer to know his identity, his name, to
bring him to trial, to be responsible for what he is committing. There are
these unsolved cases that are just put to the side, so this is why I blow up the
image of the soldier who killed or who shot the protestor – to see his face.
But I failed; when we magnify, we don’t see anything, we see a face without
features. And even if we see his face or learn his name, it is connected to
authoritarian or religious systems in which the law is always suspended. So,
there is no justice and they hide behind the excuse – ‘It is not me, it is the
regime, the Party. It is not my responsibility’. In this sense, yes representa-
tions become pixelated, blurred and abstract.

MK: You are proposing a state of unrest. If representation is a way of stabilising

things, then how do we interrupt that moment of stabilisation?

RM: Yes, to interrupt, to stop, to see properly. If we can look closely at just one
thing, like in Looking for a Missing Employee, which goes into the detail
of the detail. In all of these works, I take one incident, very local and very
precise, not to go to the general. This precise incident can take us to big-
ger questions. This is my problem with the media, who are generalising
things. They pick one victim and create an icon, which denies all the other
victims. This victim then hides all the other victims. In the details of the de-
tail, everyone can find something of their own experience. I will deal with
something specific that concerns me personally and I will share it with you,
which will make you think of something else that you know better than I do
and you will share it with me. It is about sharing.
In Again We Are Defeated, this work is about murdered people whose cases
are unsolved. I draw from daily newspapers people who have been killed in
the wars I know or have followed in Lebanon or Syria. What happens to their
corpses? When they take them to be buried, they carry the corpse, but they
forget the shadow. I started to draw the shadow. I am not trained as a painter,
and I do not know how to draw. I was drawing only the shadows and then the
corpse started to take shape. It was fascinating how my pencil started to make
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 111

the illusion of a corpse. I produced hundreds of these drawings, sketches,

which are meant to be shadows of people that are still haunting us. I forgot
their names, but they are still there. I failed to bring them justice (Image 6.3).

MK: I am intrigued by the hundreds of images of people who are dead, who have
disappeared and who have died, and the records are non-existent. Multiply-
ing their presence as the phantoms of history seems to me to be your act of
keeping those bodies in a state of unrest, so they prevent us from normalis-
ing the unthinkable. Could you say more about this installation and the title
you chose for that particular piece?

RM: The title is important for me, because there is this word again. We go on
defeated and then again, we are defeated. It is Sisyphean: we will go on and
go on; we don’t care that we are defeated. So, there is this hope implanted
in it. This defeat will not make us stop. We will continue and go on with
life, with our struggle, and dealing with our past and how we will continue
the future with this past. In terms of ‘unrest’, it is a question of how you
disrupt the flow of events, or of politics. There are some topics we take up
in order to freeze, to take a breath, to contemplate what is happening. The
Angel of Walter Benjamin. Like the Angel, who would like to stay, awaken
the dead, we want to stay still, to look at the ruins and piling wreckage, but
something pushes us away, and propels us into the future as time goes on. I
have said before: I am not interested in the past as much as I am interested
in the future and in the present time, which is fleeing from our hands. We
pretend to prolong the present time, but in fact we are chasing after it.

Again
IMAGE 6.3  We Are Defeated, 2018. 112 drawings on paper with a video projec-
tion on a loop. Image courtesy of Rabih Mroué.
112 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

MK: If in his essay on existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre says, ‘that a human be-
ing is condemned to be free,’2 are you suggesting, as evidenced by, for
example, Swept Under the Carpet or Again We Are Defeated, that we are
‘condemned to hope’? In a way, to stop hoping would be the ultimate defeat
that perpetuates the status quo, which you want us to disrupt. In your work,
are we condemned to be free according to Rabih Mroué?

RM: I cannot claim this, but it is an aim, or it is a hope. We are ‘condemned to

hope’ – I agree with this. It is the ultimate defeat when we lose hope. But
can we totally lose hope unless we are completely desperate and prepared
to commit suicide?

MK: Is that a question or is it a provocation to me?

RM: It is a provocation, but not to you. Maybe to me as well. I provoke myself in

my works. I do not want to provoke my audience, though I provoke myself
all the time. In the work I contradict myself. I betray myself also, I betray
my beliefs in the work that I portray to the audience. It is because I want to
provoke myself – I want to put myself at risk. And I want to fail, and to be
defeated. And I am always defeated, to be honest. Look at what me and my
generation have achieved. I see the new generation and wonder what they
have from what we have done. Maybe nothing. It is sad and it is fine at the
same time.

MK: I want to go back to this one word you mentioned, betrayal. In a way, is
not a betrayal a form of seeing something as if you are seeing it for the first
time? If I betray, it means I betray what has been normalised. And I see that
betrayal in your work when you repeat certain images, or you repeat certain
themes, but that betrayal, or repetition, is a form of seeing it in a new light.
In Swept Under the Carpet you use parts of Again We Are Defeated, but is
it the same as the installation at the Walker in 2018 where you had those
hundreds of images, or is it that you are betraying your work by staging it
in a different way?

RM: It is a betraying of time. When you think about things you have done and
you bring them back, it is to be sceptical about them or to bring them as
proof. I don’t bring them back to say, ‘You see, I did this 10 years ago and
I was right!’ Maybe I bring them back to say, ‘I was not right, but I was not
necessarily wrong’. Time is going on and it changes us, our thoughts, our
perceptions. Things and ideas are not fixed especially when we are talking
about interpretations and analysis. I need to think about it again. To reframe,
to rethink things, and to put them in a different concept, context, to ask dif-
ferent questions. For example, the eye contact in Pixilated Revolution or the
repetition in Three Posters with the martyr repeating the recording of his
testimony – when I bring these back, I think them in a different way.
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 113

In 2000, Elias Khoury and I presented Three Posters, a performance/

video, which was about the suicide operations committed by the Lebanese
National Resistance Front between 1982 and 1987 against the Israeli mili-
tary occupation of Lebanon, and about the resistant fighters’ testimonies
that they had been recorded on VHS tapes before embarking on their mis-
sion. This resistance front was founded by Lebanese communists and secu-
lar parties and had nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalists.
In this performance, we show a videotape that contains different takes
of Jamal Sati’s testimony. We tried to understand why he had repeated his
testimony several times in front of the camera.
As in Pixelated Revolution and in Swept under the Carpet, I was trying
to recognise the face of the killer and to think about the absence or presence
of his victim, who is not in the image, but whose presence is very strong.
How do we bring the killer into the image without doing what a film direc-
tor does by taking the same shot multiple times – I don’t have this privilege.
I cannot place my camera in different locations in order to see the victim
better. So how will I bring the victim to the image, conceptually, without
being able to shoot it from different angles or edit the shots? I have only one
point of view – it is the point of view of the victim, or it is the one point of
view of the killer. How do we show the different angles without changing
the angle of the camera? With these different works, they may answer some
of our questions, but later on, we will see this is not the answer.
Coming back to Three Posters, the performance questions both the rheto-
ric of the role of/being a martyr by criticising the official narratives, which
encourage these ideologies, and how the video recording of Jamal Sati’s
presence suspended between life and death creates an ‘in-between’ in a non-
place. That is, the repetition of the martyr’s testimony is a sign of a double
desire of postponing death and at the same time of withdrawing from life.
The performance represents a moment between fiction and truth by offer-
ing the spectator a voyeuristic view of, on the one hand, a performance and,
on the other, of a real suffering. Indeed, what is this ‘in-between’ between
truth and representation in the non-place of the mediated image-scape?
I would like to conceptualise something that I call the ‘in-between’. This is
a space-time that does not resemble the space-time we are used to in the world
of the living. And it is not the world of the dead. This is the in-between of
these two worlds, which has different ways of being, and we do not wilfully
enter this time-space – it is against our will, we find ourselves there. I have
never been there, but I noticed after many years of working and seeing the
mise en abyme that I talked about and the endless repeating, repeating, repeat-
ing, but it is not a repetition. It looks to us in our world as if time is linear and
space is measurable – it is not this, but being in another time and in another
space that we don’t know. We can try to understand, but it is somewhere else,
a threshold that is invisible. I am not sure this is a space you can come back
from, so when the protestor and the killer are there, I don’t know if they come
back to the world of the living or to the world of the dead. And if they come
114 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

back to the world of the living, I am not sure they will return as they were
or not. I think when we come back from this in-between, we are completely
different. It is like someone in a coma; this is the state of the in-between. It is
a different time and different space, and when someone comes out of a coma,
she/he forgets its language and its logic and the only way to describe it, is to
use the language that the living person knows and has experienced.

MK: This brings me to Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch (Man and the Masses,
1923). In Scene 6, there is an open space in which the human subject is
meant to review him or herself and it does not belong to the victim or to the
perpetrator. There is no linear time in this in-between space – time is fold-
ing back up on itself. It continuously vibrates and is in the state of unrest.
It cannot be pacified. It tenaciously negates what you are, who you are, and
what you are thinking. It cannot be tamed by the normative categories of-
fered by the status quo. Do you think that thinking about this ‘in-between’
conditions your modality of expression? So it is not necessarily that you
are a visual artist, as in putting things in a gallery using theatrical means,
nor are you a theatre artist, using the tools of the visual artist to illustrate
something. Do you find yourself also in this in-between performative space
where you are not shackled by any conditions, allowing you to materialise
your thoughts?

RM: I would differentiate between this concept of the in-between that I have
seen in these repetitions of the martyrs and the eye contact and the in-
between of me as an artist and theatre maker. Yes, I am in-between, but I
am also not – it is this blurry space of a situation where you do not know
the borders. You are in a way trying to be there without seeing the borders,
or playing with them, making them vanish, to be in this territory that is
undetermined. I am also sometimes defiant and will say, ‘No, this is now
theatre and not an academic lecture’ or ‘This is not theatre but a lecture’. I
will be provocative in this sense because I want to ignite a debate that will
change me and others who work with these mediums. I want to challenge
artists who think theatre is still like this or like that, who are stuck to tradi-
tions in these normalised spaces, to stereotypes and norms. How can you
break this? Sometimes provocation is a way, which I use when I decide
to name things like, ‘This is theatre!’ I don’t mind if you tell me it is bad
theatre, but I insist it is theatre. If you tell me it is not theatre then you are
cutting the possibility to discuss, to dialogue, to debate, and to reflect on
what is theatre, what is art, what is an object of theatre, what is an object of
a museum, etc. The reflection on these different mediums is so important
because I don’t know where I am – at the same time, I am lost and I am not
lost. I am not lost completely, because declaring being lost would make me
irresponsible – for example, if you critique me then I can just say, ‘Oh, I am
lost’, and whatever you ask me I could just respond, ‘I don’t know’. I am
lost and I am not lost, means that I am responsible. I have answers, but they
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 115

are not definitive answers – they are temporal answers, or they are postpon-
ing the conclusions. We have to defer the time for conclusions – just like
this in-between, we withdraw from life, but defer death at the same time.

MK: In Riding on a Cloud, your brother works with you. What is really fascinating
is that the piece is a profound mediation on the complex relation between his
memory and your memory, his fiction and your fiction, but also the political
reality you both shared because of the incident you describe. Can you talk about
how you view this relationship between memory, fiction, and political reality?

RM: To briefly summarise the incident you mention in this piece: it is the true
story about my brother Yasser, who was shot in the head by a sniper dur-
ing the civil war in Lebanon in 1987. After hearing about my grandfather’s
assassination, he ran to my grandfather’s house and while he was crossing
the street, a sniper shot him. Thus, there were two dramatic tragic events
on the same day. Fortunately, my brother survived, but he was partially
disabled for a long time. He became aphasic, so he lost language, the abil-
ity to speak, to write, etc. He also could not understand you very well. He
had to go back to zero to learn language. Language was the key for me to
build this theatre piece in which Yasser is playing the role of Yasser, but it
is not him. This is the first complexity in the piece. The actor is playing his
own role, but he is an actor playing the role. The representation goes to the
extreme. If I play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare and directed by
someone else, there is the Hamlet Shakespeare wants, and there are clues
for this in the text and in the history of Shakespeare at that time, and then
there is the director’s concept – how to be and play Hamlet today – and then
there is the actor, who brings something from their own biography, reading,
understanding of Shakespeare. There are these three and then a fourth level,
the character of Hamlet. So, with Riding on a Cloud, what if Shakespeare is
the life of the actor, and the director is the brother who wrote about the live
actor, and the actor is playing his own role? Yasser is playing these three
things, only to the extreme. This is why people are sometimes confused and
they say, ‘Oh, but he is not acting’. He is acting, but, coincidentally, it is the
role of himself. I like this confusion and I push it. Sometimes, when I stage
plays, I use the real names of the actors, which creates the question: what is
the limit between reality, real-life fiction, theatre, and representation? I do
not want to put my brother Yasser on stage and then have the audience feel
empathy or pity for him or feel sad and shed tears. I do not want the piece
to be emotional. I want to do it for him, but also to bring all my questions
and my concerns in art, in theatre, in philosophy to this piece, in collabora-
tion with Yasser. Language was the keyword because it is with language
that we can formulate abstract ideas, we can ask questions, we can write
poetry, and we can talk about themes like democracy and justice. How to
address Yasser’s story, which has a lot of pain in it, and go to the level of the
abstract, of ideas, of questions? When Yasser started to learn to speak and to
116 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

write again, he succeeded in being a poet and published poetry books. He

beat the bullet and the sniper who shot him by becoming a poet, even with
his broken language, with his broken words. This is what I put on stage.

MK: The question that comes to my mind while listening to you is: what does it
mean to take a trauma and abstract it? Very often, the immediate impulse
is to take a trauma and present it on stage with a level of hyper-realism or
realism. What you are suggesting in Riding on a Cloud with Yasser’s condi-
tion is that you take a trauma to the level of abstraction. Is this abstraction
a mode of materialising trauma in a way that escapes the conditions that
define what trauma is for us today? To what extent does abstraction allow
us to look at that object, trauma, in a different universe that cannot be con-
quered by that sniper who tried to kill your brother?

RM: Yes, this is the question of how to present and represent the story of Yasser,
not as a victim. It is the trauma that makes us victims and makes the focus the
horror of what happened. The horror is not interesting at all. I am not point-
ing a finger to say, ‘You are the murderer and the one who is responsible for
what happened to my brother!’ To go to the level of abstraction goes beyond
‘being a victim’ or pointing a finger towards a perpetrator. It is to go to the
level of art and philosophy and to think, and to ask questions. This is not
about answering questions or making conclusions. To contemplate abstract
things, like what it means for a person to stop dreaming, which happened to
Yasser. Is it good to dream or not to dream? I have no answer, but I think it is
a very good question. What happens to literature or poetry or theories based
on dreams if I do not dream at all. Not if I dream and then forget my dreams,
but if I really don’t dream. Yasser posed it as a question to the audience. He
did not pose this as a victim, but as a question at an abstract level.
I am not interested in the trauma. I made a piece of work called The
Crocodile Who Ate the Sun [2015], which would become part of the work
Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane, which was about a leaflet
dropped by an Israeli warplane over Beirut during the 1982 siege. This leaf-
let followed a truce and asked the inhabitants to leave immediately before
bombardment. I had the leaflet in my hand in Beirut when I was 15 years
old – a time in my life when I was young and I was not afraid, so I just
put it in my pocket and continued on. I remembered this leaflet after many
years and decided to make replicas of it. I invited friends to visit me and I
placed the leaflet on the table without saying anything. When they saw it,
they started telling me stories from their memories from that period. Some
beautiful memories and others that were horrible and tragic. The piece of
paper, a replica, not the original, evoked the past, the ghosts of the past.
This speaks directly about the trauma of the 1982 besiege, which remains
unresolved.
There is something hidden in this piece – it is not true that I made replicas
of the leaflet, and it is not true that I invited friends over. I also claim that my
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 117

friends each treated the paper in a different way – they destroyed it, or they
left it behind. Afterwards, I took pictures of the leaflets and made these into an
artwork with the name and age of each of the friends who handled the piece
of paper. It is all fictional; it is all not true. But it is a question about trauma
itself – how do you make work about trauma? When people say my work is
about war and about trauma, it is not true. It is a lazy reading of my work. I
made this piece to tickle the people who read my work in this way (Image 6.4).

MK: How does this work, in which you lie to us about the leaflet, contrast with
The Crocodile Who Ate the Sun and Before Falling Seek the Assistance of
Your Cane, which is the last section of a piece called Probable Answers
That Are Still Far from Any Conclusion?

RM: I do not use the word ‘lie’, but rather ‘fiction’, which is also related to memory.

MK: Or mnemotechnics.

RM: Yes, also. Most often when we write history, we are subjective and in this
sense fiction intermingles with reality. It is dangerous when we try to dis-
tinguish what is really real and true from what is fiction or lies. This is
problematic. I do not make a dichotomy between truth and lies, or truth and

Crocodile
IMAGE 6.4  Who Ate the Sun, 2015. Set of 12 19 × 28 cm photos with text.
Image courtesy of Rabih Mroué.
118 Rabih Mroué and Michal Kobialka

fiction, or reality and fiction. I would put them together and make them one
reality, the reality that includes both truth and fiction. This is an interest-
ing way to try to understand the Other, or to understand the events, or to
understand history as well. In this sense, The Crocodile Who Ate the Sun
and the leaflet – this is not a lie to cheat the audience. At the end, I would
not laugh at the audience and say, ‘Oh you believed me!’ No, it is not a mat-
ter of believing me or not. This is not the question. It is true that if I were
to show this leaflet from 1982 to anyone who was in Beirut at that time, it
would evoke memories in them. So, it is not completely fake, or fiction,
it is imagination. It is true, but I do not need to prove it.
The other side of this work is not about this narrative, but rather what the
picture shows. You can try to understand the trauma from the wrinkled, torn-
up paper in the image, or the person who makes a paper plane out of the leaflet,
or a third person who takes notes and writes question marks on the margins.
Each one had a different reaction through the paper to the leaflet and you
can understand trauma in this way. It is a personal thing – and it is harsh and
dangerous to talk about collective trauma, because what is collective trauma?
What is collective memory? It is very selective and related to fiction. The col-
lective memory of a group, or a party, or a people always has censorship. It
censors what is not to be remembered because it does not serve the collective
memory, and it also insists on certain types of memories to be remembered
and to be included. So, collective memory reveals and hides at the same time.
What it reveals is questionable and what hides is also what is hidden.

MK: In that way, Yasser becomes that stranger from Benjamin and Brecht inter-
rupting what we’ve been thinking about – let’s say trauma – by making you
think about trauma not in terms of the collective, but really as something
very singular and specific that manifests itself in so many different ways
that it escapes a dominant form of representation.
Is it accidental that Swept Under the Carpet and Before Falling Seek the
Assistance of Your Cane, one being an installation and the other being a
non-academic lecture, are happening at the same time? Is there a coinci-
dence or are you inviting us to be in the space in-between where there are
not really answers?

RM: Yes, it is to bring many layers to this same space, to put these questions and
doubts inside the spectators. There are many ways of giving spectators an
opportunity for distance – one of them is being sceptical or being doubtful,
and another way is to tell the audience, ‘ I have a question, but I really don’t
have an answer’. And I think these strategies can sometimes be in com-
mon with the Brechtian theories of theatre, but Brecht also tries to break the
audience into social classes, and I don’t want to do this, to classify them. I
don’t want to create any clash, social or psychological or gender, etc. No,
each person has her own opinion, thoughts, ideas, and experience. You can
 Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between 119

do this by asking a complex question that audiences do not have a yes or no

answer to – it is not that you agree or disagree. If you have an answer, then
you immediately split the audience into two parties: one agrees and the other
disagrees. When you create doubt by putting fiction and reality together,
then you are respecting each member of the audience and you expecting
each one of them to have a different answer or opinion. The Crocodile Who
Ate the Sun, which is a fable, is the story about a crocodile who ate the sun.
Because the sun is no more, now, all the animals hate all the crocodiles
because of that one bad crocodile. This happens every day in our world.
One person in ‘a group’ commits something which creates a stereotype, and
this stereotyped image proceeds her/him despite him or her will – it is there
before she/he arrives. In my case, it would be the image of the Arab, of the
Muslims, of the Middle Eastern, of the Lebanese. There are a lot of stereo-
types images that we have to fight every day. We have to fight this image that
comes beforehand – this image is not me. This identity is not me.

MK: So, what is difficult in staging difficult pasts?

RM: The ‘difficult’ is always interesting. The difficulty in representing and bring-
ing the difficult past to the present time is how to put it in an abstract way,
which is not monochrome and it does not mean you don’t understand any-
thing. To make it philosophical, to make it poetic, to learn from it and put it
in terms of questions, and ideas, but unfinished ideas, unfinished thoughts
that give us the ability to think, to add, to adjust, and to rethink again and to
understand it in a different way. This is how the past is still present in our
time. It is interesting for our present and for our future, because we under-
stand the present from the past, and this is the difficulty.

MK: I would like to finish by saying that when I think about Looking for a Miss-
ing Employee, Pixelated Revolution, Riding on a Cloud, or Before Falling
Seek the Assistance of Your Cane; and Again We Are Defeated and Swept
Under the Carpet, the words that come to mind are: interruption, field of
possibility, latency, intensified realism unhampered by the status quo or
dominant ideology, another vitality set against the pressure/demand to re-
produce reality/status quo. Your non-academic lectures, installations, pro-
ductions are relentless refractions of your need to re-singularise history,
memory, fiction, all of those elements, in order for them to be dynamic,
vibrant objects that cannot be swept under the carpet.

Notes
1 This interview took place on 29 October 2022 in Berlin, Germany.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, https://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.
7
LISTENING TO THE MUSEUM,
HEARING THE MINE
Mapa Teatro’s live Réplica to Modernity

Giulia Palladini

De los dementes, ò faltos de juicio (Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity) is a

site-specific project realised by Colombian artistic laboratory Mapa Teatro at the
Museum Reina Sofía in Madrid between October 2018 and April 2019, in the frame
of the program Fisuras (Fissures), which invited international artists to produce
new work that ‘tries to reveal interstitial areas of the Museum, allowing visitors
to discover the narrative potential of intermediate zones, spaces of conflict, hybrid
zones (landings, stairwells, basements, connections between buildings)’ (Museo
Reina Sofía 2011).
The project does not feature the live presence of bodies in space, nor is it per-
formed according to the punctual, ephemeral temporality of a live event. De los
dementes would hardly be described, according to the terminology of performance
studies, as a work of live art. The work is constituted of visual materials, a sound
installation, video, a curated montage of materials. Yet, it is precisely the ‘liveness’
at the core of this work that is key to the political and poetical operation it per-
forms. The museum itself, in this project, is addressed as a living organism, rather
than a place of display: this produces a shift from the trust in visibility, traditionally
presiding over the encounter with public memory, to the potential of attending the
museum building’s embodied memory and bringing it to life, making it public.
In the following pages, I trace the logic of this hidden, uneventful liveness, sug-
gesting that Mapa Teatro’s intervention in the Reina Sofía not only complicates the
terms in which the relation between liveness and the museum is usually addressed
(as an ephemeral intervention in time, which agitates the timeless stillness of the
collection) but also offers a generative epistemological contribution to thinking the
idea of modernity, in which the museum as an institution is intrinsically embedded.
Whereas, ‘modernity can be characterized, among other ways, by a sense of pres-
ence or contemporaneity created by the spatialisation of time’ (Mitchell 2000: 15),

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-8
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 121

resulting from the fiction produced by the narrative of modernisation, according to

which all territories, including spaces supposedly cast as the ‘non-West’, have now
‘reached the same hour on the great clock of development’ (Jameson 1991: 97),
I suggest that Mapa Teatro’s project produces a ‘temporalisation of space’ in the
Reina Sofía: the museum is turned into a colander through which different times
drip in, invading the present with waves of past and future. This too is a result of
fiction, or more accurately, using Mapa Teatro’s own terminology: it is the outcome
of a work of ‘ethno-fiction’ (Mapa Teatro 2019: 3).
The encounter with this project entails an invitation to wander: only the move-
ment of the visitor’s body, in space, can activate De los dementes’ multifarious
dramaturgy, opening access to a different ‘cartography of the present’ (Rolnik
2011). For the returning spectator, for a museum visitor who, like myself, has been
affected by Mapa Teatro’s work over the years, De los dementes constitutes a won-
drous compendium of their politics and poetics. This project is, in fact, a testing
ground for intuitions and tropes that have long characterised Mapa Teatro’s work.
It is the outcome of a 40-year-long trajectory that has overflowed from theatre to
other spaces, as diverse as streets and public squares, prisons, tribunals, hair salons,
the Amazonia, guerrilla camps, private houses, and exhibition places.
Like De los dementes, Mapa Teatro’s artistic trajectory branches across the
Atlantic, and exists between Europe and Latin America. Founded in Paris by the
siblings Elizabeth, Rolf, and Heidi Abderhalden, children of a Swiss-German fa-
ther and a Colombian mother, Mapa Teatro’s work has ‘always been marked by
a double physical, historical and political presence’ (Abderhalden 2018), and has
therefore confronted from the start the question of negotiating an artistic citizen-
ship in between continents. Mapa Teatro has cultivated a constant dialogue with
Europe: it suffices to mention that the encounter with Samuel Beckett, which hap-
pened in the early days of the company’s work, has left a vital imprint on their
poetics, and that Heiner Müller provided Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden with the key
term to describe their practice as ‘a laboratory of social imagination’: an expression
translating the German Sozialer Phantasie (Abderhalden 2018). Even more vital,
however, was the Abderhalden’s decision to return to Colombia after completing
their education in Europe and to build their ‘laboratory of social imagination’ in
Bogotà: this choice marked an ethical and political positioning, and a commitment
to a situated knowledge. It also shaped a militant approach to artistic practice,
understood as a technology of transformation, through which the complicated tan-
gle of violence that has long characterised Colombian history could be ‘decrypted
and resignified’ (Abderhalden 2018). In this laboratory, histories and memories
migrate and recombine, transforming from one work to the next (Palladini 2018:
141–142). Meanwhile, Mapa Teatro’s work has travelled extensively worldwide: it
was hosted by prominent festivals and contemporary art venues, such as the Festi-
val d’Automne, the Festival d’Avignon, Find in Berlin, the São Paolo Biennale, the
Berlin Biennale, LACMA in Los Angeles, to name just a few. It has increasingly
circulated in the slippery map of a globalised art world which, as Suely Rolnik
122 Giulia Palladini

(2011) pointed out, is quick to appropriate the subversive power of creation, turn-
ing it into ‘shallow prêt-à-porter cartographies, adaptable for consumption in any
point of the globe’. Navigating this movement without being captured, without
giving up the gist of that commitment to poetical and political resistance, is no
easy task: this is why the strategy of Mapa Teatro has been to take responsibility
for the position they occupy as artists, and as inhabitants of this territory in between
spaces, in between histories. In this respect, De los dementes – commissioned by,
and exhibited in, one of the most prominent Spanish art institutions, located in
Madrid across from Atocha Station and close to the Prado, hence standing at the
centre of an ancient map of cultural and symbolic power – is exemplary of Mapa
Teatro’s pledge to take responsibility before history. I consider such responsibility
not a moral, but rather a political posture, and I see it powerfully resonating with
the very etymology of this word: responsibility as an ability to respond, to speak
back, to take position, and, moreover, to invite others to do so. De los dementes
takes responsibility for the history of the museum Reina Sofía, staging both a rep-
lica of, and a replica to, modernity.
Responding to De los dementes in writing is complicated, because any linear
description of this project collapses into multiple directions, demanding space for
drifts, bouncing back tropes of Mapa Teatro’s ‘thinking-creation’ (pensamiento-
creación), which would each deserve much broader critical consideration. My
choice, then, is to replicate the invitation Mapa Teatro made to Reina Sofía’s visi-
tors: to engage the reader in a practice of wandering. The following pages are,
therefore, a guided immersion into Mapa Teatro’s conceptual universe. The chapter
is organised according to a series of key terms orientating the journey into their
poetics, while also engaging with the intervention made in De los dementes. The
reader is invited to approach these terms not as part of a stable repertoire, but rather
as pointers, activating the reverberation each concept produces upon the other, and
the play of translation, which is always, of course, both a form of betrayal and an
opening onto unforeseen significations.

Artes Vivas
The first and fundamental term to initiate this journey of resonances into the De los
dementes is the expression artes vivas, used by Mapa Teatro to describe the field of
inquiry and intervention in which their practice is situated. Artes vivas is not a cat-
egory, nor a discipline, even less a genre. It rather connotes an ‘ethical and aestheti-
cal posture’ (Abderhalden 2014), which holds at its core the search for vital forces
that are silenced, tamed, emptied out of their intrinsic potency in a given context: a
neighbourhood, a historical narrative, an archive, a social practice, a fictional text.
A museum, in this case.
The concept of artes vivas is both an epistemological proposal and a praxis,
each time confronting different questions but always in light of the latent pos-
sibility to produce a shift in the texture of reality, and interrogate the canons that
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 123

organise both representation, and its so-called crisis (Abderhalden 2014). Rather
than communicate, artes vivas ‘re-cycle, transmit, problematize, translate (that is:
betray) information into poetic experiences and aesthetic events, making the act
of creation a possible act of micropolitical resistance against all forms that suf-
focate life’ (Abderhalden 2014). It is in this sense that the large corpus of Mapa
Teatro’s work – which encompasses a multiplicity of formats, including theatre,
sound work, opera, installation, video – is not merely interdisciplinary, but above
all characterised by an impulse to trigger indiscipline in each of those forms, or-
chestrating the surreptitious incursion of the body and its sensible matter into sites
which have seemingly obliterated it. While the body is the compass orientating
Mapa Teatro’s artistic interventions, its centrality in this work does not translate
into a fetishisation of presence: the body is conjured even if, and especially when,
it is absent. It does not function as the object of inquiry, but is rather the work’s
fundamental bearing.
Artes vivas is not a translation of the category of ‘live art’ advanced since the
early 2000s by artists, scholars, and cultural workers in the United Kingdom (see
Heathfield 2004; Jones 2012; Keidan 2004), but Mapa Teatro claims for this ex-
pression a specific bond of proximity and distance with that context:

live arts (is) a term of Anglo-Saxon origin that these two cartographer-
anthropophagites (Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden) have devoured, regurgitated
and reinvented in Latin America over the years […]. Theirs is a process of ‘de-
vouring transcreation’ in which human bodies are present within the work – the
‘live’ element from which the English term derives – and become the invisible
presence of life itself, a precondition of the work’s very existence.
(Mapa Teatro 2019: 1)

The reference to anthropophagy and to its significance in the Latin American con-
text, here, is not accidental. The conception of ‘artes vivas’, in fact, germinates
from a specific lineage of anthropophagic thinking, with its roots in 1930s Brazil-
ian modernism and in Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928),
later reignited and expanded upon in the work of Suely Rolnik (1998; 2011),
one of Mapa Teatro’s long-term interlocutors and collaborators. Anthropophagy,
in this context, names the critical operation of confronting alterity outside of a
logic of identity, and cultural hybridisation outside of the grammar of globalised
contemporaneity, which stems from centuries-long colonial histories in which the
Other (regularly imagined as non-European) was either annihilated or reduced to
sameness. Cannibalism, here, is reclaimed as the figure of an affective and ethical
encounter with the radical Other: it is the ‘irreverent devouring’ (Rolnik 2011),
in which the incorporation of the coloniser into one’s body becomes both the scar
left by that encounter, and also an opening to a digestion holding the potential
for new forms to emerge. The political promise of what Rolnik (2011) names the
‘anthropophagic subjectivity’ is the capacity to make oneself vulnerable to other
124 Giulia Palladini

imaginaries, towards ‘the emergence of a consistent cartography of oneself and

the world, which bears the imprint of otherness’.
It is in this conceptual framework that Mapa Teatro’s insistence on the distinc-
tive quality of artes vivas as a field affected by, but not derivative of, live art, not
only aims at resisting Anglo-American linguistic and cultural hegemony, but also
claims the specificity of an approach grown in ‘a place in the world undergone
ancient and permanent practices of violence, and subjected to multiple forms of
colonisation’ (Abderhalden 2014) that outlived colonial times and have forever
impacted language, body, and representation. The praxis of artes vivas, then, is also
a tool to come to terms with the longstanding regime of ‘colonial-capitalist uncon-
scious’ (Rolnik 2017), and to produce novel, porous maps of the world, which do
not conceal, but rather expose, the stratification of those histories, as well as the
enduring violence of European epistemologies.

Counterdispositive
Describing the praxis of artes vivas, Rolf Abderhalden makes an explicit reference
to the notion of ‘dispositive’ advanced by Michel Foucault to denote the heteroge-
neous set of relations (encompassing discourses, institutions, architecture, laws,
scientific and philosophical propositions, and so on) by means of which human
life has been governed, knowledge produced, and power exercised since moder-
nity, and conceives of all Mapa Teatro’s artistic interventions in terms of ‘coun-
terdispositives’ (Abderhalden 2014). If the Foucauldian dispositive is first and
foremost a strategic machine producing processes of subjectivation, ‘orientating,
capturing, determining, intercepting, modelling human behaviours’ (Agamben
2006: 22), Mapa Teatro’s ‘counterdispositives’ are likewise devices intervening
in fields of forces of knowledge and power, intending to produce a friction among
them in order to enact alternative processes of subjectivation in those who wit-
ness, who allow themselves to be affected by what the work attempts to activate.
In this sense, the remit of their actions also encompasses discourses, institutions,
regulations of time and space, which keep governing life in contemporary capital-
ism, dissociating humans from the conditions of living, and sustaining the ‘per-
verse abuse of the vital force of the biosphere in all its elements, including the
human’ (Rolnik 2017).
In light of these considerations, it seems almost a strange destiny that Mapa Tea-
tro’s creative research encountered the particular field of forces nesting at the core
of the Museum Reina Sofía. The museum director Manuel Borja-Villel commis-
sioned Mapa Teatro to conceive a project addressing the materiality of the museum
space; the commission did not respond to an explicit agenda, on the part of the mu-
seum, to decolonise its history or its collection. The ‘fissure’ Mapa Teatro decided
to explore, however, ended up tackling the materiality of the museum’s time: it was
a fissure located precisely at the core of the museum’s past, in a ‘faraway crevice
that is still open today, a place of desire and exploitation, ingenuity and brutality,
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 125

resistance and oblivion’ (Sánchez 2019: 6), located within the walls of the Reina
Sofía, but also branching elsewhere, across the Atlantic.
De los dementes took its cue from the history of the museum, whose building
was originally the location of Madrid General Hospital: the Hospital General y de
la Pasión. Founded in the sixteenth century by King Philip II as a Hospitium Pau-
perum (a hospitality refuge providing assistance to the poor and marginalised), the
building ‘would become a modern health center two centuries later when, in order
to save it from ruin, King Ferdinand VI declared that all alms granted by the royal
family and coming from the Indies were to be donated to the hospital’ (Mapa Teatro
2019: 2). The construction of the whole complex, designed by architect Francesco
Sabatini, remained incomplete, as the increasing demand for medical care progres-
sively slowed down the development of the original architectural project. After
1965, the building was abandoned, and for a decade, it was again under threat of
demolition, until in 1977, the Spanish government declared it a Historical-Artistic
Monument, making it again viable for preservation and public use. Following this
resolution, architect Antonio Fernández Alba redesigned the building to make it a
suitable venue for exhibitions. A few years later, in 1990, the art centre became a
national museum, housed in the Sabatini Building and significantly named Reina
Sofía: a name which, at least symbolically, stands in continuity with the colonial
ethos that has characterised the building from its very foundation.
Mapa Teatro decided to place at the centre of De los dementes the story of one
particular inmate of this hospital: the engineer Don Ángel Díaz Castellanos, who,
at the end of eighteenth century, was sent by King Carlos III to the region of Cal-
das, in Colombia (at the time, named Virreinato de Nueva Granada) with the task
to modernise the mechanism of extraction in the Marmato gold mine and maximise
productivity. Once in the colonies, however, Ángel Díaz started to suffer the first
symptoms of what came to be known as auriferis delirium, consisting in acoustic
hallucinations, and had to return to Spain, where he was hospitalised in the vaulted
basement of the hospital, today the Sala de Bovedas, which performed the function
of an asylum. According to an ordinance of the hospital, this space would enclose
all those patients who had to be removed from the streets ‘for the sake of public
quiet’ and were categorised as ‘dementes, ò faltos de juicio’ (lunatics or those lack-
ing sanity) (Mapa Teatro 2019: 5).
The rationale behind this ordinance (retrieved in the National Historical Ar-
chives in Madrid) is well known: it participates in what Michel Foucault has
described as a structural epistemic shift characterising the historical period of mo-
dernity, and that profoundly reorganised scientific knowledge and discourse, as
well as the field of perception beyond the medical realm. According to Foucault,
key to the political rationality that ensued from this epistemic shift is a novel rela-
tion between the eye and discourse: since the eighteenth century, society started
to be regulated by a particular kind of visibility, one that implied and facilitated
the interpretation of not only the visible, but also the invisible, and pivoted on the
human capacity (and hence, the power) to reveal hidden things (Foucault 2003:
126 Giulia Palladini

xiii). In medical perception, this meant turning ‘symptoms’ into legible informa-
tion, welcoming them in a space of representation called diagnostics; in clinical
practice, this corresponded to the foundation of dedicated sites for observation,
description, treatment of patients and, ultimately, also to the creation of sites of
containment, such as the one where the engineer Ángel Diaz ended his days after
his trip to the colonies. The logic regulating this broader shift towards a struc-
tural trust in visibility corresponded to a particular spatialisation of knowledge
and power, engendered and symbolised by specific institutions, such as the clinic
and, in different ways, the museum. Not surprisingly, Foucault’s work has been
a prominent point of reference for a number of scholars who have analysed the
institution of the museum as a prime site for observation and construction of the
‘order of things and people’ (Bennett 1994: 95). It suffices to mention Douglas
Crimp’s remark that the museum constitutes a certain form of art enclosure (1980:
41), Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s description of the origin of the public museum
as an instrument of disciplinary society (1992: 167–171), and Tony Bennett’s
reading of the birth of the museum as the advent of a technology of behaviour
management and the affirmation of a specific relation between space and vision
in public (1992: 89–101).
If the history of the building in which the Museum Reina Sofía exists today
hands itself over almost paradigmatically to a consideration of the relation between
these two modern sites of human experience and knowledge production – the clinic
and the museum – it is significant that in De Los dementes, Mapa Teatro left this
relation implicit and chose, instead, to place under the main spotlight a third site,
equally crucial to European modernity in its economic foundations and articulation
of discourse, and yet remarkably at the margins of Foucault’s analysis (see Bhaba
1994; Mitchell 2000; Spivak 1988; Stoler 1995): the colonial gold mine. It is in the
faraway space of the colonies, in fact, that the very procedures to discipline and
punish that Foucault carefully analysed in the 1970s as the dispositives of govern-
ance of European modernity were first tested, and put to work. In the ‘larger world’
that Foucault overlooks (Mitchell 2000: 5), a significant part of the drama of mo-
dernity was rehearsed and staged.
In convoking the word ‘stage’ and the act of ‘staging’, here, I echo the analysis
of modernity proposed by Timothy Mitchell (2000: 1), in which ‘stage’ designates
on the one hand a particular historical phase within a temporality that is understood
as linear, progressive, homogeneous, and universal, and where modernity would
supposedly represent ‘a stage of history’ (Mitchell 2000: 1), one that from the point
of view of the present is now long passed. On the other hand, as Mitchell empha-
sises, this designation is a distinctly European-modern construction, and modernity
should be more productively considered in light of its reiterated discursive placing
of itself in the West, determining not ‘a new stage of history, but […] how history
itself is staged’ (Mitchell 2000: 2).
As Benedict Anderson pointed out, in his critical consideration of the impor-
tance of print culture, map-making, and census-taking as tools to corroborate
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 127

De
IMAGE 7.1  los dementes, ò faltos de juicio (Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity),
overview of the atlas, Espacio 1, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía. Photograph by Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores, Archivo Fotográfico
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

modernity’s rendering of time and space as homogeneous (1991: 47–65), it is in

the constant representation of itself, through pictures and writing, through data
and measurements, that modernity produces, simultaneously, itself as the West,
and a sense of the world as ‘rendered up in terms of a dualism of image and real-
ity’ (Mitchell 2000: 28). Such dualism – from which a number of kindred others
descend, such as those between ‘life and its meaning, things and their exchange
value, activity and structure, execution and plan, content and form, object- and
subject-world’ (18) – is the foundation on which the very spectacle of European
modernity took place, and persisted long after the eighteenth century.
It is within this enduring spectacle of modernity that Mapa Teatro’s De los de-
mentes articulates its counterdispositive, staged on one of modernity’s designated
stages, a museum, and playing precisely with colonial modernity’s structures of
representation: maps, archives, indigenous artefacts exhibited as artworks. Fur-
thermore, Mapa Teatro cannibalises the ‘the triumph of the gaze’ (Foucault 2003:
165), which has structured both the medical experience and the mode of display
that have marked the history of the Reina Sofía by means of three main modali-
ties: first, placing sound, rather than gaze, as the narrative core of the project; sec-
ondly, using archival documents registering the history of this building, and the
story of the engineer Ángel Diaz, not as markers of truth, but rather as fragments
of a fictional story; third, questioning the notion of authenticity that traditionally
organises the display of items in a museum, ‘an institution committed to guarding
against counterfeits, a place where replicas ought only to be found in the gift shop’
(Sánchez 2019: 16).
128 Giulia Palladini

Replicas
De los dementes took place in three spaces of the Sabatini building: la Sala de
Bovedas, the staircase connecting its five floors, and the main exhibition space
(­Espacio 1). The first space the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition, Es-
pacio 1, hosted a visual atlas of the story which unfolded throughout the museum.
On a big wall, facsimiles of colonial maps of the Americas were displayed along-
side theatrical replicas of ordinances, letters encountered in the archives of the city
of Madrid, attesting the details of the mission Ángel Díaz was sent to accomplish in
the region of Caldas, as well as paintings representing indigenous people produced
in the space between Spain and the colonies, and photographs of the mountains in
the region of Caldas, today. In between these still images, a monitor, split into four
simultaneous videos, projected moving images documenting the labour of gold ex-
traction that currently continues to take place in the Marmato mine, shot by Mapa
Teatro in situ. A second monitor, positioned at a different point in the hall, used
a closed-circuit TV camera, showing what was happening in the basement of the
museum – the Sala de Bóvedas – where the installation continued. There, allegedly
the place where Ángel Díaz ended his days trapped in his delirium, Mapa Teatro
reproduced the interior of a traditional mine, realised with material brought from
Marmato, and accompanied by an acoustic installation reproducing sounds of min-
ing work: the repetitive sound of the labour of extraction as well as the acoustic
hallucinations that haunted those who, like Ángel Díaz, were enclosed in those
rooms. The Sala de Bóvedas, one of the spaces least currently used for exhibitions,
was the point of departure of the De los dementes: during the first visit to the space,
Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden recognised the walls of the basement as a form of liv-
ing archive of the building itself, and from this archive, they decided to investigate,
as well as to invent, the rest of the story.
The Sala de Boverdas is connected to the Espacio 1 by a large staircase, which
in De los dementes became an integral part of the project: the staircase resonated
with the sounds from the mine, coming from downstairs, in chorus with those pro-
duced by a barrel – similar to those in which gold is still transported on the Co-
lombian mountains – which was slowly carried up and down the five floors of the
building. The barrel also carried a small projector, screening on the bare walls of
the museum images recorded by Mapa Teatro in Marmato, portraying the miners,
their everyday labours, riding mules to access the mine. Curiously, the inspiration
for those videos came from a conversation that occurred during another inspection
of the space in preparation for this project: walking up from the basement, Rolf
Abderhalden asked Teresa Velázquez, Head of Exhibitions at the Reina Sofía, how
the furniture used by the inmates of the asylum in the Hospital General y de la
Pasión was carried up and down the five floors, and Velázquez replied ‘probably by
mules’. The figure of the animal, then, kept haunting the staircase in Mapa Teatro’s
imagination, and further migrated not only across space, but also across time: the
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 129

mules’ slow labour of transportation resurfaced in another space, in Caldas, figur-

ing a continuity of exploitation that silently traced yet another thread between the
city of Madrid, back then, and the contemporary Marmato mine.
On closer inspection, however, the connection between those geographical
spaces can be detected in all figures included in De los dementes. Another sig-
nificant example is an object on display in the main exhibition hall, alongside the
visual atlas on the wall: a replica of a golden statue of a cacique Quimbaya, part
of the Quimbaya Treasure, a large collection of 122 golden items (among which
jewels, elms, utensils, anthropomorphic figures, musical instruments) looted from
two tombs in the Cauca river valley, and donated by the Colombian government
to Spain in 1891, allegedly as a gift for the role played by the Spanish crown in
the negotiation of the borders between Colombia and Venezuela. This statue marks
the access to yet another complex entanglement of power, history, and geography.
Since 1965, the Quimbaya treasure has been displayed in the Museum of Américas
in Madrid alongside a massive collection of other pre-Colombian, ethnographic,
and colonial pieces, and is currently at the centre of a heated dispute between
Colombia and Spain. In 2017, the Colombian Constitutional Court demanded the
restitution of the treasury on the basis of ‘issues of international law relating to
cultural property (particularly that of indigenous people)’ and human rights in rela-
tion to ancestral cultural patrimony (Mejía-Lemos 2019: 122, 123). Colombia’s
demand to this day has remained unsuccessful: the Museum of the Américas has al-
legedly agreed to return to Colombia only golden replicas of the original items that
could be displayed as ‘stand in’s for the real thing, which would remain in Europe
(Lopera quoted in Infobae 2022).
In preparation for the De los Dementes, Mapa Teatro asked the Museum Reina
Sofía to request, on their behalf, a loan of a golden statue of the cacique Quimbaya
from the Museum of the Américas, with the intention to display it. This request,
however, was turned down: what was offered in its stead was, again, a replica of the
item. Mapa Teatro, however, refused to accept the replica manufactured by the Mu-
seum of the Américas, and this episode became the input for a further articulation
of the project. Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden contacted Jorge Mello, a Colombian
artisan and guajero (someone recovering items from abandoned places, and in-
digenous cemeteries) trading his manufactured objects in a flea market in Bogotá,
and commissioned him to manufacture the replica of the golden cacique that they
exhibited in the Reina Sofía. Through the conversation with Mello, Mapa Teatro
learned that it would be impossible to produce a replica of the original golden
statue of the cacique Quimbaya, since the technique originally used to fabricate it –
lost-wax casting – by its nature does not allow identical reproductions.
The theatrical replica fabricated by Mello and exhibited in De los dementes,
then, was in a sense an original. And yet the context in which it was exhibited, an
art museum, relegated it to the function of a replica: it was, in a sense, both an origi-
nal and a stand-in for the original object displayed in a museum located close by.
130 Giulia Palladini

The question of authenticity surrounding this statue can be read as a powerful sym-
bol of the careful blurring between reality and fiction on which the entire project
De los dementes was founded. As José Antonio Sánchez explained, in this project,
Mapa Teatro embraced ‘a baroque ethos’, intrinsically ‘questioning the ontological
pre-eminence of what is represented’ (2019: 16). Drawing on the work of Ecua-
dorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, Sánchez conceptualises the baroque ethos
as an attitude fundamentally challenging the distinction between fiction and truth,
and reclaiming the ‘duality of the theatrical experience’ (2019: 16) as a radical
epistemological possibility: one aiming at staging reality not according to factual
truth, but rather in its excess, including what reality makes structurally invisible.
In the case of this replica, then, ‘not only the logics of theatre and museums col-
lide, but so do the logics of creation (live) and conservation’ (ibid.). The ‘excluded
middle’, that in Echeverría’s conceptualisation of the baroque ethos is the space
where two spheres of reality can be inhabited at the same time, is exactly where
the living labour of Jorge Mello existed, in the museum, and so the convergence of
Madrid and Marmato, which De los dementes strives to make appear, displays the
actual and symbolic brutality of power that has long shaped the relations between
Spain and Colombia.
The word ‘replica’, after all, does not just mean reproduction, or copy: in its
etymological potentiality, still expressed in Latin languages such as Spanish, ré-
plica also means ‘to respond, to speak back’. Indeed, el derecho de réplica (the
right to replica) is a fundamental juridical principle in Colombia (among other
countries), which offers the constitutional guarantee of the possibility to oppose,
or ask clarification for, statements previously made public in the media. The verb
‘reply’, in English, retains this ancient sense: from re-plicare, the term is formed
by the particle re (marking the ‘againess’ of the occurrence) and the verb plicare,
literally meaning ‘to fold, to wrap up’. In the multifaceted meanings opened up
by this thinking in between languages, in the crack between spaces which Mapa
Teatro has long inhabited, the particular reply enacted in De los dementes ‘folds’
once again the story of the museum, speaking back to the inward movement of
modernity, and demanding an act of listening: listening to what, far away, keeps
resonating.

Ethno-Fiction and Living Archives

Choosing to put the absent space of the golden mine in Marmato under the main
spotlight was not merely an aesthetic expedient: it was the speaker through which
the museum’s visitor could listen to the echoes the project intended to convey.
Whereas the commission was meant to focus on the space of the museum located
in Madrid, and slowly became an investigation into its past, Mapa Teatro turned
this occasion into an opportunity to think, first and foremost, about the future of
Marmato, in Colombia. And yet the future of Marmato, very much like its past, is
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 131

De
IMAGE 7.2  los dementes, ò faltos de juicio (Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity),
the golden replica of the cacique statue, Jorge Mello. Espacio 1, Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Photograph by Federico Paladino,
Archivo Fotográfico Mapa Teatro.

already interlocked with the long shadow of European modernity: the population of
Marmato, in fact, is still engaged in the same resistance indigenous people started
to build during Spanish colonisation, to protect natural resources and ways of liv-
ing, ways of working, ways of relating to one’s territory and culture.
The Marmato mine – which was the actual economic substratum that made it
possible for the Reina Sofía to exist in the first place, and where the engineer Ángel
Díaz Castellanos was sent to modernise gold extraction in the eighteenth century –
has continued to exist. The region of Caldas is the scene of ‘one of the most con-
troversial mining conflicts in recent decades in Colombia’ (Serra-Carmago 2022),
and is emblematic of the enduring consequences of modernity. To be sure, in Mar-
mato gold mining activities had begun well before Spain’s colonising of the Ameri-
cas, on the part of local Indigenous populations such as the Quimbaya, Quinchías,
Supías, and Cartamas people (Gärtner 2005: 36). The town was founded in 1536,
and the local population that settled there includes descendants of Indigenous
people as well as ‘enslaved and free Africans, Spanish and other Europeans who
came to extract gold’ (Ferry 2022). The methodology of extraction, on the part
of traditional miners, is non-mechanical and has a low environmental impact: it
constitutes one of the various artisanal crafts carried out in the municipality of
Marmato that sustains a small-scale local economy. In the nineteenth century, the
newly born Republic of Colombia had agreed to allow British investors to mine for
gold (in 1825, the mines of Marmato were mortgaged to pay the debt for the War of
132 Giulia Palladini

Independence) and since then foreign corporations have slowly, but steadily, con-
tinued exploiting natural resources in the region. For a period, Marmato’s mining
tradition has given rise to a kind of ‘coexistence’ regime around mining, in which
different types of mining and different actors have managed to coexist, preserving
the upper area of the mountain, intended solely for small-scale mining. Since the
1990s, however, a series of multinational corporations – and most prominently the
Canadian company Aris Gold – have arrived and started implementing large-scale,
open-pit mining that not only creates enormous environmental damage, but also
has had a devastating impact on the life of local communities. A robust movement
of resistance has built over the years: The Marmato Defence Committee and the
Regional Indigenous Council of Caldas (CRIDEC) have fought over the municipal
Land Use Plan in 2011, advocating for the sovereign decision of the people for
Marmato. The common front Fuerzas Vivas Marmato is still mobilising to counter
Aris Gold’s plan to construct a tunnel whose existence would require the resettling
of the historic urban centre of Marmato (El Llano/La Betulia) and expose the local
population to toxic emissions.
Mapa Teatro brought the story of this struggle into the space of the Reina Sofía,
not just as additional background information but as the fundamental core of their
creative research. The traditional miners of Marmato are not ‘extras’ in this story:
they are effectively invited onto the stage and named in the exhibition brochure,1
alongside the members of Mapa Teatro who took part in this project. The miners
appear in the videos included in the main exhibition hall, but most importantly,
they were Mapa Teatro’s main interlocutors for this project.
In preparation for De Los Dementes, in fact, Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden de-
cided to ‘follow in Don Ángel Díaz Castellanos’s footsteps and went in search of
his phantasmagorias’ (Mapa Teatro 2019: 3) in Caldas, the region where he was
sent to modernise the mechanism of extraction. What they found, however, were
unpredictable traces: in their extensive fieldwork, Mapa Teatro learned about the
traditional miners’ work techniques, about the enduring exploitation of the region
from the monopoly of multinational companies, and about the struggle local popu-
lations have built to protect their livelihoods. This, in a sense, became the vital
force they decided to bring to the fore in the space of the museum. As one of the
performative activations of the De los dementes, on 25 April 2019, Mapa Teatro
presented in the Reina Sofía the lecture performance Museo Vivo, bringing together
elements of the scenography of the piece La Despedida (2018), which narrated a
hallucinatory farewell to the Colombian communist guerrilla and to their European
ghosts. Museo Vivo re-enacts the last scene of the piece, featuring an imaginary
mute dialogue between Karl Marx and a shaman in the Amazonic forest on the site
of a gold mine, including the presence of a spokesperson of the miners’ union in
Marmato, as well as the videos shot in Marmato documenting the labour of extrac-
tion and treatment of gold in Caldas.
Sánchez refers to the specific research methodology characterising Mapa Tea-
tro’s work, and prominent in this project, as a form of ‘archeological fiction’: this
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 133

is a research process less reliant on ‘traditional scientific procedures’ than on ‘intui-

tion or chance findings’ (2019: 14) and, most of all, assigning to the artists not the
role of archaeologists in search of traces of the past, but that of engaged, implicated
witnesses of the present.
Mapa Teatro refers to their artistic work as ‘ethno-fiction’: a term that not only
highlights the blending of documentary and fictional materials, but also implies
an approach to artistic creation as a process of investigation where the distance
between subject and object, typical of traditional ethnography as well as Western
approaches to knowledge production, collapses in favour of a poetics that also
includes, and strives for, an affective implication. In this context, the moment of
public presentation (in this case, the installation, in others a theatre performance,
or a moving image work) is only one step within a much longer, much wider poetic
and political engagement with the world (Palladini 2018: 669–679).
In Mapa Teatro’s works (to name just a few: Testigos a las ruinas, 2012; the tril-
ogy Anatomia de la Violencia in Colombia, 2010–2015), documents encountered
in actual archives coexist with ‘guests’, invited on stage not to ‘represent them-
selves’, neither to offer a testimony, but to participate, with their live presence, in
the construction of a fictional memory, which is – however – embodied, rather than
illustrated.

The living archives of Mapa Teatro […] challenge any attempt towards the clo-
sure that can result in a mimetic, dramatic or political representation. The pres-
ence of the guests fulfils the function of avoiding the objectification of their
testimony in a closed representation.
(Sánchez 2020: 167)

This is the case of Danilo Jiménez, the old leader of the Marco Fidel Suárez band,
famously accompanying Pablo Escobar in his public appearances, on stage in Dis-
curso de un hombre decente (2014), or that of Juana Ramírez, and Antanas Mockus
on the stage of Testigos a las ruinas, respectively the last inhabitant of the neigh-
bourhood El Cartucho in Bogotà (whose destruction the project documents) and the
former mayor of the city, together on stage ‘between official history and collective
fictions, the mythical tale and local mythologies: un-affective institutional documents
face-to-face with personal archives laden with affects’ (Abderhalden 2017: 138).
This is also the case of the contemporary traditional miners of Marmato: their
gestures (panning, scooping, transporting, touching gold) are documented on video
not just for their aesthetic beauty, but for their capacity to make visible, in the mu-
seum, a movement of life not detached from the conditions of living, a life which
is striving to keep existing despite the enduring shadow of colonial expropriation,
and which does so, significantly, using a technology of work which is older than
colonisation. In a sense, the choice to document the particularities of artisanal min-
ing, in the space of the museum, can be considered a ‘catachrestic gesture’, bor-
rowing the term advanced by Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha in their classical
134 Giulia Palladini

texts on postcolonial agency (Bhabha 1994: 184). ‘Catachresis’ traditionally means

to reclaim the meaning of a word, in order to express something supposedly ‘in-
correct’: it is the ‘abuse or perversion of a thought or metaphor’ (Spivak 1988:
308), and the manufacture of a replication which upends the supposed hegemony
of the signifying function. This concept has been extended, in Spivak’s work, also
to practices of concepts-metaphors which have been co-opted, but actually pre-
existed and survive, colonial domination. Whereas the activity of mining has long
been coded, within the text of colonial modernity, as a prime technique of Euro-
pean colonisation, Mapa Teatro makes visible the artisanal mining in Caldas that
pre-dates Spanish colonisation, bringing to the surface ‘the originary “abuse” con-
stitutive of language production’ (Spivak 1988: 308). In other words, while in the
text of the colonial past, which haunts the history of the Reina Sofía, the miners of
Marmato were doomed to appear (or rather: disappear) merely as victims of colo-
nial exploitation, the images and materials from contemporary Marmato account
for their vibrant political agency in the present, and their struggle for the future,
which happens through a craft which predated and outlived colonial modernity.
Through the activation of the miners’ story in the museum, Mapa Teatro welcomes
the enduring temporality of anti-colonial struggle and makes it resonate in the heart
of Europe.

The Engineer’s Ear, the Miner’s Ear

What the visitor may encounter, following the footsteps of Ángel Díaz to the co-
lonial gold mine, and then back to Spain, into the asylum, may well be something
that is not a replica of his delirium, but is, in fact, a replica – a reply – to colonial
modernity. The engineer’s hallucinations, in fact, might be the replication, in a
soundscape, of a very tangible reality. It might be the phantasmatic pointer to the
destiny of sound within a miner’s ear, which Rosalind Morris has described very
precisely:

The miner’s ear is attuned to the sounds of catastrophe: sirens, rumbling, explo-
sions, a gush of water where only a dripping should have been heard, coughing,
the burble of fluid in the lungs… or too much silence. The miner’s ear is attuned
to what will destroy him, what is already destroying him in the moment that he
hears, if he hears. The miner seeks signs. He is at least prepared for them, for he
has rehearsed their arrival. (…) And, what is worse, the miner is in the process
of going deaf. Miner’s deafness, caused by repeated exposure to loud, often re-
petitive and percussive noise, emerges as a gradual attenuation of the frequency
range that can be neurologically detected. It manifests itself, among other ways,
as the transformation of voice into mere sound, and of many voices into constant
but diminishing noise. The peculiar deafness of the miner thus annihilates his
capacity for differentiation. Sounds become ever more indistinct, unclear. The
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 135

deafness is itself the symptom of an injury. But it is also the cause of greater
risk, for it increases the miner’s vulnerability to yet more injury. This spiralling
deafness extinguishes the miner’s receptivity to communication, including, and
most dangerously, the sounds of warning.
(Morris 2008: 96)

It is possible to imagine, then, that what was interpreted in the eighteenth century
as auriferis delirium was in fact Ángel Díaz’s experience of this hearing deteriora-
tion, which his own task of modernising extraction in the mine had started to bring
about in his body. Surely, in the early days of gold mining, the loss of hearing was
not yet diagnosed as a physical impairment, not least because the indigenous popu-
lation employed in the mining industry was hardly put under medical scrutiny, or
offered medical treatment. Hence, it was an invisible illness: one that had not yet
been welcomed in the space of representation called diagnostics.
It might be, instead, that the sound installation pointed to something else. It
might be that being in the colonies, and witnessing the violence of exploitation
which enabled gold extraction, had triggered Ángel Díaz, who had lost lucidity,
and incorporated within himself the deafening sound that the miners around him
had to endure every day. The acoustic hallucination reproduced in De los dementes,
then, could be a glimpse into the future, a time much beyond the historical moment
when Ángel Díaz was confined in the asylum: the hallucinating sounds might well
be interpreted as an echo of the following ‘stages’ of the global business of extrac-
tion, tracing a direct line from the Spanish colonisation of the Americas to contem-
porary exploitation by multinational corporations like Aris Gold.
A curious homonymy seems to hide all these possibilities in the texture of this
story, making the auriferis delirium both a hearing impairment, and a form of gold
rush:

Wherever there is gold, there lies a possible confusion of signs. The very word
invites such confusion. In the innocent ear, homonymy masquerades as etymol-
ogy, as the aural (what can be heard) is falsely linked to the auriferous (the gold
bearing). In one, the root—obscured by time—of an ear: aurilis (Latin). In the
other, the root of (evil?) gold: aurum (also Latin).
(Morris 2008: 98)

At the end of the museum visit, the spectator of De los dementes is left to inhabit
a strange predicament: sitting at the cusp between the past and the future, they are
enfolded into the body of the museum, they participate in its sensorial memory,
they witness the ancient breathing of its hidden colonial life. The museum visi-
tor, too, is compelled to search for their ability to respond, which means to take
responsibility, to speak back, to respond with life to the enduring, deafening sound
of colonial modernity.
136 Giulia Palladini

Note
1 Respectively, the catalogue list miners from the following associations: Marmato Asso-
ciations of Traditional Miners, La Esperanza Mining Company, El Respaldo – Enchanda
Gold Mine, as well as the Marmato Cultural Center and the Hospital San Antonio de
Marmato. The members of Mapa Teatro involved in the project were Heidi Abderhalden
Cortés, Rolf Abderhalden Cortés, Ximena Vargas, José Ignacio Rincón, Alirio Garcia. In
Mapa Teatro 2019.

Works Cited
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elheraldo.co/latitud/artes-vivas-132326.
Abderhalden, Heidi and Rolf (2017) ‘Testigos/Witnesses’, in Giulia Palladini and Marco Pus-
tianaz (eds), Lexicon for an Affective Archive, Bristol: Intellect and LADA, pp.137–142.
——— (2018) Goethe Medal 2018 Acceptance Speech, https://www.goethe.de/resources/
files/pdf160/goethe-medaille-2018_acceptance-speech-mapa-teatro_en.pdf.
Agamben, Giorgio (2006) Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Milano: Nottetempo.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, New York: Verso.
Bennett, Tony (1994) The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics, London and New
York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.
Crimp, Douglas (1980) ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’, 13 October, pp. 41–57.
Ferry, Elizabeth (2022) ‘A Robust Movement Against Caldas Gold in Marmato, Colombia’,
12 September, https://miningwatch.ca/blog/2022/9/12/robust-movement-against-caldas-
gold-marmato-colombia.
de Andrade, Oswald (1928; 1990) ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, A Utopia Antropofágica, São
Paulo: Globo, pp. 66–74.
Foucault, Michel (2003) The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge.
Gärtner, Álvaro (2005) Los místeres de las minas. Crónica de la colonia europea más
grande de Colombia en el siglo XIX, surgida alrededor de las minas de Marmato, Supía
y Riosucio, Manizales: Editorial Universidad de Caldas.
Heathfield, Adrian (2004) ‘Alive’, in Adrian Heathfield (ed), Live: Art and Performance,
London: Tate Publishing, pp. 6–13.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Jones, Amelia (2012) ‘The now and the has been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History’, in
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds), Perform, Repeat Record: Live Art in History,
Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, pp. 1–3.
Keidan, Lois (2004) Vision Paper. A Question of Live Art, ‘Live Art UK’, https://www.
liveartuk.org/uploads/documents/Live_Art_UK_VISION_PAPER.pdf.
Lopera, Jaime (2022) quoted in ‘What is the Quimbaya treasure, the valuable collec-
tion of pre-Columbian pieces that Spain refuses to return to Colombia’, News Infobae
https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/03/31/what-is-the-quimbaya-treasure-the-valuable-
collection-of-pre-columbian-pieces-that-spain-refuses-to-return-to-colombia/.
Mapa Teatro (2019) Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, exhibition catalogue, Madrid:
Museo Nacional Reina Sofía.
 Listening to the Museum, Hearing the Mine 137

Mejía-Lemos, Diego (2019) ‘The Quimbaya Treasure, Judgment SU-649/17’, American

Journal of International Law 113(1): 122, 123.
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Press.
Morris, Rosalind C. (2008) ‘The Miner’s Ear’, Transition 98: 96–114.
Museo Reina Sofía (2011) Efrén Álvarez Económicos, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/
exhibitions/efren-alvarez-economicos.
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de Mapa Teatro’, in Marta Rodriguez (ed), Mapa Teatro: el Escenario Expandido, Bo-
gotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, pp. 669–679.
Rolnik, Suely (1998) ‘Subjetividade Antropofágica/Anthropophagic Subjectivity’, in Paulo
Herkenhoff and Afriano Pedrosa (eds), Arte Contemporânea Brasileira: Um e/entre
Outro/s, São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, pp. 128–147.
——— (2011) ‘Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible’, e-flux
journal 25, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/25/67892/avoiding-false-problems-politics-
of-the-fluid-hybrid-and-flexible/.
——— (2017) ‘The Spheres of Insurrection: Suggestions for Combating the Pimp-
ing of Life’, e-flux 86, November 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/163107/
the-spheres-of-insurrection-suggestions-for-combating-the-pimping-of-life/.
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Lacking Sanity, exhibition catalogue, pp. 6–13.
——— (2020) The Bodies of Others: Essays on Ethics and Representation, London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Serra-Carmago, Ximena (2022) The conflict between traditional miners in Marmato and
Canadian transnational mining companies: Another ISDS dispute over natural resources
in Colombia, https://www.iisd.org/itn/en/2022/03/30/the-conflict-between-traditional-
miners-in-marmato-and-canadian-transnational-mining-companies-another-isds-dispute-­
over-natural-resources-in-colombia/#_ftn1.
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berg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan Educa-
tion, pp. 71–313.
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the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8
SHOWCASING ANTI-COLONIAL
NATIONALIST STRUGGLES
Museums and Theatre in Contestation

Bishnupriya Dutt

In today’s India, an aggressive right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which

promotes homogeneity, particularly based on religious identities, has tried increas-
ingly to collapse the historical past with narrow chauvinism through distortions
and misinterpretations. Therefore, with caution, one approaches the four new mu-
seums located within the grand Mughal era monument, the Red Fort, in Old Delhi,
theatrically depicting selective historical moments from the anti-colonial national-
ist struggle within the aggressive atmosphere of the nationalisation of history and
heritage. In this context, it is important to explore how the public consciousness
of an enormous number of daily visitors1 who are the spectators of this new mode
of historical dissemination can be raised around BJP’s instrumentalisation of his-
tory. The current cultural politics, therefore, assumes new dimensions and allows
one to engage with colonial histories, anti-colonial nationalist movements, and the
questions of violence and non-violence; the growing difference between academic
scholarship and popular histories and how State-sponsored cultural hegemony is
fostering populism, akin to ideological conditioning and the critical role theatre
plays in such a culture-scape by offering a counter-narrative and an active chal-
lenge to such histories in the public domain.
Out of the four, the only museum that seems congruous with the location is the
one on the rebellion in 1857, marking the end of the Mughal rule in India.2 The
other three museums are of nationalist struggles from the twentieth century –
the tribulations of the radical and militant leader, Netaji Subash Chandra Bose
(1897–1945); the Jallianwallah massacre of 1919, titled: Yaade-e-Jallian (Remem-
bering Jallian); and the largest, Azadee-ke-Diwane (Freedom’s passion) that depicts
the militant nationalist movements that occurred throughout the twentieth-century.
These are generally regarded as alternatives to mainstream nationalism that were
led by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Indian National Congress, to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-9
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 139

whom power was transferred in 1947. All these histories, since independence in
1947, have been cited or performed to challenge the elite nationalism of the Con-
gress party that is regarded as the ruling oligarchy, mostly by Left cultural practices
and now by the right wing. These historical depictions have never been perceived
as the historical past, but a spectre of the past that always haunts the present, in
cultural politics. In light of the shift to a right-wing ideology that is based on nar-
row communitarian identities, the new practices assume a critical significance that
needs to be discerned and countered.3
Depicting the anti-colonial nationalist movement may be the most difficult his-
tory to ‘stage’, as it is often the means by which the Indian State celebrates its ex-
istence, but it also invites criticism for the foundational exclusions and structural
inequalities that have continued to plague Indian society and are very typical of
post-colonial democracies. These debates have long been widespread in academic
circles and generate critical historical discourses from the subaltern, Marxist,
feminist, and post-colonial historians. Post-colonial theatre owes its popularity
and credibility to the dissemination of these critical perspectives as popular his-
tories in the public domain. Yet, at this contemporary moment, there has been an
enormous swing towards a populist rendition of these histories that borders on
xenophobia and jingoism, which this chapter tries to ‘stage’ through the descrip-
tion and analysis of these museums and theatre’s challenge to State-sponsored
museum politics.
This new museum project has been exclusively implemented by the BJP gov-
ernment after coming to power in 2014 (most of the museums were inaugurated
in 2019) and as is the norm in India, funded and administered by the State. The
anticipated distortion and manipulation of history, instrumentalised for the benefit
of the right wing, if present, was positioned in a more subtle way – not on your face
appropriation. The deployment of unusual theatrical strategies – life-sized black
and white photographs, audio-visual projections, a few artefacts, soundscape, and
creating a scenographic locationality that is immersive – with the intention of
evoking patriotic affective responses, allows one to experience the museum rather
than think and this camouflages a critical approach.
Within this larger historical framework offered by the four museum spaces,
I bring in a representative play from 1989, re-staged in 2019, to show how thea-
tre does not shy away from the discursive in popular historical dissemination and
makes it accessible to the people to evoke critical thinking.

Museums of the Past and Present

The new scenography and narrative-dominated museum with theatrical deploy-
ment is a new phenomenon in post-independent India. However, as Susan Bennett
asserts in her book, Theatre & Museums (2013), it is part of a global trend. It maps
a shift from ‘display to experience, from tableaux to performance, and from quiet
contemplation of authoritative interpretation to active participation that implies the
140 Bishnupriya Dutt

collaborative production of meaning(s)’ (Bennett 2013: 60). Bennett regards it as

a welcome shift from an art object focus that is imposed on a compliant and pas-
sive population to a more interactive mode that she describes as a ‘synergic turn to
theatricality’ (Bennett 2013: 21) with ‘deeply performative effects’ (Bennett 2013:
19), but ideally is part of progressive curatorial practices.
The new Museums of Independence, mark a departure, in exactly the way
Bennett sums up, from the museum culture(s) in post-colonial India that are, usu-
ally, centred on objects of antiquity and are, as Kavita Singh lays out so eloquently,
premises of the new Nation state that attempt to create a historical discourse around
artefacts and objects that otherwise have neutral and even secular values (Singh
2015). Singh’s reference to ‘neutral’ and ‘secular’ values is based on her extensive
work on the national museum and state museums, which transitioned from housing
colonial-time discoveries as part of archaeological projects and exhibitions to be-
coming the new nation’s cultural heritage. This, to a certain extent, was instrumen-
tal in the larger field of constructing national identities mediated by canonical art
objects. Housing artefacts from colonial era archaeological projects and colonial
exhibitions, they were more or less neutral art objects entrenched in the autonomy
of the world of art and scholarship and mostly subjected to a historical interpreta-
tion within their specific contexts and, hence, not seen as representing a particular
religion or culture.4
The hard proof of material remains of the past – the corpus of relics from
monument structures and archaeological discoveries and art objects – handed
over to the new nation at the time of independence continued to grow as the post-
colonial nation persevered with archaeological and museum projects and according to
Tapati Guha-Thakurta became entangled with ‘the power of the “nation form” as
it enfolds these structures and objects and the histories and traditions they yield’
(Guha-Thakurta 2004: xviii). Both Guha-Thakurta and Singh have traced the his-
tory of museums and how knowledge is deployed and imbricated by profession-
als, intellectuals, and the State in a web of demands and desires that come to be
woven around the hard proof of the material remains of the past. According to
both, the art-history methods and discourse established in the heyday of Nehruvian
secular India allowed an open hermeneutic approach invested in the Nehruvian
scientific archaeology. The term Nehruvian scientific archaeology then, according
to them, allows one to distinguish between the 1950s and 60s – the period when
these museums were set up – with the later obscurantist epic archaeology of the
1970s – when contradictions between the worlds of myths, history, and academic
archaeology were infused to express a ‘deep crisis of self-legitimization of the field
itself’ (Guha-Thakurta 2004: xviii).
However, as the museums in consideration displayed in the second decade of
the twenty-first century, there is no scope to interpret the art object, but as a nar-
rative with its accompanying new ‘nation form’ that allows one to reconfigure the
meaning and scope of the National with the new objectives and orchestration of
exclusions and chauvinism that lie at the root of the current crisis of identities
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 141

and intrusion of Hindu nationalism. The new experiential museums, conspicuous

in the absence of any material remains, leave no scope for the earlier neutrality
entrenched in the autonomies of the art objects and associated with the, once, lofty
ideals that the nation wanted to display – heterogeneity, plurality, and what, I will
reiterate, is the secular tenor of the display of art objects.

Museums of Independence
The four museums, under the title: India’s Struggle for Independence (Bharat ki
Swatantra ke Sangram), are located in the old British barracks that were built when
the colonial army occupied the Red Fort after the end of the rebellion of 1857.
Under the new BJP regime since 2014, the barracks have been converted into a
museum complex.5 The museums, as mentioned on their display plaques, were all
inaugurated in 2019, under the current right-wing dispensation. The chief advisor-
historian who worked along with a team of historians is Kapil Kumar, a one-time
Marxist but now patronised by the new regime and someone who has a declared
shift in his ideological affinities. It is an ongoing project conducted under the strict
scrutiny of the advisory committee as matters of history are seen as bearing ideo-
logical and political intents.
A contrast to the seventeenth-century palace, these are utilitarian colonial build-
ings and the entrance tickets to the Red Fort with a small addition (Rs. 40) allow
the large number of tourists visiting this site every day to walk through the mu-
seums. The visitors comprise a very large section of the population from all parts
of India and for whom a visit to the Red Fort is a priority. Significantly, while the
palace is one of the most important edifices to symbolise Mughal architecture and
its glory, it is also a history that is being increasingly marginalised because it was
a part of the history of Islamic rule over India. The juxtaposition of the new muse-
ums in the same space, glorifying Indian anti-colonial nationalism with its inherent
Hindu tendencies is anomalous but deliberate.
Each museum represents a phase, but also tries to create a continuity and cover
different regions and time. The cogency is more evident in the formal aspects: they
feature standard uniform black and white photographs, enormous boards with visu-
als and texts, projections on walls and centrepieces of objects or installations. The
entrances display installations that initiate one into the space through theatrical
means. The one in the museum dedicated to the events of 1857 is a wall fresco with
the Red Fort sketched across a large wall as a panorama with four of the leaders:
Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775–1862), the last Mughal Emperor, a significant symbol of
the Pan-Indian nature of the revolt; Nana Saheb (1784–1859), the Peshwa/ruler of
the Maratha Empire, who led the rebellion in Cawnpore; the Rani of Jhansi (1828–
1858) and Hazrat Mahal (1820–1879), queen consorts of the princely states of
Jhansi and Awadh respectively, who led the rebellion in their respective locations.
The museum dedicated to Jallianwala Bagh has a wall resembling the grounds of
the historic park, with bricks jutting out and a monument dedicated to the martyrs
142 Bishnupriya Dutt

at the centre, while on an audiovisual screen, the names of the people who were
killed and wounded roll on. The museum on Netaji Subash Bose has a larger than
life-sized photograph, and the final, Azadee-ke-Diwane, has a cannon in the centre
of a room and a model of the Cellular Jail where political prisoners and revolution-
aries spent many years in exile. Chains and a few utensils are scattered to indicate
life in the Cellular Jail. Once you enter the subsequent galleries (about four–five
in each one of them), the narrative begins with a similar use of the photographs,
audio-visuals, write ups, music, and voice-overs.
The narratives are simple, descriptive, and linear. The 1857 Rebellion starts
by announcing it as the first war of independence, without any reference to the
controversies that have raged on for years about whether it may be considered a
wide-scale rebellion or a mere sepoy mutiny. The nomenclature of the first war of
independence was coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Marx and Engels
1857) while writing about the rebellion,6 but this was also significantly advocated
by the founder of the right-wing organisation, the Rashtriya Sevak Sangha (RSS),
Veer Savarkar (Savarkar 1909). The RSS is a sister organisation of the BJP. The
narrative weaves its story through the long-term causes of the East India Compa-
ny’s oppressive regime and merges this with the immediate cause: soldiers revolt-
ing against the use of Enfield rifles that were supposed to have been made using the
fat of cows and pigs that is sacrilege for Hindus and Muslims, respectively. Some
rifles and pistols are laid out in glass boxes, but not the Enfield or anything histori-
cally specific. The trajectory follows the idea that though started by the sepoys, the
revolt spread all over India. A coloured map shows its expansion into the various
regions of India and the leaders who represented their people – maharajas, kings,
and even the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The second floor is dedicated
to the defeat of the sepoys and the leaders at the hands of the British through treach-
ery and the superiority of the British artillery – the coming of a Capitalist modern
state fighting against the last remnants of a semi-feudal India and the inhuman
oppression unleashed on those leaders and people who were seen to be complicit
with the rebels.
The Jallianwala Bagh museum also tells a similar story, but one of the early
twentieth century. It begins its narrative with the contribution of the Indian soldiers
to World War I, which was considerable and went unacknowledged and, as the
exhibition says, rewarded with nothing less than the draconian Rowlatt Act. The
Rowlatt Act was passed by the Imperial Legislative Council in 1919, and because
of it, political cases could be tried without juries and the convicted imprisoned and
interned without trial. Protests broke out, particularly, amongst the extremist wings
of the Congress Party and in Punjab took on a more radical dimension. To suppress
the protests, the army chief of Amritsar, General Dyer, with the tacit support of the
lieutenant governor-general of Punjab, Michael Francis O’Dwyer, opened fire on
a large group of people who were celebrating the spring festival, Baisakhi, on 13
April 1919, in a closed park – the Jallianwala Bagh. It was a bloody massacre that
led to approximately 379–1,000 Indians dying and 1,500 being wounded. Protests
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 143

followed with Tagore renouncing his knighthood in 1919 and Gandhi hardening
his anti-British stance. The exhibition ends with a note of melancholy as memories
of Jallianwala Bagh tend to evoke, but also with an uplifting patriotic moment:
Udham Singh in London, 20 years later, killing O’Dyer with the classic, ‘India
takes revenge’.
The Azadee-ke-Diwane museum contains stories of many revolutionaries who
were called militant nationalists and represented the alternative to the Gandhian
focus on mass mobilisation, civil society protests of Satyagraha, and non-violent
strategies. Tanika Sarkar, in her seminal work Bengal 1928–1934; The Politics of
Protest, has laid out the close relationship between radical congressmen and revo-
lutionary terrorists, who represented a consistent patriotic discourse for the urban
middle-class Hindu nationalist (Sarkar 1987: 23). This comes with a problematic
historical stance, as Gandhian politics of non-violence are seen as a direct opposi-
tion to the militant strands within the nationalist movements. As Tanika Sarkar has
tried to point out, it was difficult, at least in Bengal and some other regions, to dis-
tinguish radical congressmen from the revolutionary terrorists. But Gandhi’s often
calling off nationalist agitations, signing pacts with the British and denouncing the
revolutionaries as they were tried and sent to the gallows, is full of contradiction,
which the museum highlights blatantly. After the installations of the cannon and
the Cellular Jail, come many exhibits extolling rebellions and revolutionaries –
unknown soldiers, small rebellions (Indigo rebellion 1859–1860, Gond rebellion
of 1868, massacre at Maler Kotla in 1872, Lushai in 1872, the Rampa rebellion in
1879, and the Munda Movement in 1900). These are accompanied by short biogra-
phies of their relatively unknown leaders. The Gadar Party rebellion and Rashbe-
hari Bose’s revolutionary activities, along with a large number of militant groups
such as the Jugantar Samity, the Anushilan Samity, the Hindustan Socialist Revo-
lutionary Party, the Hindustan Republican Army who undertook the assassination
of British administrators, and, finally, Netaji Subash Bose adorn the other galleries.
One room is dedicated to the women who participated in these movements, while a
final audio-visual clip brings the history of all these different events and narratives
together. The final installation, before the exit, is a small room with many artificial
candles flickering in a darkened room.
The final museum is dedicated to Netaji Subash Chandra Bose (1897–1945), a
popular nationalist figure, who introduced to Bengal in 1928–1929, ‘a stridently
militant idiom and keen interest in agitational politics, recruited large numbers of
urban youth and students as his volunteers’ […] and fulfilled the longing of a for-
cibly disarmed people for martial romance’ (Sarkar 1987: 14). Bose however was
embroiled in controversy with the Congress leadership till his resignation from the
party and went on to form the Azad Hind Fauj or the Indian National Army (INA)
with help from the Axis Powers to march to Delhi, and finally his mysterious death
in a plane crash in Taihoku (now Taipei). His biographical narrative extends from
his college days, to the final INA project, and to his disappearance. Life-sized pho-
tographs along with his cap, identity cards of the members of the INA, and other
144 Bishnupriya Dutt

paraphernalia are placed in little glass boxes. Footage from Bose’s life and his ac-
tivities are played on a loop all over the museum – we see him and his associates
and hear his voice declaring, what is now his famous speech, ‘Dilli Chalo’, indicat-
ing an impeding march to Delhi to take over power through force from the colonial
rulers. He wanted to compel a transfer of power and in the process challenge the
compromised position of the Congress and Gandhi. Bose has always been seen as
the alternative leader (particularly in Bengal) who could have led India to independ-
ence and offered a challenge to the ruling oligarchy that attained power in 1947.
The narrative is supplemented by the visual sources that are chosen to illustrate
the curatorial pedagogic intent and to make it ‘authentic’ and historical. The re-
search is thorough and comprehensive – particularly excavating popular grassroot
rebellions, those on the geographical margins that were led by subaltern people
and that have always been of significant historical concern and an aborted project
by subaltern historians.7 Where photographs are not available, sketches have been
used – a style made popular by school textbooks – that seem authentic and replicas
of the icons and patriots. A uniform pattern is maintained, though the availability
of photographs is more evident for the later years when the nationalist movement
was extensively documented. The audio-visual clips, at least three or four per mu-
seum, are old footages. These are film division documentations that were played
in cinema halls in the 1960s and 1970s, before films begun – footage of important
events. A solemn male voice provides the narration, creating a storytelling form
with dramatic modulations of the voice. The clips edited from a more didactic nar-
rative, however, in the larger space seem to bring forth the historical leaders as live
subjects and enhance the experience.
A soundscape comprising old patriotic songs constantly play in the background;
songs from old Bollywood films such as Manoj Kumar’s Mere desh ki mitti (The
soil of my land) (1967) and Lata Mangeshkar’s, now famous, rendition of Sare ja-
han se aacha (The best in the world) (composed in 1904). Like all patriotic songs,
they are uplifting and also given the film genres popular amongst the vast major-
ity of the population create the necessary nostalgia. There is probably a concerted
sound system that plays across the museums, exceptions being those played to
enhance the ambience around the entrance installations such as a song or music
piece with adequate pathos for Jallianwallah Bagh or a classical tune based on a
raga depicting the poignancy of the events of 1857.
Following the established trend of valourising individuals and constructing na-
tional icons, the museum introduces many marginal and forgotten leaders and in
the plethora of individuals, some icons, particularly Gandhi and Nehru, are incon-
spicuous. The individual cult of national, regional, or local leaders is regarded by
Partha Chatterjee as an integral aspect of Indian cultural practices and the museums
tell us explicitly that there is no dearth of embodied sovereigns and identification
with individuals of the past and the present that have effectively built relatively
closed communities whose identity is anchored in the leader (Chatterjee 2020: 99).
By this logic, the sovereign deficit of constitutional democracy by playing on
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 145

individual leadership cults is, thus, ‘sought to be filled by sovereignty effect of the
icon who demands reverence’. Anyone who is seen as opposing this leader, the
colonial ruler in this case, but also their subsequent erasures ‘will fall prone to an
internal border that divides loyal followers from its enemies or who has marginal-
ised them in political power’ (Chatterjee 2020: 99).
Along with the title of the exhibitions, engraved in stone are marble plaques that
announce that Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, inaugurated the museums. His
role in creating an international awareness by demanding an apology from Great
Britain on the centenary year of Jallianwala Bagh (2019) has been highlighted.
In the Subash Bose museum, a plaque near the entrance announces how the an-
niversary of the formation of the Azad Hind Government was commemorated by
Prime Minister Modi at the Red Fort on 21 October 2018. Stray interventions in
placing their leaders, including the founder of the RSS – Veer Savarkar – cannot be
overlooked given the size and positioning, as museums tend to do in terms of high-
lighting certain aspects. In front of the central installation in Azadee-Ke-Diwane
is a board with the face of Veer Savarkar and his short stint at the Cellular Jail is
prominently displayed as are others from Maharashtra who were known to be more
oriented towards Hindu nationalism. The original order from the English govern-
ment for the deportation of Savarkar from Britain to India for participating in na-
tionalist activities is exhibited. It is Rashbehari Bose’s later affiliation with Veer
Savarkar and the founding of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha branch in Japan in
1938 that may be responsible for his prominence amongst the militant nationalists.
Where such blatant genealogies are not possible, it offers a different perspective.
Bose’s history highlighted, thus, becomes the narrative to critique the mainstream
Congress politics that sidelined him; his disillusionment and his subsequent search
for international allies are also highlighted. Noteworthy is a quote as a graffiti that
specifically mentions how he shunned Bolshevik overtures as he refused to be their
agent. However, Bose’s controversial alliance network with the Japanese impe-
rial powers and the Nazis are conspicuous in their absence. No reality of histori-
cal knowledge and criticism is allowed to mar the glorification of the individual’s
valour and introduce complexities. Similarly, the strong Hindu overtones inherent
in the militant strands of radical congress and revolutionary terrorist discourse,
where – ‘The Gita8 was frequently cited to evoke a death defying mood among the
youth’ (Sarkar 1987: 23) is tacitly understood rather than spelt out, either in eulogy
or criticism.
Another noteworthy gallery that throws light on the dramaturgical interventions
inherent is the one dedicated to the women revolutionaries and martyrs, relatively
few and far in between. Once again, apparently, it seems to be an important exercise
in excavating lost narratives, but the gallery-centre is symbolically adorned by a
towering piece – a replica of Bharat Mata9 or Mother India, a symbol often evoked
by the right wing to valourise the domestication of women while elevating them
to the level of a goddess as an empty but regressive signifier. Interestingly, in the
great scramble for photographs amongst the visitors, this was an installation where
146 Bishnupriya Dutt

the visiting women waited to be photographed. The invitation to pay homage to the
life-sized portrait of Bharat Mata encourages various modes of identification, obvi-
ously overpowering all the other portraits in the room. This is a classic example of
the intrusion of right-wing ideology, as many of the women revolutionaries who
came out to participate in the movement and political struggles subverted the idea
of the hegemonic Bharat Mata that talks of women as a symbolic presence devoid
of all agencies and subservient to male subjects.
Indeed, the tourists walk through the new museums, clicking photographs on
their phones, paying attention to the historical objects, glancing through the pho-
tographs, sketches, and audio-visual clips, but rarely reading the supplementary
written texts accompanying the exhibits as they are mostly in English or pausing to
study any one object or visual. It is a walk-through performance and experienced
viscerally by being barraged by, what I regard as, the forms and idioms derived
from theatre scenography and design. It is a coherent experience; exposed to a
photographic gestalt that aims to generate a sensorial experience as spaces evok-
ing patriotism, even bordering on jingoism, tend to do. The apparent objective
historical narrative is extensively supported by sources such as visual documents –
facsimiles of newspaper cuttings or correspondences and coded secret messages
circulated within revolutionary networks that helped spread the message of re-
volt in 1857 within the country, or Rashbehari Bose’s and Netaji Subash Chandra
Bose’s10 messages circulated internationally during the First and Second World
War respectively.
Bennett’s recommendation of such experiential museums committed to ‘social
engagement, often grounded in the specific context of public memory’ and ‘direct
pedagogy’ is based on progressive curatorial practices (Bennett 2013: 59) and not
the examples that we are examining and scrutinising with justified suspicion. Quot-
ing Paul Connerton, she cautions that such purposeful structuring of memory is not
necessarily agentive or evocative of any critical thinking. In this context, the key
question is that when the mediation and curatorial practice are an extension of a
larger politics and instrumentalisation of cultural institutions for regressive com-
munal motives and interventions into nationalist histories, how do we initiate a crit-
ical perspective? Here, the problem is not so much in distortions or manipulations
that can be pointed out or critiqued, but I would argue that the linear narrative by
eliminating the discursive aspects actually unravels a different mode of efficacy –
total absorption by which critical faculties are suspended. The theatre aims to chal-
lenge the return to the discursive and evoke self-reflexive critical thinking.

Theatre’s Challenge to Museum Politics

Since independence, the post-colonial Indian theatre, particularly what is often
categorised as political theatre, has played with all the themes that the above-
mentioned museums espouse. 1857 has long been discussed in the context of the
first war of independence (Dutt 2009a);11 Netaji Subash Bose and his INA (Dutt
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 147

1995) have always featured when Gandhian politics has been critiqued; the various
militant genres, particularly those inclined towards progressive politics, have been
recovered and performed; and plays and jatras12 on the events at Jallianwala Bagh
have been a popular theme (Dutt 1996). The dramatic repertoire critiqued main-
stream nationalism and the emergence of the ruling oligarchy by taking up these
themes, but through that which invited a discursive critical thinking and interven-
tion not only in terms of history but to develop citizenship values and a form of
active participation in civil society. When censorship and repression from the State
came, theatre turned into a vortex of artivism.13
Since 2015, as the right wing came to power, a number of these plays, written
and produced in the heyday of theatre’s agonism towards the State, were revived.
I focus on one such play that brings together the anomalies of Gandhian politics
along with the militant nationalist themes, but through a complex discursive ap-
proach that neither allows one to eulogise any iconic figure nor fall into the binaries
of militant or non-violent strategies. Most importantly, it points out the biggest
contradictions of the Indian nationalist movement – the inherent seeds of commu-
nalism that it harboured and whose horrific picture we see in 2022 as the genesis of
xenophobia based on Hindu nationalism.14 The play, Ekla Cholo Re (Walk Alone),
2019, written by Utpal Dutt in 1989, has been produced by Sapna Sandhani and
directed by Kaushik Sen in Kolkata.
The play is located in the period of transition from colonial rule to independ-
ence, when the ruling Indian National Congress party is taking over power in India
and still claiming credit for leading a successful freedom movement that enabled
it to build sufficient consensus to win elections and rule India for decades. While
the movements acted as a compulsion for inclusion, the subsequent monopolisation
of power lead to large-scale disillusionment. The play brings in both the dominant
strands of nationalist struggle: the militant nationalist trend and Gandhian politics.
The militant nationalist trend that the playwright has always highlighted is here
portrayed through an ex-revolutionary who in 1947 is returning from the Anda-
mans where he had been imprisoned and had undergone, as it happened, a com-
munist consolidation. The character of Priyatosh combines a revolutionary past
with the present and represents the need for a socialist ethos to be incorporated
into the Indian polity. His father, Ananthbondhu Chakravarty, is an old Congress
veteran who led the Gandhian mass movement from their village, which in 1947
is being torn apart by communal riots. At another level, history is unfolding as the
viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, offers a transfer of power to the Congress party
for India and to the Muslim League for Pakistan by a division of the country based
on Hindu- and Muslim-dominated populations. In order to retain power as revolts
start breaking out all over India (Naval Mutiny of 1946, INA 1946, and other peas-
ant movements), both the Congress and Muslim League are ready to divide the
country along communal lines and majoritarian criteria. Gandhi, initially silent,
soon realised the huge blunder and goes on a protest fast and offers other means to
restore harmony and peace.
148 Bishnupriya Dutt

Anticipating a hindrance, by Gandhi’s protests, in their grand plans of gaining

and consolidating power, the Congress party now turns against their leader, who
becomes a symbolic figure of resistance. Gandhi’s public pro-Muslim stance is
opposed by the right-wing groups, particularly the notorious RSS, whose founder-
leaders we saw inserted into the pantheon of militant nationalist martyrs – Savarkar
and Rashbehari Bose. A conspiracy is hatched that shakes the new nation – the as-
sassination of Gandhi. A thriller-like plot unravels as two police officers are on the
trail of the assassins after the first abortive attempt. The play suggests complicity
on the part of the new leaders of the nation who wait till it is too late and Gandhi
dies a martyr as Nathuram Godse shoots him during a public meeting. Though the
RSS is banned, dormant lies the Hindutva politics and deep communalism that
refuses to go away even 70 years after independence with the Congress and the
right-wing bearing responsibility.
The new production has made a number of dramaturgical interventions by Sen,
the director, flagging the contradictions in Gandhian politics as he fights relentlessly
for communal harmony and unity. The playwright, Dutt, who all his life critiqued
Gandhi and his non-violence particularly his anti-militant stand, in 1989, when
the play was written and premiered, changed his stance in the face of the growing
influence of right-wing politics in India. He undertook a historical assessment of
Gandhi and his positive role in terms of his approach to religious differences and
co-existence. The play, unlike the museum narrative, does not evade the colossal
role of Gandhi or the Congress party, but subjects it to a very strong critical focus.
Gandhi is now the symbol of resistance, but also the cause of the devastation as
he built the political organisation to lead the Indian national movement. While he
mobilised masses for his campaigns, the leadership and membership remained with
the elites who represented a higher class, caste, and in terms of religion harboured
a strong Hindu fundamentalist attitude.
The 2019 production in view of the current scenario, when the right-wing party
is firmly ensconced in power at the Centre and many states and its ideology is being
aggressively disseminated amongst the population through cultural mobilisation,
highlights the tragedy of independence and traces the historical root from where
communal politics15 in India emerged. Given the devastating violence that marked
the event and the partition of the country, leaves no doubt that the foundation of
Indian democracy has been built on many exclusions, particularly that of religion.
For the Marxist playwright and the radical director16, the focus is on a notion of ex-
clusion and its current implications where religion is used in a far more dangerous
way than in 1947 or when the play was written and premiered for the first time in
1989. The director has focused on the historical past to address the present and the
general disillusionment with the post-colonial moment gives away to a criticality
that is reflected in the final scene when Gandhi’s shadow looms in the background
as he sits spinning his wheel and Nehru, the prime minister, and Vallabhbhai Patel,
the home minister, are looking across the heads of the audience to lament a vision
of the future – what the country would be like 70 years later as Hindus and Muslims
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 149

continue to shed each other’s blood. A country that will never recover from the
historical moment of its birth.
The production used an ensemble cast to depict the riots and fights, choreo-
graphed marches through various levels of the stage and converged to form the
diamond map of India. Actors refrained from impersonating the political figures and
icons, but through some symbolic costume, make up, gestures, and postures refer-
enced the historical photographs from the archives for its audience to identify the
historical figures. However, despite the realistic style of acting in character, the roles
were played with identification and non-identification in a Brechtian mode. The
scenography, effective but also minimalistic with steel structures, gave an impres-
sion of prison grids. The lighting often brought out the starkness and shadows of the
prisons. The music and soundscape were part of the scenography, but when refrains
of patriotic songs were used, they were done so more as irony with some notes being
dropped. Familiarity and non-familiarity created a sound-text of affective criticality.

Culture and Politics of Violence: Museum and the Theatre

The museums in the Red Fort and the theatre in Kolkata, though on the same theme
of anti-colonial freedom struggle and impertinently pointing out historical inclu-
sions and exclusions that affected the post-colonial nation formation and its demo-
cratic ethos, could not have been more different. Museums are a part of the statist
nation-building projects and reflect shifts according to the affinities of the politi-
cal parties who are in power and under their hegemonic control. The right-wing
conservatism of the current dispensation has been propagating an all-pervading
cultural pedagogic mission, which, as Partha Chatterjee describes, often proceeds
independent of government agendas and deploys strategies akin to populism.17 Ac-
cording to Chatterjee, and relevant regarding the current right-wing populism; ap-
parent chains of equivalence through rhetorical, visual, performative, and other
modes of representation of grievances are created. ‘An empty signifier called “the
people” is then filled by a wide array of grievances, all signifying equivalent, un-
fulfilled popular demands denied by the powerful elite that constitutes the enemy
of the people’ (Chatterjee 2020: 83). The political theatre, on the other hand, that
came to be identified as one of the most important post-colonial genres of theatre
practice particularly in the 1960s and 70s and continues to contest the populist
tendencies openly, critiques the State and, in turn, faces censorship. Plays are often
banned on the grounds of sedition.18 Chatterjee, however, regards the widescale
dominant populism and divisive agendas also as a displacement of practices, such
as the political theatre that aims at supplementing coherent political ideas amongst
mass followings and cultural mobilisation (Chatterjee 2020: 82). Yet, in face of
such adversity, theatre continues to fight back against the all-pervasive populism to
build solidarities and create resistance.
Within the populist context, the museums, thus, seem to urge for and make
a comprehensible representation of people and their leaders as their embodied
150 Bishnupriya Dutt

presence. However, as populist principles require, they create palpably in cultural

and emotional terms, internal frontiers between the ‘people’ and their enemies. To
interpret the museum narratives, accordingly, one ‘enemy’ is undoubtedly the elite
character of the Congress party and its leadership and, thus, Jawaharlal Nehru and
Mahatma Gandhi are their representation. They are actually focusing on exclusions
that have come out of what they claim is an elite secularism and Nehruvian notions
of ‘unity in diversity’. They turn the critique around to advocate the inclusion of
populations and other communities, but not outside what could be regarded as a
perverted universality of a majoritarian ethno-religious identity to claim its promi-
nence in the larger imagination of the nation. Within an underlying fragmented, dis-
parate, and contentious narrative, the museum display urges an acknowledgement
of the tragedies and aspirations of particular groups or communities that then guide
the viewer to a ‘people nation’ – making people visible without any agentive roles
or power of equivalence and reducing them to empty signifiers (Chatterjee 2020).
To achieve such an objective, violence dominates the dramatic and theatrical
element and is in synchrony with the current politics of elimination and iconoclas-
tic denigration. Some leaders are iconised more than others and icons replace the
collective and offer tokenistic representations to the people – a national perspec-
tive without affirming to an equality amongst different people or groups and as a
discourse on life. Given the political scenario of communal violence since 2014,
citing historical injustices in a performative way, the apparent justification and eu-
logisation of militancy only enhances a culture of extermination and annihilation
of enemies. The simplistic and linear narratives manage to pit patriotic violence
against colonial violence, justifying a continuum to the present-day violence as
communities and individuals are positioned against each other. Inherent in such a
historical paradigm, as Judith Butler points out, lies the seeds of social inequality
and an impediment to the democratic ethos (Butler 2021) particularly if we associ-
ate the historical narrative with the present situation steeped in Islamophobia.
The theatre offers a contradictory historical analysis that points out the fault
lines of the Indian polity and the anomalies of Indian democracy, where violence
at the time of laying its foundations despite the Constitution that professed equality
amongst all citizens, created distinctions based on caste, class, and gender, but most
importantly religion (Jayal 2015) and denounces these violent exclusions. These
structural exclusions, implemented through violence, form the basis between how
different lives are perceived and that some lives are seen as more grievable than
others, rather than all lives being equally grievable (Butler 2021: 116). Loss of
Muslim lives historically and in the present are not only ‘ungrievable’, but tacitly
endorsed as they are pushed more and more to the margins with expectations of
extermination.19
The assassination of Gandhi in 1947, as the play depicts, not only meant that his
ideals of co-existence of the two largest religious communities were unrealised and
that Muslim lives in India have always been regarded as less grievable than those
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 151

of the Hindu subjects of the nation. The theatre, consistently, since independence,
but now more so with the revival of plays such as Ekla Cholo Re, has tried to create
a counter-resistance to these regressive cultural tendencies. Through its dramatur-
gical re-interpretation of history critically stages Gandhi’s protest, not as the credo
of an individual but as embodying an affirmative obligation to life that is ‘different
from preserving oneself or one’s own community’ (Butler 2021: 146). Gandhi’s
sympathy and support for the Muslim population is what led to the fast and protest
and is an affirmation of Muslim lives as an eternal symbol. According to Butler
then, it offers a way on how we might re-approach equality and co-habitation on
new terms, ‘defined by an interdependence that takes the edge of the individual
boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential’
(Butler 2021: 148).
The potential was never realised at the time of independence or in the period of
the nation’s incubation and has continued to haunt and weaken democratic experi-
ments by intensifying social inequalities produced by biopolitical forms of govern-
ance. Butler emphasises that dismantling the phantasmatic domain in which lives are
differently valued requires not merely a pro-life individual stance that aims to ‘es-
tablish a metric of grievability’ (2021: 147) and is commonly attributed to Gandhi as
an individual but as an affirmation of life, a discourse that she says that the Left, and
I say Left cultural practices, has not sacrificed to its reactionary opponents (2021:
148). Gandhi’s commitment to life, Muslim lives in particular, meant that with his
assassination it is not only Gandhi’s death that the nation grieves, but all other lives –
that of the militant nationalists who sacrificed their lives and all the people who died
in the riots of partition and we remember ‘that all lives are equally grievable and try-
ing to see how that matters both in death and in life’ (Butler 2021: 146).
The play deliberately focuses on Gandhian strategies of non-violence, not to play
on his martyrdom but to proposition an affirmation of lives; walking through riot-
torn areas to bring peace amongst Hindus and Muslims, taking up a fast in protest
as his body exhibited to the public, goes visibly weaker, explicitly unravelled on
the stage, and finally his martyrdom. In the middle of the play, Ekla Cholo Re, is a
poignant scene, where the old Congressman, now marginalised, and his once mili-
tant but now communist son, pick up dead bodies in the aftermath of the riots and a
voice asks, ‘What is that you pick up?’ The elderly man answers: ‘bodies’. ‘Of Hin-
dus or Muslims?’ asks the voice, but the man shakes his head and in a soft voice that
vibrates across the theatre says: ‘the bodies, the dead’ (Dutt 1999). In every sense,
the criticism is also a critique of Gandhian politics and how he once did not value
the lives of the revolutionary terrorists as they refused to follow his path – and the
failure of Gandhi in affirming life is what is now destroying the nation he built and
envisaged and therefore his final stance and sacrifice in affirming life.20
This essay has traced the shift in the museum display that echo with a world-
wide trend of interactive modes deploying theatrical tactics, but when it comes to
the history of anti-colonial nationalist struggle and given the institutional politics
152 Bishnupriya Dutt

of museums in post-colonial India, it is significant to critique the narrative and the

accompanying scenography which comes with this new theatrical manifestation.
Given the larger politics of historical erasures, manipulations and distortions, the
new museums in the Red Fort becomes an apt example to re-visit the debates. The
museums’ objectives to reach out to a larger audience bring back the debate of how
populist impulses are deployed to mitigate against what can be called a people’s
history. In contrast, a theatrical production has adopted within the same theme a
critical articulation to create a narrative that reveals the alternate modes of per-
forming histories of the past – which still impact the present, both as a catalyst to
initiate changes. I finally have tried to read not only the anomalies of anti-colonial
nationalism, but also the contradictions that plague the most important icon of the
nationalist movement, Gandhi and his final days when he becomes the symbolic
resistance to violence. Judith Butler’s formulation of the forces of non-violence
and its impact on social inequalities and democracies allows one to understand why
the difficult past is still haunting the more dangerous present.

Notes
1 The Red Fort is the second most visited monument in the country with visitors in
2018–2019 reaching 3.6 million annually. (Government data) https://economictimes.
indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation.
2 Mughal rule in India spanned from 1526 to 1857 and built an extensive empire covering
almost the entire subcontinent. But since the reign of Muhammad Shah (1719–1748) it
was in decline.
3 Christophe Jaffrelot has edited and introduced a volume on Hindu Nationalism. It com-
prises excerpts from the writing of their ideologues and leaders with a detailed history
from the nineteenth century. It goes on to show it taking concrete shape in the 1920s and
various strands which it has developed on the basis of strategies of ideology building,
characteristics of a diverse set of practices clubbed under the rubric of Hindu ethnic
nationalism (2007: 6).
4 In India like most post-colonial nations, museums have mostly been controlled by the
State as is the Archeological Survey of India, which controls historical monuments like
the Red Fort. Kavita Singh has worked on the National Museum in Delhi (founded in
1949) while Tapati Guha-Takurta’s works along the same vein are around the Indian
museum, Calcutta (previously the Imperial Museum).
5 Other museums are being added to the four that are being discussed in this essay: one
on Shahjahan and the Red Fort and one on Kashmir. The one on Shahjahan and the Red
Fort opened in September 2022, sponsored by a private industrial house that has used
technology more abundantly to create the interactive experience.
6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expressed their opinions on 1857 through letters to the
New York Tribune, during the time of the revolt; commenting on the general character of
the revolt, the question of atrocities committed, and the conduct of the military struggle
(Marx and Engels 1857).
7 The Subaltern Studies Group comprised a group of historians and social scientists in In-
dia and South Asia, who in the 1980s, inspired by the works of Antonio Gramsci, exten-
sively explored anti-colonial nationalist struggles from below, of the subaltern classes,
and critiqued the focus on elite narratives.
8 The Gita is a 700 verse Hindu scripture as part of the epic Mahabharata (second half of
the first millennium BC), where Krishna counsels Arjuna, justifying the war and violence.
 Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles 153

9 The painting is a replica of Abanindranath Tagore’s painting of 1905 and depicts a saf-
fron clad woman, holding a book, a sheaf of paddy, a white cloth, and a rosary. This
was one of the earliest visualisations of a woman embodying the nation, Mother India,
according to ideals of the Swadeshi movement of 1905.
10 Rashbehari Bose (1886–1945) and Netaji Subash Bose (1897–1945) are regarded as
heroes who represented the militant genre of Indian nationalist movements particularly
the Swarajist party. Rashbehari Bose played a key role in the Gadar Party Mutiny, a plan
to initiate a pan Indian mutiny in the British India Army in 1915 and later founded the
Indian National Army, which he handed over to Netaji Subash Bose. Both of them tried
to garner international support for the Indian nationalist cause from the Japanese and
Netaji subsequently from the axis powers during the World War II.
11 For the sake of brevity, I have cited only the works of Utpal Dutt – playwright, direc-
tor, and actor whose vast repertoire dealt extensively with these themes: Ferari Fauj
(Absconding Army, 1961), Kallol (Sound of the Waves, 1965), Rifle (1968), Jallianwala
Bagh (1969), Sannyasir Tawrawari (Swords of the Sannyasis 1972), Baishakhi Megh
(Storm Clouds 1974), Titumeer (1978), Aranyer Ghoom Bhangche (Forests are awaken-
ing, 1987), Kuthar (1980), Swadhinatar Phaki (1981), Bibighar (1982), Damama Oi
Baje (Drums are beating) (1988), Mahabidroho (The Great Rebellion 1975 and 1984).
12 Jatra is popular theatre on the rounds, popular in Bengal, Assam, and Orissa. The Bengal
jatra is a totally commercial enterprise, but reach out to an unprecedented number of
audiences.
13 See Utpal Dutt’s semi-autobiographical work, Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (2009b).
14 Communalism is a derogatory term used to identify the doctrine that came to be known
by name ‘Hindutva’ which according to Jaffrelot fulfilled the criteria of ethnic national-
ism. According to him the motto of the right wing political parties and affiliated cultural
organizations, ‘Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan’ echoed many other ‘European nationalism based
on religious identity, a common language or even racial feelings’ (Jaffrelot 2007: 5).
15 Communal politics in the Indian context refers to the major communities, the Hindus and
the Muslims divided on religious lines with a long history of violence and antagonism.
16 Koushik Sen (b. 1968) is a theatre director and actor. He directs plays for the theatre
group Swapnasandhani which was formed in 1992. The early directorial ventures that
he is known for are Tara Teen Bon (1998), Bhalo Rakhosher Golpo (2005), Malya-
ban (2006), Suprobhat (2006), Banku Babur Bondhu (2006), and Dorjiparar Morji-
narai (2009). In recent years, Sen has turned to classics, staging Shakespeare’s Macbeth
(2012), Sophocles’ Antigone (2015), Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as
Nirbhaya (2017) and Hamlet (2022).
17 Christophe Jaffrelot has traced in detail the different associations which together with
the political party, BJP forms the Sangh Parivar (the family of the Sangh that is of the
RSS); the RSS, working at the grass root levels with cadres and branches and sub-
branches, students union, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP – Indian Students
Association) primary aim to combat left influences in campus, Bharatiya Mazdoor
Sangh (BMS – Indian Clerics), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP – the world Council of
Hindus) (Jaffrelot 18–19).
18 The colonial Dramatic Censorship Act (1876) and section 124 A of the Indian Penal
Code (1860) is often used to ban plays and cultural performances. Its application has
increased in the recent times to curtail the freedom of speech.
19 Since 2014 there have been rampant Islamophobia including public lynching and target-
ing Muslim population and works as a nexus between the state, new legislations, police
and Hindu mobs.
20 Tanika Sarkar has also shown how within the radical militant movement there was a
divide between those who showed strong indigenous tendencies and those who were
finding inspiration in the socialist and working class worldwide movements (Sarkar
1987).
154 Bishnupriya Dutt

Works Cited
Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre & Museums, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Butler, Judith (2021) The Force of Non-Violence, London: Verso.
Chatterjee, Partha (2020) I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today, Delhi:
Permanent Black.
Dutt, Utpal (1995) ‘Dilli Chalo’, in Nataksamagra III, Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, pp. 1–78.
——— (1996) ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, in Nataksamagra IV, Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, pp. 1–94.
——— (1997) ‘Mahabidroho’, in Nataksamagra V, Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, pp. 281–358.
——— (1999) ‘Ekla Cholo Re’, in Nataksamagra VIII, Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, pp. 377–436.
——— (2009a) The Great Rebellion, in Three Plays, Kolkata: Seagull.
——— (2009b) Towards a Revolutionary Theatre, Calcutta: Seagull.
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2004) Monuments, Objects, History, New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2007) Hindu Nationalism; A Reader, Delhi: Permanent Black.
Jayal, Niraja Gopal (2015) Citizenship and its Discontents, Delhi: Permanent Black.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1857) ‘The First Indian War of Independence (1857–
1858)’, New York Daily Tribune, July 1857–October 1858, https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1857/india/index.htm.
Sarkar, Tanika (1987) Bengal 1928-1934: The Politics of Protest, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar (1909) The Indian War of Independence of 1857, https://
archive.org/details/ldpd_6260651_000/page/n11/mode/2up.
Singh, Kavita (2015) ‘The Museum is National’, in Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (eds),
No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, London: Routledge,
pp. 107–131.
9
‘IT’S ART, ALL IT CAN DO IS
BEAR WITNESS’
Remembering Histories of Enslavement in Black
British Women’s Plays and at the International
Slavery Museum

Lynette Goddard

This chapter examines how histories of enslavement are portrayed in Selina

Thompson’s salt. (Southbank Centre, 2017, Royal Court Theatre, 2019, BBC,
2021; directed by Dawn Walton) and Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights
(Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2020, BBC Radio 3, 2020, and National
Theatre, 2021; directed by Miranda Cromwell).1 I argue that Thompson and Pin-
nock use embodied dramatic and performance strategies to create space for Black
women to speak back to past histories of racial injustice and comment on the ongo-
ing legacies of slavery in the present. Black women’s perspectives are particularly
pertinent to understand when taking account of bell hooks’ argument that ‘it was
only in relationship to the [enslaved] black female […] that the white slaver could
exercise freely absolute power, for he could brutalize and exploit her without fear
of harmful retaliation’ (1982: 17, 18).2 Both Thompson’s and Pinnock’s plays ex-
plore hooks’ notion that legacies of slavery, of rape, coercion, and brutalisation
manifest in the ‘continued devaluation of Black womanhood’ (1982: 53).
I compare themes in the plays with objects and artefacts that are displayed
at the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool to consider how nar-
ratives, staging, and curating decisions respond to the ethical issues of bearing
witness to the past and drawing out contemporary legacies.3 I argue that Pin-
nock and Thompson create a dynamic between the past and the present, whereas
ISM’s general overview is less effective in conveying the complexities of Black
experiences and the continued impacts of slavery’s afterlives. In comparison to
the embodied representations in the plays, I argue that the ISM presents sedate,
sterile, and disembodied narrations of histories of enslavement. A seemingly
neutral, objective, and factual stance in the ISM’s conventionally curated ex-
hibitions distances visitors from the most traumatic aspects of the transatlan-
tic trade.4 I follow Ana Lucia Araujo’s scepticism that ‘depictions of human

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-10
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
156 Lynette Goddard

bondage in museums and exhibitions often fail to challenge racism and white
supremacy inherited from the period of slavery’ (2021: n.p.). Araujo argues that
‘attempts to provide an overview of slavery systems’ through a focus on four
themes – wealth and refinement, submission and victimisation, resistance and
rebellion, and achievements and legacies – means that ‘most exhibitions fail
to fully address the legacies of slavery such as anti-black racism and persisting
racial inequalities’ (2021: 2).
Histories of enslavement are complex, raising inevitable questions about the
ethics of representation and the responsibilities of playwrights, performers, and
curators when portraying these themes for contemporary audiences. Questions re-
volve around the relevance of staging slavery today and about how to avoid valor-
ising the past by focusing on abolition and the heroics of white abolitionists. There
is a delicate balance to be struck between showing what happened without relying
on portrayals of disturbing tropes or reproducing excessive violence that risks re-
traumatising contemporary performers and spectators with images of ‘black people
in chains, again, beaten and degraded’ (Jones, Jr. 2019: 383).
A number of African-American theatre scholars have argued that contempo-
rary representations of transatlantic slavery are created to show how the ongoing
legacies continue to impact and shape racial discourses today. Douglas A. Jones,
Jr. argues that ‘many find in the historicity of slavery explanatory frameworks
with which to account for, and thereby help redress, persistent forms of race-
based inequities and exclusions’ (2019: 384). His view is echoed in Stacie Selmon
McCormick’s perception that playwrights ‘push against received histories of slav-
ery’ and grapple with the past as ‘a site of interrogation of the contemporary prob-
lem of un/freedom for black subjects […] in constant negotiation of what Saidiya
Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery”’ (2019: 2). Hartman’s claim is that ‘skewed
life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarcera-
tion and impoverishment’ come from structural racisms that are direct legacies of
slavery. In other words that

[s]lavery […] established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that
has yet to be undone […;] black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial
calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.
(2007: 6)

Afterlives of enslavements manifest in the disproportionate numbers of Black

women who die during childbirth, of Black children excluded from education, of
Black people in prison, and dying during or soon after being in custody of the po-
lice. I argue that these ideas about afterlives of enslavement are shown in how Pin-
nock’s and Thompson’s plays are framed within dramatic devices that are shaped
to accentuate the continued impact of the past on Black women’s experiences in
the present.
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 157

Staging Slavery in Selina Thompson’s salt. and Winsome

Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights
Selina Thompson’s salt. is a solo performance narrating her 2016 journey to retrace
the transatlantic slave route, starting with a journey on a cargo ship from Europe
to Africa, before taking a flight to Jamaica in the Caribbean and returning to the
United Kingdom via visits to plantation houses in Wilmington North America. The
journey that Thompson recounts and her experiences of performing the produc-
tion highlight the ethics of remembering transatlantic slavery on the contemporary
stage. Thompson felt compelled to make the trip to heal, to remember, to witness,
and to explore the afterlives of slavery in response ‘to an endless [social media]
feed of black pain, black rage and black people having to assert that black lives
matter because black death is normal’ (2018: 20, 21). As a way of emphasising
gendered dynamics Thompson’s speech is attributed to ‘The Woman’ in the pub-
lished play text and I will oscillate between referring to Thompson as the writer and
performer and The Woman as she appears as a character in the play text.5 Moving
between these two descriptors recognises that Thompson recounts her own per-
sonal and specific experiences as resonant with the experiences of Black women
more broadly.
At the start of the show, Thompson acknowledges that she and her birth and
adoptive parents ‘are all descended from enslaved people’ (14) and she describes
salt. as a response to the ‘violence that is in my ancestry’ (22), a way of grieving,
and as a memorial for the dead. Thompson echoes Christina Sharpe’s exploration
of ‘The Wake’ (2016) as both the trail left in the sea by a ship moving in water
and a vigil or ritual held to mourn and celebrate the life of someone who has died.
Stage directions indicate that ‘[t]he space has been spiritually cleansed, and is
ready for the spirit work that is to take place’ (14). As the audience enters the au-
ditorium, The Woman stands in front of a small wooden table, or altar, on which a
bottle of water containing a sprig of rosemary has been placed for libation along-
side a pestle and mortar of finely-ground salt and an incense stick burning. The
Woman is wearing a white cotton dress that is reminiscent of what African women
wore while working in cotton fields and of spiritual or religious robes for the wake
work. Through direct audience address in a poetic monologue, The Woman de-
scribes colonial dynamics that continue to shape interactions today and are (re)
enacted and (re)produced in the racist and sexist assertions of power and surveil-
lance that Thompson experiences on the journey. The Woman challenges notions of
England’s ‘green and pleasant lands’, stating

Europe is awash in blood. Every penny of wealth, each brick of each intimidat-
ing building, the pavement slabs of quiet city streets and the soil beneath rolling
green hillside is built on suffering, massacre, death. It is, and should be a cursed
continent.
(19)
158 Lynette Goddard

Her account of the journey evokes memories of the Middle Passage and invites
audiences to consider how colonial legacies result in Black people being subjected
to extra surveillance at ports and airports and impact the ethics of tourism in Africa
and the Caribbean.
Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights is inspired by two JMW Turner
paintings completed in 1840: ‘Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) To Warn
Steamboats of Shoal Water’ and ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and
Dying – Typhon Coming On’ (1840), known as ‘Slave Ship’. Rockets and blue
lights refer to the Royal Navy sending up flares as a warning to the captains of ships
that continued to carry enslaved people after trading became illegal to let them know
that they were being pursued or, ambiguously, to forewarn them and give them time
to throw captives overboard to avoid being caught illegally trafficking. ‘Slave Ship’
shows a distant ship at sea in a storm. At first glance, one is likely to be struck by the
richness of the bright orange and red sky, the approaching storm, and the precari-
ous ship sailing away in the distance, and on closer inspection, one notices shackles
around severed human limbs that are caught in the wake and seagulls preying on
human flesh. ‘Slave Ship’ is widely discussed as being a response to the 1781 Zong
Massacre, where the captain of a ship that was running low on food and water sup-
plies after misrouting on the way to Jamaica ordered his crew to throw 133 of the
sickest captives overboard into the sea, knowing that he could not make an insur-
ance claim for the loss of cargo if they died from natural causes such as starvation.
The story became notorious when the insurers refused to pay out until a court case
eventually found in favour of the ship’s master’s decision to sacrifice some of the
enslaved people to protect the rest of the captives and crew. Turner’s painting is
one of many responses to the Zong in art, poetry, and literature, although as Sharpe
argues, calling the painting ‘Slave Ship’, rather than ‘Zong’, ‘allows it to stand in
for […] every slave ship and all the murdered Africans in the Middle Passage’ (36).6
Pinnock (2020b) recognises ‘lots of contradictions in the painting. For a start it’s
really, really beautiful, but its subject matter is awful’. In the prologue two Black
women – schoolteacher Essie and actress Lou – view Turner’s painting exhibited to
mark the Bicentenary of the 1807 Abolition of Slavery Act at a museum housed on
the reconstruction of a slave ship. Lou criticises Turner for dehumanising the mur-
dered African captives by reducing them to severed body parts floating on water,
whereas Essie commends him for avoiding the usual pitfalls of portraying ‘noble
victims’ (Pinnock 2020a: 10) or ‘mak[ing] abolitionists into saints’ (11): ‘We can’t
see the drowning bodies but we know they’re there. We have to imagine, and what
we imagine is so much worse than anything he could show us’ (11). In the second
act, John Ruskin questions why ‘[t]he painting does not depict the slavers nor the
action that the title describes’ (75).
In response to criticisms that Turner dehumanises the enslaved Africans by re-
ducing them to their body parts, Pinnock’s Black characters have names, past lives,
and voices to talk back to the white enslavers enacting violence upon Black bodies.
Scenes set in 2006–2007 show a company of actors and director rehearsing scenes
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 159

from the film The Ghost Ship, which includes scenes set in 1781 re-enacting the
Zong massacre, and scenes in 1840 as Turner boards the ship to conduct research
for his paintings and free Black sailor Thomas leaves his wife Lucy and daughter
Jess behind to embark on one last voyage. Pinnock layers these multiple time-
frames to show important continuities between the past and the present more ef-
fectively than the narrative of slavery shown at the ISM, as I will now demonstrate.

Exhibiting Painful Pasts at the International Slavery Museum

Jessica Moody recognises that museums were slow to engage with histories of
enslavement and she notes that when slavery museums started to appear ‘many
maintained narratives that celebrated colonial endeavour and acts of white libera-
tion’ (2020: 157).7 Araujo acknowledges that the reluctance of Western museums
to engage with histories of enslavement started to shift near the end of the twenti-
eth century and in the early twenty-first century in preparation for the 2007 com-
memoration of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade (1807).
Following years of increasing pressure from Black activists and campaigners for
Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery to be recognised, the ISM opened as
a permanent exhibition in 2007.8 ISM is a two-gallery space occupying the third
floor of the Liverpool Maritime Museum, which opened on the Royal Albert Docks
in Liverpool on 23 August 2007 as ‘the first public museum totally dedicated to the
history of slavery’ (Araujo 2021: 6). ISM is located ‘at the centre of a World Herit-
age site and only yards away from the dry docks where 18th century slave trading
ships were repaired and fitted out’ (Anon 2022).
ISM developed from the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (TSG), which was housed
in the basement of the Liverpool Maritime Museum from October 1994.9 Anthony
Tibbles explains that National Museums Liverpool thought carefully about cater-
ing for both Black and white visitors when creating the original exhibition. Tib-
bles argues that concerns about presenting ‘factual and accurate’ information and
ensuring ‘that white people should not leave feeling guilty and that black people
should not leave feeling angry’ (2005: 132) resulted in ‘a gallery which tries to look
at the whole history of the transatlantic slave trade’ (ibid.: 132). TSG ‘attempt[ed]
to reflect the experience of transatlantic slavery over a 400-year period, between
three continents and to tell a human story rather than [a] technical one’ (ibid.: 132)
and these ideas are carried forward into the ISM. However, despite claims that
‘the ISM represented a notable step change in public memory work around trans-
atlantic slavery’ (Moody 2020: 156), the collection was criticised as consisting
of ‘ahistorical presentations of artefacts relating to African culture, from different
ethnic groups, regions, and time periods, which presented Africa from a decidedly
European point of view through the dominance of Western ethnographic museum
practice’ (ibid.: 162).
On arrival at the ISM, visitors are greeted with slogans etched into the walls that
emphasise the human right to freedom, creating an initial impression that Black
160 Lynette Goddard

and anti-slavery perspectives will be prominent: ‘No man can put a chain about
the ankle’ (Frederick Douglas), and ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude’
(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). A wall of video recordings con-
textualises the museum, which is arranged into three main rooms to create a linear
narrative from the past to the present. ‘Life in West Africa’ challenges reductive
notions of Black experience as beginning with transatlantic slavery by focusing on
pre-colonial African lives and depicting stories of capture, resilience, and rebellion.
‘Enslavement and the Middle Passage’ includes exhibits showing life on planta-
tions, a walk-in film screening of a Middle Passage voyage, and an exhibit showing
how street names in Liverpool are connected to local merchants who were involved
in the trade. ‘Legacy’ focuses on contemporary forms of enslavement and includes
documentary clips about modern slavery that demonstrate how oppressive systems
persist in continued global inequalities and forms of exploitation, such as factory
sweatshop workers in Brazil. The ‘Legacy’ gallery also includes displays of con-
temporary artworks that respond to colonialisation and the British Empire, as well
as a Black Achievers Wall displaying photographs of Black cultural commentators,
arts practitioners, sportspeople, and politicians.10
ISM ‘tidied up’ the cruelty of slavery by placing objects and artefacts into neatly
arranged glass cabinets, where they are grouped into types, evenly spaced, and
labelled with the name, place of origin, and date, which encourages an aesthetic
view of them as artworks. Trade beads, which were used for currency, as well as
manillas, shackles, and other instruments of torture are observed from a distance in
these glass cabinets. African masks, musical instruments, ivory tusks, sculptures,
and Caribbean coins are displayed to show African life pre- and post-slavery, and
porcelain teapots, plates, and sugar bowls demonstrate the wealth of the enslavers
and celebrate artistically intricate European designs. As Araujo notes, however,
the ISM fails to fully explain connections between the trade, wealth, and enslaved
people’s labour: ‘there are nearly no attempts to associate the fortunes generated by
the Atlantic slave [trade] with the present-day legacies of slavery’ (20). While long
timelines of historical events are informative, they remain accounts of something
that happened in the distant past.
My experience at ISM is reminiscent of Hartman’s experience of visiting a dun-
geon museum and noticing that ‘the [enslaved] were missing. None of their belong-
ings were arranged nicely in well-lit glass cases […] None of their sayings were
quoted on placards throughout the hall. Nor was their family life and social organi-
zation described’ (2007: 116). This point is exemplified in an ISM exhibit about the
trade of goods between Europe and the Caribbean via Africa. Whilst each page from
1501 to 1867 includes figures showing how the number of ‘Enslaved Africans’ grew
from 270,000 between 1501 and 1600 to 3.5 million between 1807 and 1867, the
use of arrows and charts underplays the violence that was enacted as part of the trade
of ‘precious metals, trade goods, and tropical goods’. Another exhibit prints a list
of the names and sale prices of enslaved people, revealing how captured Africans,
particularly women and girls, were objectified by remarks made about them
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 161

Violet, 16, Housework and Nursemaid, $900.00; Lizzie, 30, Rice, Unsound,
$300.00; Minda, 27, Cotton, Prime Woman, $1, 200.00; Flementina, 39, Good
Cook, Stiff Knee, $400.00; Sally, 10, Handy in Kitchen, $675.00; Dorcas Judy,
25, Seamstress, Handy in House, $800.00; Bessie, 69, Infirm, Sews, $250.00;
Callie May, 27, Prime Woman, Rice, $1, 000.00; Honey, 14, Prime Girl, Hear-
ing Poor, $850.00; Angelina, 16, Prime Girl, House or Field, $1,000.00.

A note that ‘[o]n account of low prices listed below, they will be sold for cash only,
and must be taken into custody within two hours after sale’ (Sale of Slaves and
Stock) sounds grim, but the exhibition is disembodied from the reality of those
lives at the auction. By not providing any details about how the women became
‘infirm’ or developed ‘poor hearing’, for example, the museum fails to invite visi-
tors into the experiences of these enslaved women or to consider how their injuries
resulted from the violence inflicted upon them. These descriptions hide the fact that
the women’s injuries have resulted from the oppressive and violent spaces that they
were forced to inhabit and from the brutalities of their environments and owners.
The Middle Passage was the second leg of the triangular route of the transatlantic
slave trade, which involved a horrific eight-to-ten-week journey on ships carrying
captive African men, women, and children across the Atlantic in severely cramped
and dehumanising conditions. Sowande’ M Mustakeem argues that ‘the interior
holds of merchant ships served as vital sites of power sailors used to dehuman-
ize captives, enforce dependency, inflict pain, establish authority, and prohibit any
sense of control over one’s personal life in the near and far future’ (2016: 18, 19).
Stephanie Smallwood describes how overcrowding and unsanitary conditions
combined with ‘[e]xhaustion, malnutrition, fear, and seasickness resulted in de-
pressed immune systems and increased vulnerability to disease’ (2007: 136). Many
captured Africans died during the Middle Passage journeys or jumped overboard
into the sea, choosing to take their own lives rather than suffer the humiliation of
being enslaved when the ships reached their destinations.
The ‘Enslavement and the Middle Passage’ exhibit felt sanitised at the ISM with
the horrific conditions on the ships captured through a short descriptive summary
that made appreciating its gravity less effective. In order to offer a more affective
approach, one exhibit ‘represents the journey of three slave ships sailing out of
Liverpool in 1788’ – Rose, Bud, and Brooks – and includes three ‘audio excerpts
written by people with direct experience of the horrors of enslavement and the
Middle Passage’. Yet even in this case, one is the voice of a surgeon on board a ship
and another is a ship’s master.
The centrepiece of this room is a walk-in audiovisual display about the Mid-
dle Passage, which is one of the few performative exhibits in the museum. Before
entering, visitors are told: ‘The central interactive in this gallery features a two-
minute recreation of that journey. Please be warned that it includes graphic scenes
of life on board a slave ship’.11 Visitors enter into a darkened room where we are
surrounded by a looped film sequence of a Black man in shackles with close-ups
162 Lynette Goddard

of his feet, face, and body dripping with sweat as he is writhing in pain, struggling,
bleeding, and vomiting with a soundtrack of ambient, squelching music and the sea
playing in the background. However, the focus on close-ups of the Black man’s
body and face does not fully convey the cramped space of the hold of the ship in
relation to other bodies or give any sense of who is enacting these cruelties upon
him and so denies showing white enslavers as responsible for acts of violence.
The implication of sanitising portrayals of the Middle Passage is that the horrors
and violence enacted upon Black bodies during transportation are minimised for
contemporary viewers who are distanced from its impact. By contrast, Thomp-
son’s and Pinnock’s plays use narrative and dramatic devices to immerse audiences
within detailed expositions of the trauma of Middle Passage voyages.

Remembering the Middle Passage: Voyages, Massacres, and Resistance

Selina Thompson (2021) recognises the significance of the sea in tethering Eu-
rope to transatlantic slavery, preventing the usual ‘sidestep’ and ‘sleight of hand’
that seeks to evade acknowledging European responsibility at the forefront of the
trade, which is reproduced by the erasure of the white perpetrators in the ISM’s
Middle Passage display. salt. centres on the traumatic experience of being at sea
under European rule and highlights how Thompson and her filmmaker colleague
were subjected to racism and sexism from the first cargo ship’s Italian captain
and crew. The captain was reluctant to let them on board the ship, departing first
from Harwich, Essex and then Hamburg, Germany without them (Harvie 2018).
They eventually joined the ship in Antwerp after signing a contract agreeing to
a number of conditions, including agreeing not to film while on board the ship,
which undermined the main purpose of their voyage, which was to capture foot-
age of the sea (Harvie 2018). As Black women, they were at the bottom of the
ship’s hierarchy, and the rules imposed upon them were detrimental to their ability
to work together effectively on their creative project. Thompson admits that she
did not consider the emotional risk to her collaborator at the time and she protects
their identity by not revealing their name in the retelling: ‘in not naming them
now, and not seeking to tell their story on her behalf, I’m trying not to repeat that
harm’ (2018: 23).
Thompson’s account of the captain’s humiliating treatment of them echoes
bell hooks’ ideas about how enslaved Black women were ‘ridiculed, mocked, and
treated contemptuously by the slaver crew’ (1982: 19). Although adamant ‘[t]hat
his ship is not a slave ship’ (Thompson 2018: 24), he insisted that they call him
Master and their signed agreement was that ‘at sea, the Master’s word is law’ (24).
He repeatedly insults their heritage, ‘refers to Africans as [n-word]’ (26), tells them
that African ‘people are feral children’ (26), ‘that the continent will never progress
[and] to be wary of Africans’ (26). Thompson’s narration evocatively captures how
they were not allowed up on the deck for much of the journey, deprived of natu-
ral light and fresh air by being down in the ship’s hold, which is reminiscent of
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 163

how captives were transported across the Middle Passage, chained together and
squashed below the decks: ‘I curl into the corner of my bed and make myself as
small as I can’ (27). The Woman stops going to meals to avoid the blatant racism
and sexism of the white officers; she becomes depressed and ill and her menstrua-
tion cycle stops as her body becomes blocked.12
The story is narrated primarily through the use of direct address to the audi-
ence while The Woman sits or stands in one of the three main areas of the stage.
In Europe, she stands at a lectern above which hangs a neon triangle reminding of
the transatlantic route. A wreath to mourn the dead represents Thompson’s time at
Elmina’s Castle in Ghana and The Woman sits amongst a foliage of potted plants
that indicate the lushness of tropical Jamaica. However, the centrepiece is a se-
quence during which The Woman moves centrestage to smash at a large block of
pink Himalayan rock salt with a sledgehammer in an act of physical exertion that
evokes the sweat and labour of enslaved people. She uses the salt fragments to
recount the painful dynamics of power that she and her colleague experienced on
board the first ship.
The Woman lays out the rocks of salt increasing in size, each one representative
of a character or a force. The smallest block represents the two Black women art-
ists, followed by the Filipino crew, who are somewhat disempowered themselves,
the white Italian officers that ‘terrorise the artists’ (30), the Master, whose ‘control
is held by intimidation and aggression’ (30), the Union, the Company, and the Eu-
ropean States. The largest block represents ‘imperialism, and racism and capitalism
and/God knows what else/Built on Violence/Maintained by it too/It decides who
matters and who will die’ (31, 32). Thompson is categorical about showing the hi-
erarchy of oppressive forces and repeatedly smashes at each block of salt when the
character or force is mentioned, which acts both as a way of venting her rage about
how she and her colleague were treated and visually illustrating how disempowered
the Black women felt by the actions of the captain and the crew. By the end of the
sequence, the largest block of salt representing imperialism remains relatively in-
tact, while the smallest blocks representing the two Black women are smashed into
smithereens. Although the sequence centres on the European sailors disempowering
the Black women, Thompson’s resistance is evident in the defiant final line of this
section: ‘I should have spat in that man’s face before I reached dry land’ (32).
Thompson’s return journey on another freighter ship is imagined as a ‘eulogy
[…] of a woman who has jumped into the sea’ (49), referencing the many captured
African people who took their own lives during the Middle Passage, choosing to
die rather than be enslaved when the ship reached its destination. The Woman’s
descriptions of ‘birds div[ing] into the water we leave in our wake’ (49), of ‘soli-
tude’ (49), of ‘not see[ing] land for eleven days’ (49) capture how arduous it is to
travel by sea. Recounted memories of ghosts coming up from below the decks at
the centre of the Atlantic evoke grief for our ancestors who died at sea and bear
witness to ‘how sacred it is to be a descendant of those that were never supposed
to survive’ (51).
164 Lynette Goddard

The Middle Passage is also at the centre of several moments in Pinnock’s play,
drawing attention to the violence enacted upon Black bodies by white enslavers as
well as to the resistance of enslaved Africans. In the first act, the cast rehearses a
scene from The Ghost Ship (the film within the play) that outlines the graphic vio-
lence perpetrated against enslaved Africans. The showrunner reads out the opening
directions of the film, which describe a tranquil sea setting that ‘explodes into the
screaming chaos of a massacre. We see the impressive tall ship in silhouette, its
sails at full mast and ‘sailors on deck dragging struggling and enchained Africans
then throwing them overboard’ (Pinnock 2020a: 17). The film directions highlight
acts of resistance – a drowning child ‘struggle[s] with the water, trying to swim
back to the surface’ (17) and Olu ‘struggles, kicking and biting’ (17) the sailor who
is trying to hoist her over the side of the ship into the sea. Determined to survive
his act of violence, ‘she clings on to the rigging’ (18) in a moment that acknowl-
edges the story that one of the African women on the Zong defiantly resisted being
thrown to death in the sea and tried to clamber back on board. Reading out these
film directions rather than showing the action on stage lets the audience vividly
imagine the violence without causing emotional or physical harm to actors.
Later in the play, Lucy, who was enslaved until her husband Thomas bought
her freedom, remembers the inhumane conditions in which enslaved people were
trafficked,

shackled […] in the hold, all of you together – men, women, children – cheek by
jowl; up to your neck in somebody else’s shit and vomit, not to mention the stink
of festering sores carved out on your back by the cat [o’ nine tales].
(40)

Lucy’s daughter Jess’s fear of and repetitive dreams about drowning evoke mem-
ories of African ancestors losing their lives in the sea. In the following scene, the
actress Lou is on the film set playing Olu on board a ship where two white sailors
are punishing her by forcing a speculum into her mouth to keep her throat open
while they force-feed her. The violence of the enslavers is captured as their whip-
ping of Olu becomes more severe. Olu demonstrates ideas of Black resistance
by struggling against them before grabbing the whip and turning it upon them
in a further act of rebellion. Decisions about how to stage this scene respond to
the ethical concerns about how the violence of the past can be shown while not
retraumatising contemporary actors or spectators. The National Theatre produc-
tion’s set and costume designer Laura Hopkins and director Miranda Cromwell
explain that it was imperative to find a way of staging the scene to show the
violence enacted upon Olu without inflicting pain on the Black performer’s body.
The whip is never used directly upon Olu and instead is lashed next to her on
hydrochromic ink, thus ‘leaving marks on the floor rather than on an actor’s skin’
(National Theatre 2021).
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 165

World Heritage Sites of Atrocity, Street Names,

Tourism, and Plantations
Araujo argues that ‘West African countries seeking to promote economic devel-
opment through tourism initiatives encouraged the memorialization of the At-
lantic Slave Trade, especially through the promotion of heritage sites and [the]
creation of monuments and memorials’ (2021: 5). One such world heritage site
is Elmina’s Castle in Ghana, a notorious fort where Africans were held captive
before being transported across the Middle Passage. Thompson pinpoints the
complexities of ‘sites of atrocity’ (Hartman 2007: 115) now being packaged for
tourists:

This castle bleached white by the sun, and set against a gorgeous tableau of
palm trees and blue sea, was the place where people went through the Door of
No Return, and out into the Middle Passage to become slaves.
(Thompson 2018: 35)

At ISM, Elmina’s Castle is represented by John Stobart’s 1971 painting ‘Daru, Off
Elmina Castle, Ghana’, which captures an idyllic location in which the white walls
are set against blue skies and palm trees, with waves gently lapping the shore and
ships bobbing in the bay. Stobart’s painting gives no indications of the violence of
Elmina as a holding fort and by placing the image into an ornate gold frame, ISM’s
framing encourages viewers to primarily experience an aestheticised version of this
site of atrocity as a classical landscape painting.
Drawing from Hartman, who visited Elmina’s Castle over 50 times, Thomp-
son’s account expresses internal feelings of discomfort by paying particular atten-
tion to how she navigates the visit as a Black woman who is there to grieve our
ancestors. She recounts her feelings as the tour guide tries to sell them souvenirs of
a space where she feels painful connections to the past:

The women’s dungeons reek, we stand in a courtyard where women would have
stood, looking up to where the governor would have selected a woman from.
The reality of what being selected would have meant, lingers in the air.
(2018: 36)

Hartman recognises that ‘how best to remember the dead and represent the past is
an issue fraught with difficulty, if not outright contention’ (2002: 758). Similarly,
Thompson finishes her eulogy by questioning the ethics of memorial sites: ‘What
should a site of mourning for the enslaved look like?/What might hold the long,
long memory? What would be both a covenant to never let such things happen
again/And a refusal to forget?’ (2018: 37).
Thompson captures how ‘residual trauma’ (2018: 41) plays out when travel-
ling as a Black woman alone and navigating the tourist trade in Africa and the
166 Lynette Goddard

Caribbean in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, her British passport carries
the instruction ‘to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to af-
ford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary’. Yet she recog-
nises being subjected to extra surveillance, ‘[a] squeeze here./Some fingers down
a fat fold there’ (40), bringing to mind the scrutiny of enslaved bodies on auction
blocks; and she finds affinity with ‘a host of Black women/Detained in rooms/Told
to remove their wigs/Removed from first class/[…] Dragged off planes/As others
are dragged on in the dead of the night’ (ibid.). Things are no easier in Jamaica, the
country of Thompson’s birth parents, grandparents, and one of her adoptive par-
ents, and where in many ways she feels at home. ‘Fecundity defines Jamaica’ (43),
she says, recognising Jamaica as the paradise island of the tourist brochures and a
space where she can finally exhale; her blocked period and appetite return. Yet, on
the other hand, she recognises some discomforting remnants of the island’s colo-
nial past: ‘mongooses, here because they were bought by slave-owners to kill rats
[…;] bamboo planted to stop the skin of white women going dark in the sun […;]
private beaches where Jamaicans can’t go’ (44). Thompson notices these residues
and the complexities of seeing ‘white tourists coming to enact a dynamic in which
they are the master and black people smile and serve happily and I am somewhere
[in] between’ (44).
A taxi driver tells her the story of ‘Devon House, built by Jamaica’s first black
millionaire, that the governor’s wife hated it so much – said it was an affront –
that they built a whole new road so that she wouldn’t have to drive past a black
man’s wealth – “Lady Musgrave Road? More like Racist White Lady Lane”,
the driver says’ (44). As Thompson highlights, street names carry the histories
of places and some areas are named to remember where celebrated people have
lived. Most of the names in ISM’s ‘Street Names’ exhibit are of ‘local merchants
who were involved in slavery and related trades’ (ISM 33), including Liver-
pool’s Cunliffe Street, Earle Street, Great Newton Street, Rodney Street, Tarleton
Street, and Penny Lane. Turning over the cylindrical plaques reveals information
about the respective streets and the controversies surrounding the figures. Araujo
finds that

[t]his display is certainly the most successful in exemplifying how the profits of
the trade left important marks in Liverpool, where streets, buildings, and other
landmarks were constructed with the wealth created by slavery or named after
slave merchants and other individuals involved in the inhuman commerce.
(20)

However, after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, during which the toppling
of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and renewed calls for streets and build-
ings associated with people who profited from slavery and were against abolition
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 167

to be renamed, ISM took the street names exhibit off display due to concerns that
it might cause offence to some visitors.
Former plantations and plantation houses in the United States and the Caribbean
are packaged as tourist sites in ways that belie the atrocities that were enacted there,
similar to museum exhibitions in showing the grandeur of the mansion houses and
presenting objects and artefacts as artworks. ‘The Plantation Life’ exhibition at ISM
includes a touchscreen exhibit on which to listen to testimonies, including from en-
slaved field and house workers (though it is not clear how these were acquired), as
well as a scale model showing the layout of a typical plantation, surrounded by black
and white images of enslaved Africans with their feet in punishment stocks, wearing
restrictive facemasks and collars as punishments or to prevent escape, and being tied
up or whipped. Such a framing discharges slavers from culpability through the focus
on the bodies of the enslaved Africans, and placing this series of images amongst
those of auctions and sugar plantation mills further lessens their impact.
The violence of enslavers is made explicit in scenes set on a plantation in Brazil
at the end of Rockets and Blue Lights, where sailor Thomas has been tricked into
enslavement,13 and is cutting cane with an overseer pointing a rifle at him. Singing
is a form of resistance that recalls spirituals and Thomas defiantly continues singing
even as the overseer threatens more violence. He ends the song by remembering
what African-Caribbean people have endured over the centuries, chanting a req-
uiem that remembers the names of past Black heroes and Black people who were
victims of racial injustices in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries:

I survived the slave castles at Bonny, the Zong and Baptist massacres […;] I sur-
vived the fires of New Cross and Grenfell /; Death in custody, through all this I
lived […] I am Yaa Asantewa, Yvonne Ruddock, David Oluwale […,] I am Sam
Sharpe, Kelso Cochrane, Stephen Lawrence.
(2020a: 79, 80)

Thomas’s song acts as a reminder of historical and contemporary sites of atrocity

where Black lives were tragically cut short, concluding with the reflection that ‘[m]
emories survive the centuries […] to remember is to open deep wounds’ (Pinnock
2020a: 79), which speaks to the concerns about memorialisation that this chapter
has explored.

Conclusion: Bearing Witness and Remembering Not to Forget

By the end of Selina Thompson’s salt. all of the props and materials used during
the performance are strewn across the stage: a smashed-up block of pink Hima-
layan rock salt, a sledgehammer, a pair of steel toe-capped boots, safety goggles
and gloves. Smoke continues to waft from an incense stick that has been burning
throughout. The Woman looks around and describes the stage scene as
168 Lynette Goddard

her monument […] her act of remembrance […] her grief. […] Because this is
our burden/Sit with it/Sit with the pain/It doesn’t go away/But we are sitting
with you. There is work to be done/And we must go on.
(Thompson 2018: 52)

The performer acknowledges that the past is not yet over because legacies of slav-
ery continue to impact Black lives today and her words combine with the stage
image as a visual reminder of the unresolved residues from traumatic histories that
remain to be healed.
Thompson’s and Pinnock’s plays and the ISM exhibitions all address questions
about how we remember and the politics and aesthetics of memorialising histories
of enslavement. Hartman discusses the ‘slipperiness and elusiveness of slavery’s
archive’, where documentation such as ‘ledger books of trade goods; inventories
of foodstuffs; bills of sale; itemized lists of bodies alive, infirm, and dead; captains’
logs; planters’ diaries’ (2007: 17) emphasises versions of history that foreground
the perspectives of the enslavers while erasing traces of enslaved African people.
However, artists and theatre makers can imagine stories and images that problema-
tise the idea of the archives by foregrounding the missing perspectives, which dis-
tinguishes plays from museum exhibitions that tend to be primarily concerned with
presenting information about the past. Pinnock states ‘When you’re dealing with
very difficult material, theatre can do things that historians can’t, to create a voice
that you can’t see in the archives’ (Pinnock 2020b). Thompson reflects on her trip as
part of an artist’s job to ‘reflect and create, imagine new ways of living’ (2018: 23).
These observations also speak to questions about whose stories are remembered
and how, which are explored in both Pinnock’s and Thompson’s plays through
narratives that contrast viewpoints. In Rockets and Blue Lights, the use of multiple
timeframes and a film within a play format creates space for characters to challenge
how history is (re)presented. During a read through of The Ghost Ship film script,
Lou notices that her character has been changed in ways that reinforce stereotypi-
cal portrayals of Black women, such as her emerging out of the water ‘naked, wet’
(Pinnock 2020a: 36). Lou questions the cutting of scenes that show aspects of Olu’s
life before she was captured in order to foreground Turner’s point of view in the
film as shifting the focus away from her story and onto Turner as a white saviour
within the abolitionist movement. Lou’s challenge becomes possible within the
context of her as an actress arguing for her character’s importance in the narrative
while at the same time drawing attention to how the past is remembered and of a
need to ethically consider how stories about enslavement are told. Lou asserts that
‘[t]he audience has to identify with her as a person. […] Otherwise, they won’t
feel the impact of her death. It’s supposed to be her story’ (37), whereas the direc-
tor’s view is that the film is about the Turner painting and that editorial decisions
have been made because ‘the conditions for the grant from the Abolition Legacy
Foundation require that the film commemorates the bicentenary of abolition’ (38).
Their argument serves doubly as a critique to the gatekeepers of artistic production
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 169

(film, theatre, and performance) for continually reproducing a set of dominant nar-
ratives that stereotype or marginalise Black perspectives.
While visiting the art gallery exhibition that opens the play with his teacher,
school pupil Billie refuses to take part in a re-enactment of a Coffle Walk after
learning that ‘people used to jump in the sea and fly to their ancestors rather than be
captured’ (47);14 Billie’s resistance is a reminder of the need to question appropriate
ways to pay tribute to and memorialise the dead. At the start of Rockets and Blue
Lights Essie and Lou look straight into the audience when studying Turner’s paint-
ing in the exhibition and Essie states, ‘It’s art. All it can do is bear witness’ (11).
On exiting the theatre after the show, Turner’s ‘Slave Ship’ and ‘Rockets and Blue
Lights’ are digitally projected as exhibits in the Dorfman Theatre foyer, where we
as an audience gather around to contemplate the artworks for ourselves.
The solo performance format of salt. directly engages audiences in the act of wit-
nessing and of understanding the past through resonances with the present. Those
sitting in the front rows are provided with safety goggles to wear when Thompson
smashes the rock salt during the show. At the end of salt. audience members are
invited to meet the performer at the door, to take a piece of the broken rock salt and
to keep it as ‘a commitment to the radical space of not moving on, and all that it
can open’ (Thompson 2018: 52) and as part of a shared responsibility to address the
afterlives of slavery that continue to manifest in structural and institutional racism.
As I stopped to write my first impressions about how sterile, organised, and
‘English museum’ I found the ISM, the only two other Black people in the space at
the time stopped me and said: ‘If you get a chance to go to the US you should go to
The Wax Museum in Baltimore there; it’s much more graphic’. They described the
exhibitions in Baltimore as more immersive in recreating the inside of a slave ship
and other more visceral performance exhibits. There was no such brutality at ISM,
which we agreed had tidied things up too much. The ‘Why Slavery?’ exhibit prob-
lematically frames the past as a ‘trade [that] happened because Europeans needed
workers for their colonies in the Americas’. The dark lighting casts shadows and
glares onto the glass that prevents the eye from easily seeing the objects and labels
inside the cabinets. While I understand that the low levels of lighting may well be
a way to protect the artefacts from light damage, the effect obscured the story of
slavery. A wall entitled ‘We Will Remember’ consists simply of photographs in-
forming visitors of statues and memorials from around the world, again lessening
the potential impact through a reduction to one dimension only.
ISM, it seems, is focused on presenting a narrative itinerary about histories of
enslavement that creates a place where one can go to learn about the overall time-
line as well as significant events, moments or people, including mutinies such as
Amistad or heroes of abolition such as Olaudah Equiano. As argued earlier, ISM’s
approach produces distanced ways of looking at objects and artefacts that maintain
a spectatorial distance from the most traumatic aspects of the trade. As Thompson
alludes to, however, there are questions about how the trauma of enslavement that
has been passed down through generations of Black people can best be processed.
170 Lynette Goddard

Expressing anger is one response, and a refusal to forget is another. Structural rac-
isms are direct legacies of histories of enslavement and, in contrast to the ISM,
both plays evoke Hartman’s idea that ‘reckoning with our responsibility to the
dead necessitates not only our remembrance but also a promise to forswear the
injustice that enabled this crime against humanity to occur’ (2002: 757). Plays such
as Thompson’s and Pinnock’s have created a space within theatre for audiences
to above all feel the emotions that go along with exploring ways to memorialise,
grieve, and bear witness to the past.

Notes
1 Between 2018 and 2021, six plays by Black British women have explored the British
Empire, colonialism, and slavery by reflecting on a significant historical event, person or
untold story. See also debbie tucker green, ear for eye (Royal Court, 2018; directed by
debbie tucker green), Juliet Gilkes Romero’s The Whip (Royal Shakespeare Company,
2020; directed by Kimberley Sykes), Janice Okoh’s The Gift (Eclipse Theatre, 2020;
directed by Dawn Walton), and Amantha Edmead’s Sold (Kumba Nia Arts, Unlock the
Chains Collective and Park Theatre, 2021; directed by Euton Daley).
2 Despite perceptions that there is an obsession with slavery in Black films, literature,
and theatre, there are only a few Black British plays on this theme as most of the plays
produced in the UK are by African American playwrights. See Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj
of the Antarctic (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2006 and Oval House Theatre, 2007;
directed by Sheron Wray) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Statement of Regret (National
Theatre 2007; directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah).
3 Since the establishment of the ISM, The National Museum of African-American His-
tory and Culture, designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, opened in
Washington DC in 2016. See Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley’s essay in this collection
for a discussion of the US museum.
4 I visited the ISM just after just after the building reopened in 2021 following over a year
of national lockdowns to contain the Covid-19 coronavirus. Many of the interactive,
tactile, touch-based, and performative exhibits remained taped-off and unusable, which
limited the possibilities for fully experiencing certain aspects of the displays and further
exacerbated a sterile and distanced effect.
5 Rochelle Rose took over the role for the 2019 Royal Court production while Thompson
took a break after becoming mentally and physically exhausted by re-enacting the trau-
matic journey night after night. Thompson returned to perform in the film adaptation
salt: dispersed (2021) which can be widely distributed without her reliving the traumatic
experiences.
6 Other responses to Zong include David Dabydeen’s book, Turner (1994), M. Nourbese
Phillips’s long poem Zong (2008), and Giles Terera’s play The Meaning of Zong (Bristol
Old Vic Theatre, Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre, and Liverpool Everyman Playhouse,
2022; directed by Giles Terera).
7 See Antislavery Usable Pasts, ‘Legacies on Display: Slavery in Museums’, which lists
museums around the world with permanent exhibitions on enslavement and abolition.
(https://antislavery.ac.uk/solr-search?facet=collection:%22Legacies+on+Display:+
Slavery+in+Museums%22).
8 The London, Sugar Slavery gallery (LSS) also opened as a permanent exhibition on the
third floor of the Museum of London, Docklands on 10 November 2007. London was the
second biggest port involved with the trade of enslaved people in Britain after Liverpool
and the museum’s building at No 1 Warehouse, West India Quay was originally used to
 Remembering Histories of Enslavement 171

store sugar from the plantations. LSS uses similar display methods to ISM where objects
are collected and displayed in glass cabinets.
9 See also The Wilberforce House Museum in Hull, the birthplace of renowned abolition-
ist William Wilberforce, which has a collection focused on transatlantic slavery and
abolition.
10 While the Black Achievers Wall largely consists of famous African-Americans such as
Barack Obama, Black British theatre practitioners include actor, playwright, and direc-
tor Kwame Kwei-Armah, and theatre director Paulette Randall.
11 See Moody for detailed discussion of the original TSG Middle Passage exhibition,
which was a reconstructed slave ship accompanied by a soundtrack of readings aiming
to create an emotional ‘experiential engagement’ (Moody 2020: 164).
12 Thompson’s words are written in the script as ‘The Woman’, so I will interchange
between both descriptors of performer and character.
13 Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery in 1888.
14 A ‘Coffle’ refers to a group of enslaved people being chained together to walk from one
destination to another.

Works Cited
Anon (2022) ‘We remember. We act’, https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/international-
slavery-museum/about; Accessed 9 February 2022).
Araujo, Ana Lucia (2021) Museums and Atlantic Slavery, London: Routledge.
Hartman, Saidiya (2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,
Dehli: Navayana Publishing.
——— (2002) ‘The Time of Slavery’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4): 757–777.
Harvie, Jen (2018) Stage Left podcast, Episode 6. Selina Thompson salt.
hooks, bell (1982) Ain’t I A Woman, London: Pluto Press.
Jones, Jr. Douglas A. (2019) ‘Introduction: Slavery’s Reinventions’, Modern Drama 62(4):
383–390.
McCormick, Stacie Selmon (2019) Staging Black Fugitivity, Columbus: The Ohio State
University Press.
Moody, Jessica (2020) The Persistence of Memory: Remembering Slavery in Liverpool,
‘slaving capital of the world’, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Mustakeem, Sowande M. (2016) Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle
Passage, Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
National Theatre (2021) Designing the Show’, 10 September, https://www.instagram.com/
tv/CTpDzEOIJxA/; Accessed 16 December 2022.
Pinnock, Winsome (2020a) Rockets and Blue Lights, London: Nick Hern Books.
——— (2020b) Lockdown Theatre Festival: Rockets and Blue Lights. BBC Radio 3.
Sharpe, Christina (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Smallwood, Stephanie E (2007) Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to Ameri-
can Diaspora, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, Selina (2018) salt., London: Faber and Faber.
______ (2021) salt. BBC Four.
Tibbles, Anthony, ed. (2005) Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, Liverpool:
National Museums Liverpool, 2005.
10
CHILE’S MUSEUM OF MEMORY AND
HUMAN RIGHTS
Long Life to the Theatre!

Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

On 11 January 2010, the first female Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet, opened
the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMHR). While giving her inaugural
speech, Catalina Catrileo, sister of Matías Catrileo (1964–2008), a young man of
Mapuche ascendency shot by the police two years earlier, mounted a lightning
tower and, pointing at Bachelet, demanded justice for his brother.1 Catalina’s irrup-
tion was a sign of the controversies of a project aimed at addressing human rights
violations while excluding state violence against indigenous people. While recog-
nizing Chile’s period of political violence under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship
(1973–1990) by inscribing it in the urban space, the building of the museum also
meant coming to terms with a conflictive past, but at the price of simultaneously
shutting it down.2
This foundational moment should have marked a new beginning, but conflict-
ing opinions toward MMHR had been raised from the announcement of the project
by President Bachelet during her first public ‘state of the nation’ cuenta pública
speech after a year in office. Though her politics on human rights were expan-
sive and included the inapplicability of the Amnesty Law,3 a new reparation law
for relatives of the victims of the dictatorship, the creation of an Institute for Hu-
man Rights, and a brief re-opening of the Valech Commission,4 the whole debate
focused on the construction of the MMHR. Bachelet’s agenda on human rights
was presented to the people in May 2007, only a couple of months after the death
of Augusto Pinochet on 8 December 2006. Though Chile regained democracy in
1990, and the reports of the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation
(Rettig Report, 1991) and National Commission on Political Prison and Torture
(Valech Report I, 2004) were already issued, the dictator’s death finally opened a
space in the public sphere for state violence – considered a pending matter by the
government and numerous citizens – to be addressed.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-11
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 173

These historical events positioned Michelle Bachelet to promote a policy of

Nunca más (Never again). As the daughter of a victim of the Dictatorship,5 she had
the symbolic power to turn the defense of human rights into a critical question of
her mandate. In her first cuenta pública, Bachelet’s stated: ‘the ethics of human
rights and democracy is the legacy this generation of Chileans, my own genera-
tion, must inherit for future generations’ (2007: 35).6 Hence, the construction of
the MMHR was part of a State-endorsed project based on the idea that the only
way to strengthen democracy in a post-dictatorial context was to progress a clear
human-rights policy. Despite the reification of the past, museification has been a
recurrent means to achieve this goal. As Amy Sodaro has highlighted, the legiti-
macy of power resides in coming to terms with the nation’s violent past (2018: 4).
Though the MMHR was meant to serve this purpose, the initiative was received
with mistrust and opposition raised by both conservatives and progressists alike.
Soon after its opening, the museum hosted theatre events, strengthening the alli-
ance between art and politics that is omnipresent, and ever-persistent in the Latin
American republican imaginary. In this chapter, we argue that these theatre events
have offered a space for challenging the official narrative regarding human rights
violations during Pinochet’s Dictatorship that serves the reconciliation agenda, of-
fering instead a critical counter-discourse that reconnects with the contingencies
of the present.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights

The MMHR is located at the heart of Barrio Yungay, a neighborhood founded in
1888 where President Gabriel Boric decided to reside during his term of office.
This unprecedented decision pays tribute to the republican tradition of a district
that has known better times. At the beginning of the twentieth century, upper-
and middle-class citizens enjoyed the parks and the cultural venues nearby.7 In
the twenty-first century, Cultural Center Matucana 100 (2001) and the Library of
Santiago (2005) contributed to the cultural, educational, and recreational offer in
this neighborhood. Far from a no man’s land, the MMHR was located in a site that
has a high density of symbolic identity for the nation-state.
In addition to this first layer of material and symbolic value, the MMHR was con-
structed in just 330 days,8 mirroring the epic construction of the UNCTAD during
President Salvador Allende’s term.9 Furthermore, the end of Bachelet’s four-year
mandate coincided with the nation’s Bicentennial in 2010, and the strong pres-
sure to flee from the dictatorial past restrained to a minimum the time-consuming
possibilities for involving representatives from civil society in the design and ex-
ecution of the project.
Within a landscape of parks, neoclassical museums, and red brick buildings,
the MMHR emerges as an impressive translucent four-story-parallelepiped (or
rectangle), reminiscent of the vastness of the Atacama Desert and the Cordil-
lera de los Andes.10 The main building of the MMHR accommodates permanent
174 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

and temporary exhibitions, the documentation center (CEDOC), the audiovisual

documentation center (CEDAV), and management offices. In addition, the com-
plex includes a detached auditorium facing the main entrance, a coffee shop, and
a bookstore offering various souvenirs. The space within creates a vast open-
air inner central square where visitors meet the arts: four permanent artworks –
including an installation by contemporary artist Alfredo Jaar11 – as well as festivals,
performances, and commemorations.
Chilean museologist Tatiana Wolff Rojas, who analyzes MMHR’s museogra-
phy, cites María Luisa Ortiz, Director of Collections and Research, in articulat-
ing that the Museum aims to be a ‘space built upon evidence, not interpretation’
(in Wolff 2016: 63). Since the individual and institutional agents engaged in its
creation had mandated a display of the agreed consensus over the recent traumatic
past, the route and museographic content12 was devised based on ad hoc historical
research. The permanent exhibition includes indexical documents, including ‘oral
and written testimonies, judicial documents, letters, literary texts, essays, posters,
drawings, banners, leaflets and flyers, written, audiovisual, and radio materials,
documentaries, films and other audiovisual historic material, documentary and his-
torical photography’, as well as speaking objects, such as vestiges, arpilleras,13 and
handicrafts (Wolff 2016, 63, 64).14
Despite a factual curatorial mode aiming at providing a seamless truthful narra-
tive, traumatic memory resists closure. Relegated to an outer space, La Geometría
de la conciencia [The Geometry of Consciousness] provides a divergent experi-
ence, one that holds an individual and subjective tone. Alfredo Jaar’s installation
invites visitors to stay behind closed doors for three minutes, passing from total
darkness to see the 500 retro-illuminated white silhouettes of faces of disappeared
people and contemporary Chileans photographed by Jaar. Though the whole expe-
rience is reminiscent of the Holocaust Tower in the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, its
articulation of the absence-presence (Valdés n.d.) is much more complex due to
the kaleidoscopic image of the silhouettes both of the faces and the visitors’ bodies
replicated ad infinitum by the mirrors in the walls.
In contrasting the exhibition of objects and documents within the museum
and this adjacent experience, Wolff highlights the coexistence of two concurring
museographic logics: a literal strategy – ‘realistic and without makeup’ – and a
metaphoric one that is ‘aesthetic, sensitive, meditative, nonfigurative of the horror,
open to interpretation’ (2016: 66). Though this is a central argument for our own
analysis, an account of the development of the museum project allows for a broader
contextualization of this discussion.
As expressed on its website, the MMHR aims at ‘putting upfront the violations
of human rights perpetrated by the Chilean State between 1973 and 1990; dignify-
ing the victims and their families, and fostering the reflection and debate on the
importance of a culture of respect and tolerance for these events never to happen
again’15 (web.museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-el-museo/). For further clarification, its
mission statement highlights its contribution to set ‘a shared ethical ground, based
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 175

in a culture of human rights and democratic values’ (ibid.). Ambitious and large
on the one hand – as an educational, formative project – and very specific on the
other hand – in terms of the collection and archive – it is part of an ongoing dispute
over the Dictatorship, its aftermath, and the connection with the project of social
justice which Allende still represents. The museum’s promise was to attain sym-
bolic reparation in a context where the pact of silence still protects the perpetrators
from prosecution. Hence, the government’s strategy to overcome military impunity
involves displaying the crimes committed.16
Though only a decade old, the museum cannot escape the entropy of an insti-
tution originally imagined as a place to display objects to be admired. It shows a
divide between what happens indoors, where the official history of state violence
between 1973 and 1990 has been sealed; and the outside, where the space can
be inhabited by challenging narratives linked to the current political life of the
country. It is important to note that the MMHR played no role during the Estal-
lido Social (Social Upheaval, Chile October 2019), which led to the creation of a
Constitutional Convention and fostered the election of Gabriel Boric as President
(2021–2025).
The mission of the Constitutional Convention was to draft a new constitution
to replace that introduced by the Military Junta in 1980. Though the Draft was re-
jected in a referendum held on 4 September 2022, nowadays nobody can deny the
political negotiations that led us out of Dictatorship to a formal democracy charac-
terized by neoliberal capitalism and the capitulation of justice for the victims. In so
doing, the Estallido Social marked the collapse of the discourse of reconciliation
that characterized the transitional period, thus alienating the MMHR and its narra-
tive from the current debate.
Since its founding, the MMHR has followed the international move from de-
nunciation to promoting a culture of human rights and democracy. As originally
conceived, it symbolized reparation for the victims in a context where actual repa-
ration was out of reach. It also meant foreclosing the inheritance of a conflictive
past. In so doing, it depoliticizes memory while asserting facts and tracing the
origins of Dictatorship in the USA-USSR battle for hegemony in Latin-American
countries since the 1950s. This turns the MMHR into a place more eloquent for
foreign visitors than for locals. This is also visible in the contemporary architecture
design that evokes similar projects like the Museo de la Memoria de Andalucía
(Spain) or the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin (Germany), with the Holocaust as a uni-
versal model of memorialization. This reinforces the logic highlighted by Shelley
Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer (2016) and the need for a transnational comparative
study unveiling the specific negotiations between the local and the global each case
study might have endured.
In the Chilean case, the focus on recent history marginalizes the violations of
human rights and the longstanding (and ongoing) repression of the indigenous
peoples, namely the Mapuche. The negotiations which led to the creation of the
MMHR signal a former authoritarian regime at odds with Bachelet’s Socialist
176 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

project, exempting ‘democratic’ governments from any accusation of violating hu-

man rights. To balance this closed narrative, theatrical events at Central Square
have provided a site for counternarratives. Truthful to the political imperative
(Thompson 2021) that haunts Chilean theatre, MMHR has become a venue for
the performing arts. Since most companies obtain grants on a one-by-one project
basis without permanent support or subsidy from the state, they are in a position to
criticize the current government’s political agenda.

Theatre and Political Analysis

When we come to the question of hosting theatre in the museum, we are very
aware that we are not a cultural center, we have no ticket office, no sales sys-
tem, though we have to create theatre events throughout the year. It was obvi-
ous to me. There are so many young groups, not only in Santiago but also in
other regions, still working on the dictatorship from different perspectives and
approaches.
(Alejandra Ibarra 2021)

Though the MMHR was not originally conceived as a theatre venue, its architecture
provides two spaces suitable for hosting theatre productions and commemorative
acts. The Central Square, a large open-air esplanade with built-in stone bleachers
connecting the building with the urban surroundings; and a separate auditorium for
150 people located in an adjacent building, designed for conferences but also used
for small theatre productions due to the lack of a more appropriate room. Excep-
tionally, there are some shows inside the main building, apart from the permanent
exhibitions.
The other relevant feature contributing to the continuous presence of theatre and
performance in the MMHR is the existence of a Production and Outreach Depart-
ment in charge of scheduling various productions or commissioning pieces of vari-
ous scale and media, and responding to ‘the idea that the museum could not only be
a place for preservation, but also a mobilizing site for debate and artistic, cultural,
academic activities’ (Ibarra 2021). Alejandra Ibarra took charge of the Department
in 2010, and her trajectory partly explains the success of the live performance
events: Ibarra is a journalist and former communications coordinator at Matucana
100, the leading public cultural center in Santiago from 2001 to 2010, when Centro
Cultural Gabriela Mistral stole its thunder. Alejandra brought in a deep knowledge
of the Chilean theatre landscape and a solid relationship with artists, devising a
curatorial agenda based on three key principles: to reach new, especially young
and local, audiences, to circulate the documents kept in the museum’s archives by
making them available for artistic creation in different media, and to transform the
Central Plaza into a venue for up to 2000 spectators, who might build and embrace
a ‘theatre of memory’.
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 177

In line with the mission of the museum, Ibarra has purposefully scheduled un-
comfortable productions to foster debate and critical thinking in memory policies
and transitional justice. The first theatre cycle ran in January 2011 in the context
of Festival de Teatro Internacional Santiago a Mil (International Theatre Festival
Santiago a Mil, FITAM). Dating from 1997, this summer festival is the largest
performance arts event in the country, taking place in and outside of the capital
city, offering productions to a vast network of programmers who have been taking
Chilean theatre and dance all over the world. According to museum reports, 2,500
spectators attended the series of street theatre shows at the esplanade that year.17
The initial success continued during the following months, and theatre program-
ming became a helpful strategy for consolidating the MMHR’s relationship with
the neighborhood.
In May 2011, another milestone took place. Chilean playwright and director
Guillermo Calderón premiered two plays in tandem Villa + Discurso. Whereas
Discurso ‘imagines an apologetic and apocryphal farewell presidential speech by
Michelle Bachelet’, Villa digs deep into the debates on ‘the memorialization of
Chile’s dictatorial past’ (Hernández 2021: 133), focusing on a donation given to
the board in charge of Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi – hence the title of the
production – the most emblematic Chilean memory site. With the code name Cuar-
tel Terranova (1974–1978), the ancient villa accommodated the headquarters of
the infamous Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Agency,
DINA), operating as a torture and disappearance center, and key to the politics of
terror operated by the Dictatorship. Three young female members of the board have
been summoned to decide the future shape of collective memory while ironically
reviewing the pros and cons of the alternatives that a musealization of memory of-
fers in the twenty-first century: recreation, abstraction, and erasure:

Carla: Nothing. They took everything away. It’s like a perfect crime. So
then time just passes. And ‘we shall overcome, we shall overcome’.
One day there’s, like, a little bit of democracy and you feel like the
villa isn’t as much of a scandal as we thought it was going to be.
And someone says, girls, this can’t be a perfect crime, people have
to be scandalised by this. What if we rebuild it? Good idea. If I had
money I’d rebuild the thing. So the Swedes and the Dutch know and
say: aha. This was it. It was here. If I had money I’d rebuild every-
thing with every irrelevant detail. Not just the actual architecture of
the mansion itself, but the swimming pool of water, too; the trees
of the earth, the garden of roses, the silence, the terrible smell, the
screams, the chains, the engines in the night, all with artistic special
effects. And I’d create a fake oldness, I’d paint the walls with muddy
water, with another palette of colours in the background. Tones like
sepia. And I’d buy all the paraphernalia. I’d buy a metal bed, I’d
buy cables and sockets, I’d buy uniforms, I’d buy the smell of shit.
178 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

To create a sort of realist Disneyland reality. So people would feel

like they’re feeling what the people who felt must have felt.
(Calderón 2013: 15)

Taking the literal strategy described by Wolff to its limits, this suggestion reflects
the mise en scène of the synthetic torture room in the MMHR that has a parrilla
eléctrica, a metallic bedstead where prisoners were tied up to be tortured with elec-
tric shocks. Not surprisingly, the second proposal directly refers to the MMHR:18

Francisca: And what else is there inside? Keep walking. Inside there is death
and life. That’s why I said: a hospital. Well, Miss. It looks like a hos-
pital, but it’s a museum […]. Because of course you’re in a museum
which is, like, white on the outside, sort of with mirrors, like an inter-
national architecture competition, which is basically the aesthetic of
modern-day capitalism. And you say, this is so contradictory. Intrigu-
ing. Ok. […] And then they put you in a room with tables covered in
Mac computers. With music, like that. And you can sit at the Macs
and see lists of all of the people who came to the villa and died. And
you can click on the name and everything about that person appears.
Photos of her, her family, who her boyfriend was, whether she liked
edible seaweed, if she used to come home eating the bread when she
was sent out to do the shopping, and so on. And if you do double-
click on VILLA, click-click, a description comes up of everything
that actually happened to her in the villa. Click. Who she hugged.
Click. Who she spoke to. Click. Who she helped. If she liked sing-
ing, if she sang or if she didn’t sing. OK. And you see that and then
you do another double-click: click-click on an icon that says WHAT
HAPPENED? And a video comes up of the testimony of the family
describing everything. Click-click. When they arrested her. Click-
click. How they beat her. Click-click. If they found her wrapped in
newspaper or if they didn’t find her. And if they killed her, how she
died. Click. Click. How they found out. Click click. How they cried.
Click click. How they’ll be sad forever.
(Calderón 2013: 19)

Turned into a proper ‘hyper historian’,19 Calderón’s research allows him to retrace
the history of Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi with astonishing accuracy: the third
suggestion describes a park, the actual Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi:

Macarena: No. It’s just, wait. Look. Look. When the old regime ended, there was
no president running to the villa, saying let me in. Let me in. Was
it here? Was it here? It can’t be. No. No. Father forgive us. Father
forgive us. From this moment on this will be the new belly button
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 179

of the world, the epicentre of justice. This place. In this country no

cumbia shall be danced, no school shall be built, no cloth shall be em-
broidered until the problems of this villa are solved. But no. That never
happened. There was no president kneeling or clutching a fistful of
earth saying: I swear that this shall not pass into history as if it were a
one-night stand. Here we shall build a white museum. No, we’d better
build a house of horrors here. No. No one said that. What they said was:
we’ll aim to see justice done but, gosh darn it, it might not be possi-
ble. So this deserted villa was left empty. Until the traumatized people
came back, the beaten, the former prisoners, the survivors, the kicked,
the enlightened, the untouchables, the chosen ones, the enraged. And
they came in and said, let’s do something with the villa. Ok. But we
have no money. No. We don’t even own the real estate. So they started
little by little to plant roses here and violets there. And they swept.
And they brought together other survivors and said to them. Can you
speak? No. I don’t want to talk about that, I’m kind of traumatized.
Ok then. No. Please. No. All right, maybe. Let’s see. I don’t know.
Well, I remember that this is where the torture houses were. Yes. The
tower was here, the iron maiden was here. All the plants and animals
were here. Just birch trees and sparrows really. There were evenings
and nightfalls but no dawns. And that’s how they started rebuilding the
park, from memories. Little by little. With no master plan. And making
mistakes. Like in love. And this was the result. A strange mix of styles
from the end of the century. A pastiche collage potpourri mix.
(Calderón 2013: 31)

At the end of the play, the mystery as to why the three characters were chosen
to decide over the site is unveiled. They all share the same origin: their mothers
were raped by soldiers while imprisoned in Villa Grimaldi. Whereas Carla and
Macarena’ mother–daughter relations are tainted by their violent conceptions,
Francisca reports an affectionate rapport with her Mapuche mother:

Francisca: I kiss my mom every day.

Macarena: It’s just that we all react differently.
Francisca: Yes. That’s why we should have the field of grass.
Carla: Yes.
Macarena: Maybe.
Francisca: Yes. Because all tortured women react differently.
Macarena: Yes. There are women who never recover.
Carla: Yes. And there are women who organize and build museums.
Francisca: Yes. Are there are women who become president of the republic.
END
(Calderón 2013: 52)
180 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

Villa
IMAGE 10.1  + Discurso, June 2011. Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos
Humanos, Santiago de Chile. Photograph by Guillermo Calderón.

And that’s the cue for Discurso.

Francisca’s suggestion to have a field of grass represents the impossibility to do
justice to the past. It is also a wink to the suspicious erasure of the Mapuche people in
the story of the Dictatorship and its resistance. As Jennifer Thompson has indicated:
‘Villa’s debate is predicated on a crisis of democracy: a binary vote to determine the
future of a memorial site breaks down when one of the characters nullifies her bal-
lot by writing the Mapuche war cry, marichiweu, instead of selecting option “A”
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 181

or “B.” The binary choices, like the binary of the 1988 plebiscite (“Yes” for Pino-
chet, dictatorship; “No” for a democratic election), present a limited set of options
and exclude Chile’s Indigenous Mapuche population’ (2021: 178).
Villa + Discurso is a site-specific performance that premiered in Londres 38,
another former torture center; and subsequently was presented in the MMHR and
Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi.20 We have so extensively quoted Calderón’s play,
because we want to stress the tension between its exuberant rhetoric and the objec-
tual nature of a memorial museum. Witnessing Villa + Discurso in the museum is
an odd experience (Image 10.1).
The three actresses are surrounded by an item from the permanent exhibition:
a map of Chile with all the memorials built where violations of human rights took
place between 1973 and 1990. Though the characters do not mention the MMHR
by its name, the white museum undoubtably represents Bachelet’s memorial pro-
ject with its emphasis on cold information and data over an affective environment,
its inscription in an international circuit of institutions aiming at developing a cul-
ture of human rights and democracy for future generations, and the aesthetics of
contemporary minimalistic globalized architecture. The dissonance between a de-
territorialized building and the presence of history is magnified by the focus Villa +
Discurso places on visitor experience

Carla: I’m still in shock. Going to the rebuilt villa is the best thing that could
have happened to me in my life.
(Calderón 2013: 16)

Francisca: And I’m so angry, Mom. I feel guilty for being alive. It’s weird. I feel,
like, materialist and dialectical. But it’s lovely. Go.
(ibid.: 20)

Macarena: I say the villa should stay like that. It’s sort of poor but it does tell
the story of the survivors so well. And that’s how you weigh the fact
that we live in a graveyard. That we’ve been asleep. That the whole
country is built on top of a villa. Yes. So we’d better leave it as it is.
(ibid.: 31)

In its wide range of possibilities, Villa finds no way to inscribe history and memory
into a museum. No proposal gets three votes. Like a Chilean female version of
Waiting for Godot, Macarena, Francisca, and Carla are trapped in a never-ending
debate, demonstrating how words are as useless to ensure reconciliation as a mate-
rial endeavor like the MMHR. What words can do is to empower individuals who
were not yet born when the human rights violations took place to try different ways
to connect to this ominous past and prevent these violations from happening again.
Looking back, especially after the Estallido Social, Calderón’s persistence in re-
turning to the foundational moment when the negotiations and pacts resulting in
182 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

the construction of Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi or the MMHR – or any other
memory site or memorial museum by extension – seems even more anticipatory.
Calderón displaces the question from the closure provided by the official narrative
prompted by politicians and institutions to the plasticity required to connect with
younger generations and an ever-changing present.
Villa + Discourse has not been the only theatre production performed in the
MMHR. In the same vein of providing a complementary narrative to the mono-
linear discourse of the museum, it has hosted other controversial productions. The
Memoria Escénica Festival (Stage Memory Festival) was created with the purpose
‘not only to give a forum to the memory of the victims, but also to the memory of all
people, of the work that theatre has produced, relevant work’ (Ibarra 2021). The fes-
tival in 2016 presented La amante fascista (The Fascist Lover, 2010) by Alejandro
Moreno and directed by Víctor Carrasco; Los millonarios (The Millionaires, 2015)
by Teatro La María; and La imaginación del futuro (The Imagination of the Future)
by Teatro La Re-Sentida, all dark comedies addressing conflictive political issues.
Premiered in 2010, also in the context of the Bicentennial and the Muestra de
Dramaturgia Nacional, La amante fascista is a hilarious monologue. Sleepless in
a city in Northern Chile, Iris Rojas, the wife of an Army Captain, is waiting for
her lover – a higher-ranking officer coming to the zone on an official visit. Iris’s
anxious and hectic speech presents a rare portrait of the pro-Coup and Dictator-
ship community in a theatrical context primarily devoted to the memories of the
resistance, the victims, and the revolutionary ideal. The story of Pinochet’s regime,
told from the point of view of the perpetrators, collaborators, and supporters, has
been less addressed, probably because we still insist on a plea for effective justice
instead of the symbolic reparation promoted by the series of democratic govern-
ments from 1990.
Los millonarios is inspired by a real case, which took place in the Araucania in
2013. A married couple, Werner Luchsinger and Vivianne Mackay, were killed in
the zone of the so-called Mapuche Conflict. The assault on their country house was
perpetrated simultaneously with the protests on the anniversary of Matías Catrileo’s
murder. Machi Celestino Córdova, one of the spiritual leaders of the Mapuche com-
munity, is the only person to have been condemned for the crime. Los millonarios
are the partners of a law firm hired to defend a Mapuche being prosecuted for his
responsibility in an attack which has similar characteristics. While preparing their
case, the long Chilean history of violence against indigenous people is evidenced
through the fictional voice of the rich white elite and quotes from ex-presidents,
historians, secretaries of the state, and members of Congress from 1859 until the
present time. In so doing, Los millonarios theatricalizes longstanding power imbal-
ances and, when performed in the central square of MMHR, highlights the com-
plicit silence of the Museum toward the historical violence against the Mapuche.
The controversial La imaginación del futuro premiered in 2013, for the forti-
eth anniversary of the Coup d’état. It portrays President Salvador Allende’s last
hours while his young millennial technocrat Secretaries of State hectically devise
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 183

disparate attempts to prevent the civic–military upheaval, including the televi-

sion broadcasting of the President’s famous last speech in ridiculous settings. In
an in-your-face intervention, a ‘poor’ 11-year-old is summoned on stage, and
the performers ask the audience to donate ten dollars each to pay for his train-
ing as a physician. The initial demand turns into coercion when one actress joins
the audience, exposes her breasts, and offers a paja rusa (mammary intercourse)
in exchange for money. Rather than an accurate historical account, this was de-
scribed as ‘a free, brazen and impudent fiction, based on events that have shaped
our political identity’:21 La imaginación del futuro is either loved or hated. Fans
of La Re-Sentida, described as a punk theatre group (Alvarado 2014), applauded
the production’s denunciation of the failure of Allende’s imagined future and the
profitable business education that has shaped Chile. The production toured interna-
tionally, invited to the Schaubühne in Berlin and the Festival d’Avignon. Chilean
communities abroad and even the media expressed their disgust, qualifying it as
‘uncomfortable, electrifying and horrifying’ (Salino 2014). Hence, the decision to
perform it in the MMHR was not a small matter and expressed the conviction that
the venue shall endure dissent if it is to enhance solid political analysis.

Connecting with New Generations

Along with its curatorial work, the museum provides a space for creation through
thematic cycles related to the history and memory of the Dictatorship. Mostly
devised to commemorate an anniversary – the Coup or the inauguration of the
museum – these commissions give full artistic freedom while prompting the re-
search on material dimensions of the objects it houses. For the fortieth anniversary
of the Coup, actress and director Claudia Di Girólamo was invited to devise an
intervention in the Central Square. The previous day, a special commemorative act
took place; strangely, it was not the state’s official ceremony. In 2013, President
Sebastián Piñera was in the first year of his mandate leading a right-wing coali-
tion with active participants and supporters of the civic-military regime. Michelle
Bachelet was the opposition leader and was building up her re-election campaign;
therefore, the museum she had inaugurated that represented the aspirations of her
sector was the perfect site for an alternative act. 2013 illustrates the dispute over
the past. Everybody aimed to have a say in the public sphere. The theatre sphere
participated in the debate: numerous new productions and restagings revisited the
Dictatorship and its aftermath of silences and cover-up operations. The event led
by Di Girólamo recruited 30 actors to read testimonies of various victims, while
children’s drawings were also presented; all these objects belonged to the MMHR’s
collections. The performance provided a less conventional strategy than an exhibit
for embodying dormant past experiences (Image 10.2).
The most recent example of creative circulation of objects was ‘Epistolaria de
la memoria. Mujeres escriben a mujeres’ (Epistolary of Memory, Women Write to
Women), which promotes an affective, subjective approach to political violence,
184 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

IMAGE 10.2 Commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Coup, 11 September

2013. Actor José Soza also played the leading role in The Imagination
of the Future. Photograph courtesy of the Museo de la Memoria y los
Derechos Humanos.

inviting women to write letters to female victims of the Dictatorship. Again, the
Museum operates here under a collaborative logic; in this case, the Red de Actrices
Chilenas (Chilean Actresses Network, RACH) was in charge of the readings.
The circulation of objects, documents, and experiences enables the connection
with other audiences that are offered the opportunity to creatively revisit the mu-
seum archive:

I have so many examples of people who had never set foot in the Museum,
people who came here for the first time because they like to draw. They had
no relatives among the victims, no academic training. Once a peddler won a
prize for a microdocumentary, and that makes me so happy. The peddler stood
at the podium with the other winners, people with professional film training.
The training, he didn’t have it. He was a peddler who had bought a camera and
had started exploring with it, with no former knowledge. Ignacio Agüero [a re-
nowned Chilean film director] was on the jury. Ignacio Agüero and people alike,
and they choose the work of a peddler.
(Ibarra 2021)

This work, together with a focus on understanding what human rights mean today
and how communities understand them, remains a key focus for Ibarra.
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 185

Conclusion: History as Feedback Loop

In the twenty-first century, the historical context has changed immensely in Chile.
After the return of Democracy in 1990, the idea of a difficult past equated with the
Dictatorship; nowadays, our difficult past is the transitional period, dating from
1988 until – most probably – the Constitution of Pinochet is replaced. In this course
of events, the MMHR is in the past, asynchronous to the current conflictive memo-
ries and the consideration of the demands in the expanded field of human rights
focusing on environmental issues and the rights of historically excluded communi-
ties, including indigenous peoples, gender diversity, and women. Less rigid, bulky
institutions, like Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi (Grass 2016), have proved more
agile in responding to the political moment.22
Being only 12 years old and permanently negotiating its position as a museum
of memory and human rights, or a memorial museum (Velázquez Marroni 2011),
the MMHR offers a unique opportunity to map the crossroads where such pro-
jects emerge and how they are navigated in the twenty-first century. The balance
between informing the visitors of the past while creating a culture of respect for
human rights and democracy is delicate. Nonetheless, this balance toward its mis-
sion is not the only tension that determines the place the museum occupies in the
Chilean political imaginary and its symbolic value. The institution also embod-
ies a permanent negotiation between the global and the local as it concurs with
transnational debates on memory and difficult pasts. Within the internal landscape,
any attempt to understand its role must consider the continuities and discontinui-
ties between the MMHR with its official history and the other sites preserving
the testimonies of victims of state violence. These last considerations include its
physical location in Santiago within the republican tradition of the city and the
epic of revolutionary transformation navigated from Salvador Allende, to Michelle
Bachelet and Gabriel Boric. Financial resources both of national and international
origin highly differ from the budget allocated to grassroots initiatives with similar
purposes, and such distinctions also merit consideration.
It is not surprising that conflict has been present from the museum’s opening.
The short lapse from its conception to its inauguration prevented major community
involvement; it even meant that the architectural design ran simultaneously with
the devising of the museography, with the latter being forced to fit into the build-
ing. We recognize here not only the willpower of the President but also the Chilean
people; however, the current practice means initiatives happen in haste or do not
happen at all.
Though not originally meant as a cultural center, a quick chronology of the pro-
ductions presented at the museum that we have briefly presented involves many of
Chilean theatre’s most influential names. Given the lack of a formal artistic policy,
we assume the quality of its programming relies on the professional trajectory of
the person in charge and reflects the deep self-understanding of local artists as
agents of socio-political change. Theatre has thus become an ally to the purposes
186 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

of the museum. It has provided a counter-narrative to counterbalance the limited

monolinear discourse conveyed by the permanent exhibitions. The flexibility of
live arts to dialogue with current events has also given a deeper connection to the
demands of the present triggered by the 2018 feminist movement, the 2019 Estal-
lido Social, and the urgent impasse between the Mapuche people and the State.
In opposition to the closed nature of the exhibits,23 the central open square has
welcomed various audiences while weaving a link to the neighboring community.
Theatre performances are usually packed and lively, and audience surveys high-
light appreciation for the cultural offer the museum provides. This fluid connection
with its surroundings has also promoted the circulation of the objects in the muse-
um’s collections. Citizens, with or without professional artistic training, have been
invited to revisit a diverse range of documents, including letters and recordings,
to reconnect them with the living. The museum has organized playwriting, video,
and music composition competitions through an open call. The growing number
of participants have spoken positively about the engagement these activities have
produced due to the prestige of the judges, the quality of the winning pieces, and
the platform the museum provides for their circulation.
No one can escape the political turmoil, negotiations, and disputes among the
political body and the civil society trying to imagine social justice for the future
in Chile. These include: the 1973 Coup, the 2010 Bicentennial, Allende, Bachelet,
Boric, memory sites, violations of human rights, the Dictatorship, official history,
denunciation, reparation, memorialization, and Mapuche conflict. In this country,
it is impossible to understand – and disentangle – the feedback loop linking theatre
and museum without considering the past and present material and imaginary real-
ity of which we are trying to make sense.

Notes
1 Catalina’s action was recorded (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=609721113419290).
Although the defense lawyer argued that private Walter Ramírez acted in self-defense,
he was convicted in 2011 for excessive force. In 2015, the Supreme Court stated that
the Chilean State had to indemnify the Catrileo family. The relatives did not accept the
money, specifying that all they wanted was President Bachelet to acknowledge the re-
sponsibility of the State in Matías’ death.
2 Despite its overarching name, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights focuses on
the dictatorial period (1973–1990). Numerous political conflicts and violations of hu-
man rights in Chilean history are thus excluded from the permanent exhibit; temporary
shows and so called “extension” activities have rarely and temporarily addressed these
events. Public debate has highlighted two notorious exclusions: the violence prior to the
Coup and the longstanding violence against the indigenous population beginning in the
sixteenth century. The first exclusion aims at giving no ground to revisionist narratives
that might justify the military intervention; in exchange, it blurs the action of local civil-
ians and foreign countries, namely the United States, in destabilizing the country. On the
other hand, the violations of indigenous population’s human rights, namely against the
Mapuche people, goes back to the process of colonization and taints Chilean govern-
ments no matter what their party affiliation. The recognition of this kind of state violence
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 187

would advocate in favor of indigenous political and territorial claims that have gained
momentous in the last decades. National and international reports address the issue, and
even President M. Bachelet’ nomination as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
triggered protest actions.
3 On 18 April 1978, a law was passed to grant amnesty to all people implicated in crimes
and misdemeanors during the state of siege (11 September 1973–10 March 1978), mak-
ing it extremely difficult to prosecute military and civilians who participated in acts of
political violence and repression. In 2014, on the commemoration of the 41rst anniver-
sary of the Coup, President Bachelet announced her decision to revoke the Law.
4 The Valech Commission (National Commission on Political Prison and Torture, 2003–
2004) reported 27,255 victims between 10 September 1973 and 10 March 1990. Presi-
dent Michelle Bachelet created the II Valech Commission (2010–2011) to investigate
and qualify cases of forced disappearance and political execution, along with new claims
of political imprisonment and torture.
5 Her father, Air Force Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet, was charged with treason and
detained just after the September 1973 coup d’état. After months of imprisonment and
torture, he died from cardiac arrest the following year. In 1975, Michele and her mother
were arrested and taken to Villa Grimaldi – Cuartel Terranova, Santiago city’s most
infamous torture center. Soon after, she left Chile and stayed in exile until 1979.
6 All translations from Spanish are ours unless otherwise indicated.
7 In front of the museum is the Quinta Normal de Agricultura (1841), a center for Agricul-
tural education and experimentation, and also a public park, which includes the Botani-
cal Garden (1853), the National Museum of Natural History (1876), the National Zoo
(1882, which moved in 1925 to another location), the Arts Pavillion Partenon (1885),
the School of Arts and Crafts (1886), and the Museo de la Educación (1941). For a map
of the MMHR and its surroundings, see https://web.museodelamemoria.cl/wp-content/
files_mf/1563900982LIBROMMDHMOP_web.pdf, p. 26.
8 For a detailed account of the history and description of the MMHR, see Sodaro 2018.
9 The first elected Socialist President in the world agreed to host the III United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development in 1972 even though no venue was big enough
for all participants. Thousands of volunteers participated, and the building was ready
in 275 days. After the conference, it became the Metropolitan Cultural Center, Gabri-
ela Mistral. Decorated with paintings and sculptures by the most famous contemporary
Chilean artists, it also had a canteen open to any passer-by. After the Palace of Gov-
ernment La Moneda’s bombardment in 1973, the Military Junta seized the building,
changed its name to Diego Portales, and set up the administration offices of the Dictator-
ship there until the full restoration of La Moneda. In 2010, President Bachelet inaugu-
rated the refurbished Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral (GAM, https://www.gam.cl/), the
current national center for the performing arts.
10 According to Sodaro, the architect’s rationale was to create ‘a building intended to be
both bright and solemn, symbolizing transparency and conveying a feeling of space and
lightness. The dramatic building floats over the vast concrete Plaza de la Memoria, meant
to be an “ark where all the reminiscences of Chilean history can be deposited” (Archi-
tonic 2009). The museum hangs, suspended like a bridge over a body of water. Still,
in this case, the sparkling, greenish museum resembles the water, and one imagines –
on a hot day, in the blazing sun – the vast, empty concrete plaza feels not unlike Chile’s
Atacama Desert’ (Sodaro 2018: 121).
11 On the exterior walls of the building surrounding the Central Square, there are three
other artworks by Fernando Prats (Chile, 1967), Jorge Tacla (Chile 1958), and Luis
Camnitzer (Uruguay, 1937).
12 On the MMHR website, the museum visit is organized in ‘rooms’ as follows: (1) Truth
Commissions’ Reports, (2) Memorials, (3) Wall of the Disappeared, (4) Breakdown of
the Rule of Law, (5) Plan Z, (6) Chileans going into exile, (7) Referendum and 1980
188 Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade

Constitution, (8) Children’s Suffering, (9) Churches organize, (10) Women for Life,
(11) Absence and Memory, (12) Authoritarian Continuity or Democracy, (13) More than
Ever. Providing a video for every ‘room’, this online structure differs from the on-site
curatorial script described by Wolff (2016: 65), which counts 16 sections. The obsoles-
cence of the internet accounts for successive websites displaying diverse foci for the
MMHR narrative and mission. Its post-pandemic version (https://web.museodelamemo-
ria.cl/) provides an increased interactive experience for virtual visitors.
13 Arpilleras, are constructions of pictorial narratives in which bits of discarded cloth are
appliqued onto a burlap backing. Many were constructed in response to the atrocities
committed in Chile between 1973 and 1990.
14 Currently, the collection of the MMHR numbers approximately 213,995 documents,
44,739 photographs, 9,721 texts, 5,715 audio-visual pieces, 4,139 iconographic
pieces, 2,875 objects, and 487 arpilleras; less than 1% of which is exhibited (web.
museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-las-colecciones/).
15 The original phrasing in Spanish is relevant here because it introduces the Nunca Más
moto, raised by numerous organizations and movements fighting against the violations
of human rights worldwide. In Argentina, the National Commission of Missing People
(CONADEP) produced its final report Nunca Más (Never Again) to address the crimes
during the dictatorship (1976–1983).
16 Along with tackling the difficulties of traumatic memory, the MMHR was established
to safeguard the Human Rights Archives of Chile gathered through the Memory of the
World Project (Unesco 2003, webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220331171923/http://
www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/
register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-4/human-rights-
archive-of-chile).
17 According to the information provided by the MMHR on the programming of the theatre
January to March 2011.
18 The reference is enhanced by fact that the MMHR had opened the year prior to the pre-
miere of Villa + Discurso, and that Discurso, though a one-character play, is delivered
by the same three actresses performing in Villa, this time supposedly portraying Presi-
dent Bachelet, who commissioned the Museum.
19 See Bisnupriya Dutt’s contribution to this volume, pp. 138–154.
20 Calderón began his exploration of historical venues with his staging of Isidora Aguirre’s
Los que van quedando en el camino (Those Who Were Left by the Road). The production
was commissioned by Festival Teatro a Mil to commemorate the Bicentennial of the
Nation in 2010 and was showcased in the ex-Congress building in Santiago capital city
(see Grass 2019).
21 For the activities around the 10th anniversary of the Museum, visit: https://10.
museodelamemoria.cl/2020/10/14/museo-de-la-memoria/.
22 Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi has responsively added a section on testimonies of the
Estallido Social to its oral archive.
23 The main exhibition has not changed since the Museum’s inauguration in 2010. There
is a special space allocated to temporary exhibitions, but, being on a different floor,
it might easily escape the visitor’s trail, as usually happens with Alfredo Jaar’s piece
which is only accessible from outside the museum. The archive, and artistic and educa-
tional programs, nevertheless, have developed and increased.

Works Cited
Alvarado, Rodrigo (2014) ‘La Resentida: El triunfo de los punks del teatro chileno’, The Clinic,
2 April, https://www.theclinic.cl/2014/04/02/la-resentida-el-triunfo-de-los-punks-del-
teatro-chileno/.
 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights 189

Bachelet, Michelle (2007) ‘Cuenta Pública ante el Congreso Pleno’, https://www.camara.cl/

camara/doc/archivo_historico/21mayo_2007.pdf.
Butler, Shelley Ruth, and Erica Lehrer (eds) (2016) Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine
Exhibitions, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Grass, Milena (2016) ‘Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi: negociaciones de la memoria pues-
tas en acto’, Nuestra América 10: 149–162.
——— (2019) ‘The Construction of Material Referentiality in Chilean Theatre: Los que van
quedando en el camino (2010)’, in Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan (eds), The Rout-
ledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, London: Routledge, pp. 123–125.
Hernández, Paola S. (2013) ‘Remapping Memory Discourses: Villa+Discurso by Guillermo
Calderón’, South Central Review 30(3): 61–82.
——— (2021) Staging Lives in Latin American Theater. Bodies, Objects, Archives,
Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Ibarra, Alejandra (2021) Interview with authors, 9 September.
Salino, Brigitte (2014) ‘Marco Layera déboulonne la statue de Salvador Allende’, Le Monde,
19 July, https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2014/07/19/marco-layera-deboulonne-
la-statue-de-salvador-allende_4460015_3246.html.
Sodaro, Amy (2018) Exhibiting Atrocity. Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Vio-
lence, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Thompson, Jennifer Joan (2021) ‘Horizons of Impossibility: The Political Imperative and
the Dramaturgy of Guillermo Calderón’, Theatre Journal 73(2): 169–187.
Valdés, Adriana (n.d) La Geometría de la Conciencia, http://www.museodelamemoria.cl/
expos/la-geometria-de-la-conciencia.
Velázquez Marroni, Cintia (2011) ‘El museo memorial: un nuevo espécimen entre los mu-
seos de historia’, Intervención 2(3): 26–31.
Wolff Rojas, Tatiana (2016) ‘Pensamientos sobre la representación de la memoria traumática
en el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (MMDH)’, Interveción 7(13):
61–73.
11
ON THE MAKING OF THE ORATORIO
FOR THE DISAPPEARED
Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

In loving memory of Nadis Milena Londoño Cardona (1980–2022)

The art practice of Erika Diettes (1978–) has produced some of the most striking
contemporary artistic responses to the armed conflict in Colombia. Each of her three
latest projects – Río Abajo (2008, Drifting Away), Sudarios (2011, Shrouds) and
Relicarios (2011–2015, Reliquaries) – arose from a careful process of working with
relatives of the murdered and disappeared. These relationships with the relatives are
at the heart of her work; indeed, the art is not ‘about’ their experience, but arises from
the offer of her artistic sensibilities to them as a resource. In both Río Abajo and Reli-
carios, the families gifted Diettes objects – clothing, a favourite toy, ­photographs –
that were cherished reminders of their loved ones, and worked with her as she crafted
her responses, offering her beautiful artistic installations back to the families, the
primary audience, as she emphasises. For the former, the clothing was photographed
underwater and displayed as large glass panels, lit like stained glass to form a set of
images that people spontaneously began to treat like shrines, bringing candles to lay
before them (see cover of this book). In the latter, Diettes encased the gifted objects
in amber-coloured rubber tri­polymer cuboids, displaying them in a large grid laid
out on the floor so that visitors need to kneel to examine their contents. The first
exhibition of Relicarios was at the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín, where Diettes
kept the exhibition closed to all but the relatives for the first three days while she con-
ducted workshops with them, together with a team including psychologists, allowing
them to meet each other and to reflect on the process (Image 11.1).
In Sudarios, women who had witnessed horrific murders allowed Diettes the
privilege of making intimate and moving portraits of them; printed on floating silk
panels, they have been hung mostly in Catholic churches. Such projects demand
an ethical sensitivity and awareness that must be carried through from the initial

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-12
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 191

IMAGE 11.1 Installation of the Relicarios, Medellín (2018) With permission, archive

of the artist.

conversations through to the choice of location and curation of the final exhibi-
tions. Given the ethic of care embedded in her work, it was a great opportunity
to be able to speak to Diettes as she embarked on a new project, to follow her
decision-making process as she developed it.
The following conversation took place over a year, from July 2021 to May 2022.
Since we could not meet due to the Covid pandemic, we spoke across four Zoom
sessions. Diettes describes her wishes for the new project, a piece that, like her pre-
vious projects, is routed through her relationships with families who have suffered
profound loss due to the armed conflict, but it is also quite distinct from them. For
the first time, Diettes is making a site specific work, a little building, a chapel – not
a capella but an oratorio as she will explain – built on the hillside near La Union,
Antioquia, and filled with photographic images made with the families of the dis-
appeared, the dolientes, those left to live with their grief (Image 11.2).

I. July 2021
In our first conversation, Diettes starts by explaining that this project arose in
many ways from her previous project, Relicarios.

ED: Relicarios was such a powerful body of work. It was intense for all those years
of working. It was scary and painful for all. But it was a process that allowed
some of the families – not all of them, but a large number – the chance of some
192 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

IMAGE 11.2 Architect’s visualisation of the Oratorio on the hillside surrounded by the

rows of lavender. With the kind permission of Alejandro Vélez Restrepo.

sort of healing. Healing is a word I hesitate to use, but I believe that grief inau-
gurates a new state of living that will endure for the rest of your life. My father
died three years after Relicarios and so this new work has become connected
to my personal story. Intellectually, I tried not to let it blur the boundaries of
what I’m doing but somehow, and quite suddenly, I find I am a different artist.
One important part of the current project for me is to create a healing centre
here, alongside the Oratorio.
  You know the day after the opening of Relicarios – the very next morning
– I saw the Oratorio in my mind. I don’t want to be dramatic, but it was like a
vision! A little building made of glass with a high roof. And it was all foggy!
Here on the mountain, there is always fog early in the morning. So now, I am
following that vision, at a stage of art-making where I might not be able to
explain it with words, but I know what I’m doing. It was the same with Reli-
carios. No one understood what Relicarios was until they saw it in the museum
in Antioquia. But for seven years, I had been exploring and following my idea.

VB: How did you find the site for the Oratorio project?

ED: My friend, the sociologist Nadis Milena Londoño, who worked closely with
me on Relicarios, found it. When Relicarios ended, she knew I was sorry
to close my studio in La Unión, Antioquia, and leave. Then she sent me a
picture of this farm for sale. And I’ve been here, just outside La Unión, for
five months now, waking up at 5am every morning, feeling time. Being here
has changed my ideas about the Oratorio. The landscape – its contours, the
weather, the way the light falls and changes through the day – has an impact
on the site and my vision for it.
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 193

  With Relicarios we wanted to build something responding to all the

horrors of the conflict in Colombia, which includes not only forced dis-
appearances but also those who have been murdered, gang-raped, forcibly
displaced. The idea was to speak to Colombia as a whole. But one thing I
noticed from Relicarios was that it was the families of the disappeared who
stayed the longest in front of their relicarios. They visited and revisited the
exhibition.

VB: So the Oratorio is working only with families of the disappeared?

ED: Yes, the Oratorio will contain images from eighty families, printed on to glass.
I’m aiming for eighty families. I am asking them to choose objects for me to
photograph, but these objects are to represent not the absence as such, but
the story of the on-going conversation that is never-ending for the one who is
grieving [doliente], the mourner of the disappeared. For example, the image
of the two glasses relates to a story a mother told me. She told me that she
does not allow her surviving children to toast her on her birthday, because the
only toast she wants to receive is that from her disappeared son (Image 11.3).
So, the aim is to give physical space to an image of the relationship or to
what they are longing to see. So that it is not blocked or held endlessly in

IMAGE 11.3 Murano glass panel with printed image of two wine glasses. With permission
of the artist.
194 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

one’s mind, as a wish. When you see this image printed on the glass, you can
barely see it. It’s a ghostly image. But it has a space in the world. I mean, the
Oratorio could be a place relatives could come on that person’s birthday, for
example, to commemorate. Because life goes on, and I’m trying to figure
out how to help people feel less burdened with these thoughts and wishes.
Before Covid, we brought ten families here for the first of what I had hoped
would be three meetings. Because it’s disrespectful to just take the objects
from the families and to photograph them without doing that work with and
for them. We planted quartz in the foundations, and did yoga and gardening
together. With Nadis, and Dorcus Atyeno, who I met when I was in Uganda
with the Transformative Memory project,1 we facilitated workshops.
My rather ambitious idea was to create these meetings with healers from
different parts of the country that I have connections with, and from abroad,
because it’s wonderful to facilitate the dissemination of this practice. But of
course the pandemic has forced us to postpone these retreats.

VB: Was one of the outcomes of that retreat to make some first images for the
Oratorio?

ED: Yes. My hope is that these images might allow the spirit to rest because the
families find a path to translate something that is not translatable. One of the
women told us she is still serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her son
who’s been disappeared for the last 15 years. I think that’s devastating. I know
her anguish won’t disappear simply because she has an image in the Oratorio,
but if together we can conjure up this situation in the image, maybe through
this process she will come to understand something more about it. It is painful
for her and also, perhaps, one could say it’s not allowing that soul to rest.

VB: Maybe it won’t be any sort of solution but you have given her a gift, a
physical object outside the body, which gives her something external to
consider…

ED: Yes, it is made public but without the story. This is important because
I ­understand that through telling the story, she feels exposed and vulnerable.
Especially in the Colombian context where grief is a complicated peculiar
state, it is difficult for the relatives to live in peace. My decision not to pub-
lish the story or names alongside the image is to try to honour the pain of the
person that I have worked alongside.

VB: You are not trying to make people understand somebody else’s story and
their pain as if it was just a cerebral issue. Instead, you always acknowledge
the gaps and the distances and the limitations of, well, just being separate
human beings. You can never fully share the experience of another. Better
to always start from an acknowledgement of that failure, accept it while still
trying to give care, to be human among humans.
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 195

ED: Exactly. I mean of course I believe in the importance of naming, of not for-
getting, of remembering each story. But if you visit a site with 3,000 names
you are not really reading the names, you are looking at the idea, the lines,
at how overwhelming it is.

VB: Yes, I wrote a chapter about the memorial wall in El Parque de la Memoria
in Argentina where I was reflecting on precisely this issue2. The message is
scale, and it’s impressive but unsettling precisely because you don’t have
the ability to stand before each name, to consider each story. It was interest-
ing how as I heard more stories, those names would almost jump out at me
as I recognised them.

ED: It also feels right to follow my instinct not to tell the stories because I would
potentially put people in danger. We’re still in the midst of conflict here.
And we still don’t know exactly who, which names, we are trying to memo-
rialise. That’s why I just feel – the way you put it was beautiful – it is more
about recognising being human alongside other humans.

VB: How have you found the people whose images you are making? Are they
people you knew before, from the Relicarios project?

ED: I have a list of names through my social media and other routes, including
those who have seen Relicarios. It was not an open call because it would be
impossible to choose. I have to call and speak to each person one by one. They
are people who want to be part of the project because they have been in another
of my projects or they have seen it somehow. One is a woman who had told me
her story of forced displacement after a massacre for Relicarios but then she
‘confessed’ that she had held back another part of her story, as she was not sure
she could trust me. So now she wanted to tell me that story, about her brother’s
disappearance. She said, ‘I have to apologise to you’. It was such a beautiful
moment because there you understand the complexity of this country.

VB: Can you say something about the difference between the Relicarios being
shown in museum spaces and this project where you’re constructing a site-
specific piece?

ED: I am not an artist who works only in museums, but with Relicarios, because
of the fragility of the material and the lighting system required to be able
to light the auditorium, it is a body of work that needs that infrastructure. It
doesn’t need to be necessarily in a museum, but you need a controlled se-
cure space. And you have to be able to plug in those 165 lights! The light-
ing makes it feel sacred. With the Sudarios, because they are elevated,
the logistics are complicated, so you do need a team. Although Sudarios are
not so fragile so the transportation is easier. I can show them in a cathedral or
in a salon communal. This is the first time I have thought about this but while
196 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

Sudarios are portraits and Río Abajo displays images of the object, with Reli-
carios you are transporting the actual objects themselves. They are precious. I
think that’s the reason that it needs a museum. Also, the idea of it being shown
in the museum is, from the families’ perspective, very dignifying.

VB: Yes, there was a lovely quotation from one of the women who said to her
relicario ‘look where you are!’ as if to say ‘you will be remembered be-
cause, look! You are in a museum’.

ED: Exactly. It’s giving it a respectful, honouring place. I’m still cross that the
Museo Nacional didn’t show them and Banco de la República didn’t want
to show them because it was a chance to acknowledge the history of the
country. I mean, they should be in the most important museum ever! With
the Oratorio, because it is here in the landscape, on the mountainside, it is
quite different. I’ve been thinking of it as similar to visiting a cemetery – the
newer type of cemetery, the parque cementerio, not those in the city – where
one goes out into the countryside, where the concept is more to blend in,
dust to dust, etc. I imagine the structure, the Oratorio, in the middle of the
field. I have been deciding which plants to grow, wondering if I should
create a farm, if I should plant tomatoes, potatoes, and so on. But I have
decided to create a lavender field. I chose lavender because of all its spir-
itual and healing properties. I hope it will help the visitor arrive at a place
of calm, through the senses. You are not going to be healed, but I want this
body of work to be soothing. I have planted 500 lavender plants so far.

VB: Can you describe how you imagine the site will be when you enter it and the
Oratorio?

ED:
If you visited at dawn or dusk it would be beautiful, especially if the fog created
a pale background for the purple and the silver-white ashy colour of the laven-
der. What I want to do is to interrupt the landscape. Everything around here is
bright green, so by interrupting that colour scheme it will be as if this mountain
is in grief, in mourning. I’m also planting dark, black flowers so that when you
approach El Sosiego it appears as if the colours have been demurred. It is like a
parenthesis, to signal that something is different about this place.
  And if you visit the Oratorio at midday, you will be enchanted by
the beauty of the skies and overwhelmed by the potency of nature.
I hope that will allow you to connect nature with your own life, to rec-
ognise beauty and to connect with the joy of living. Very different from
visiting Relicarios, which takes you into a very intense space. Here,
the space will connect with you. We reshaped the mountainside so
you will see the Oratorio, then you walk through the lavender towards it
against a background of more lavender with the sky beyond.

VB: In this midday sun, how will the images in the Oratorio fare?
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 197

ED: They will fade, for sure. In fact, I can’t wait to see how they fade. I am seek-
ing to avoid being part of a mantra of ‘remember, remember, remember’ and
instead to allow time, to allow healing with a certain forgetting. It’s tricky to
explain. It’s not the kind of forgetting that doesn’t recognise or know what
happened, but the healing oblivion that comes with time. We cannot live in
suffering endlessly. Nobody deserves to live there.

VB: The phrase that comes to mind is a ‘tender forgetting’. A forgetting, but very
soft and gentle. Recently I was writing a review of a book from Peru3 and
the author was saying how often people become really angry, telling other
people ‘you have to remember’ or ‘you have to forget’. It becomes very
brittle. Your idea that actually there could be a gentle process to forgetting
resonates with his reflections.

ED:
Yes, memory within the socio-political context can be aggressive, a sort of
a ‘luchamos por la memoria’. We’re in a battle. But when you are working
with the victims, when you are listening to them, you wish for them to have
just one minute pain free. You know, just one second.
  A tender forgetting doesn’t mean you forget you had a son; obviously, it
doesn’t mean that you are not searching and looking for justice every day of
your life. But it means letting go of the horror, a resting in peace. My idea
is to create a space to facilitate that, to help the people who are mourning.
But it is not a tomb. There’s no way the images can replace a grave. That’s
why it’s important to me that the images retain a strong connection with the
life of the mourner and not to the disappeared person. Nor can or should art
adopt the role of the state. The solution cannot be that instead of a proper
state or judicial response to conflict, we make art. Art is not able to replace
law and art doesn’t occupy the place of law or the official.

VB: To return to the images that will be within the Oratorio, were they the result
of listening to people’s stories and talking to them? How did you choose
which image you would create to represent their story?

ED: The objects were brought by the families. I never choose the objects be-
cause I think they are what’s important for that person. Let me show you this
one. For this woman, it was important to include the letter and the drawings
of the daughters of the man who is disappeared. What she wants to do with
the Oratorio is to let him know that his daughters are okay. So this image
would be more effective for her. It is so important is that she feels connected
with this image and that she feels that the story as she told me was heard.
The whole purpose is for you to feel represented here, to see that your loved
one is being honoured, but in these cases of disappearance also to respond
to that constant conversation with a person who you don’t know if they are
really dead or not. With this image it’s as if the image is saying ‘look at the
girls, look at how I’m taking good care of them’. It’s in conversation.
198 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

II. October 2021

ED:
Clearly, the pandemic has interrupted our ways of working profoundly so
here I am, almost like a monk in my monastery – well, on my mountain! I
have realised that all the elements here are part of the Oratorio: the laven-
der, the sun, the rain, the hens, the locals passing by the land, the chicks who
were born here – we have six now! The Oratorio is not to be extrapolated
from these things. I don’t want to force it to reflect a theme or a theoretical
point about art, but instead to let it sit within life here. Letting it all pass by.
Its time is the time of seeds, sowing and planting, of the earth. It gives the
rhythm I’m living. I have cancelled all my exhibitions and I’m here effec-
tively living the time of the Oratorio.
  I’ve been thinking about your concept of ‘tender forgetting’. The Orato-
rio is a work that I want to have such a softness. There are so many images,
some truly awful, such as the bodies found recently on the coast, and so
many very hard processes for the victims and relatives of this conflict, talk-
ing to the JEP and so on.4 Oratorio is a work that is softer, that is given in a
spirit of kindness. It is for the mourner [doliente] and the visitor [especta-
dor]. And it is a work that lets the dead be dead.
  If we believe in the ability of art to help us look at reality, then we have to
look at that reality. But it is not about becoming journalists. Art is not jour-
nalism, searching for documents about reality. For me, the long-standing
critique of art – its aestheticisation of suffering, its ethics, etc. – neglects
the simple fact that this reality is seen, and moreover, when it enters the
worlds of creative people – artists, photographers, choreographers, people
who work with sound – that experience is inevitably aesthetic, for them, and
this reality is going to pass through their aesthetic sensibility.
  All of this project, each thing that is made, is for those who are mourning
[dolientes]. If we could we achieve that tender forgetting, this restful pause,
it would be to me the most magical thing in the world. Of course, you will
never absolutely forget. It is ridiculous to tell a mother ‘you should forget
it’. And it is very different from saying that as a whole society ‘we will
remember for you’. She knows that we are not going to remember the suf-
fering of her child each year in their specificity. Within the larger political
discourse you cannot propose forgetting when it’s right we must not forget.
But this work is in the sphere of emotion – it is about an individual, emo-
tional process – and not in the sphere of politics, debating with politicians.
  I hope we can ‘tenderly forget’. I love that formulation. To be over the in-
tensity of sorrow and achieve a softer memory. It’s not a political memory. It’s
not memory with a capital letters, set in stone, but is like a memory of a small
moment, a lovely moment. Such as ‘when I was little my father brought me
this bar of chocolate’, like those memories that can be retrieved with delight
and carry lighter emotion, rather than a painful memory of the absence. To
have memories that you can carry with you, that nourish you, rather than be-
ing hurtful. This would be the aim.
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 199

VB: I wanted to ask you some more about the images you are going to put on
to the glass. Why did you decide to use objects in this work, rather than the
portrait photography that you used for Sudarios? And what is the difference
between Río Abajo, that used clothing, or Relicarios, that also used objects,
and these images that you are creating for Oratorio?

ED: In Río Abajo, the photograph of an object that belonged to the disappeared per-
son conjured up something of the aura of the person. Their shirt, their clothes,
occupy the shape of their body, so there is something intimate about it. In Reli-
carios, the family chose the objects and the majority chose an object that had
belonged to the person, that represented them, such as the music he liked, or
the last present he gave his mother on Mother’s Day. In the case of the Orato-
rio, the representation that I would like to achieve relates more to the doliente
­themselves – the mourning person – and the conversation that they have main-
tained afterwards often for many years. The object conjures this desire for the
conversation they wish for, more than it conjures up the aura of the disappeared.

VB: So it’s a way to approach something impossible to represent, that is, grief
itself? Your way of working involves a lot of care, working with relatives.

ED:
Yes, it concerns their suspended grief. How to represent suspension? It’s a
delicate idea, because the object often represents hope. I try to find more
abstract modes of representation than a portrait might be. It is a form of
care. Because the family of the disappeared is not the disappeared him or
herself and I feel that people don’t deserve to be just the daughter of the as-
sassinated general, for example, or the mother of one of the missing. She is
a person, in spite of, or as well as, that fact.
  I will gift the families something from the Oratorio project. I still don’t know
how, what format it will take, but I know I will create something for them.

VB: As you did with Relicarios. It seems yours is a staged approach – you have
the work with the families, then an exhibition, and also you make a gift for
them, present it and take more images of them receiving the work, which
becomes in itself another body of work.

ED: Yes, but you know the images of the people receiving the gifts will never
be part of my exhibition. Maybe they will find their way into an academic
book or be available for academic reflection but they are not mine to exhibit.
That’s part of the care.

VB: So have you begun printing the images onto the glass, those that you have
already? Can you explain the printing process?

ED: They’re printed directly on to the glass, with a special printer. Obviously the
hard surface does not absorb the ink, so it needs another layer on top. It goes
200 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

into an oven with another pane of glass on top, so they are fused together. It
is murano glass so has these white swirls in it naturally. It’s both transparent
and, in places, white.
This image is one I really like. It’s an image of a boy holding a baby. But
it also has a photograph of the photo I took for Río Abajo. It’s incredible for
me that the things they brought to ‘speak’ about their son include not only
the photo they carry in their wallet, and the larger version of that photograph
that they have on the wall in their living room, but also the photo that I took
of that document several years ago. So, we are returning and creating layers
of images (Image 11.4).

VB: I’m thinking about the sun causing these images to fade. As they fade, you
will also see more of the landscape outside. I wonder if this is a metaphor
for this tender forgetting. It’s not that you are left with nothing because you
are left with the land, with where you are.

ED: Yes, it is a metaphor for life. The images will fade, and at different speeds,
depending on the ink. The magenta will be the last to fade. When the image
has gone, the family is probably at another point, emotionally. Nonetheless,

IMAGE 11.4 
Murano glass panel with printed image showing the photograph and
documentation of a young disappeared man. With permission of the artist.
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 201

the initial image will continue to exist, in the catalogue, or in the images we
take of it. So the perpetuity of the image will be assured in other ways. The
fading is part of this process and in the end the image on the glass will not
matter [so much as the issue of] how are you going to spend this life?

VB: So will you display all the images at different times, according to when they
are ready to go into the Oratorio?

ED: Yes. I have some already; we are discussing these and some from the project
in Uganda. The other panels will be grey glass. So the sunlight will only
pass through those with the images on them. It is not my idea to fill the
Oratorio once and then it is complete. The photographs are not a part of
the structure of the Oratorio, they are hanging within it but there is a mu-
seographical concept to the Oratorio too. The images will circulate. They
could be here, then go to Uganda, then maybe to the UK. And nor will the
Oratorio just have images from Colombia. It is about the pain of disappear-
ance, and people understand that is not particular to here.

VB: You take such care and time with your work, you are very patient but the
work is impatient in that sense that these people may not have time to wait
for peace, for the political process. We can’t wait for everything to be at
peace again before we deal with this healing process, with people’s mental
health. Yours is an ethic of accompaniment.

ED: Thank you, yes. Río Abajo was a process over four years. And the work and
contact with the dolientes has continued, it goes on. And I have learnt with
Sudarios, too, that my work won’t change anything, but I understand that
it can be part of a beautiful process. I can’t do anything heroic, you know.
But these things, they can make all the difference in the world to someone.
Like a nurse for someone in a terminal state, turning them if they need to
turn over, bringing a pillow. You can’t change anything radically but you
can make sure someone is comfortable. It is nothing scientific, just a gentle
attention, a softness, tranquil and quiet. Everyone needs some form of ac-
companiment. It’s why I like the image of the nurse.

III. January 2022

VB: You sent the photographs, thank you. I can see some lavender!

ED: Yes, this past week we cut the first harvest of the lavender, it’s an intoxicat-
ing smell! We have just the first row and we have sown more seeds to grow
more. I’m at a really nice point. For a long time, an art project is just an idea.
Sometimes you think it is an illusion. It only exists in my imagination, there
and in the render that I have produced with the architect. But everything
is still to come. Many practical and economic considerations too. But we
202 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

have marked out the rectangle where the Oratorio will be, and I hope that
by November we will have constructed the Oratorio. So, I am consider-
ing the landscape and attending to the lavender, but it is like working with
a photographic negative, working in reverse. As with the Relicarios, you
don’t know until you remove those pieces from the mould what they will
look like, so you are preparing, imagining and working backwards. It’s the
opposite of taking a portrait because when you’re photographing someone
your subject is to the fore [en primer plano]. And later you work on the
background. Here it is the reverse, working on the background and the foun-
dations, before I create the subject, the Oratorio.

VB: I’m trying to understand what that feels like for you.

ED: It is about holding fast to the same idea. The project is to sustain that idea,
like an exercise in meditation, while around me everything is almost the
same every day, evening, night. Of course, the weather and the seasons are
changing. But there is a sense of time that feels and is eternal. It is repetitive
and even monotonous. Having animals means you must get into a routine.
The hens announce the start of the day in the morning, and in the evening its
end. This time doesn’t have an end, it doesn’t have a conclusion.

VB: When you are walking in the lavender and imagining the chapel there, are you
imagining the image that you have produced with the architect? Can you say
something about the design of the chapel, why this particular design?

ED:
It was designed by the architect Alejandro Vélez Restrepo, around the remit
that I gave to him. It is a little house like a child would draw. Maybe it is not
a universal image exactly because I suppose some children would draw the
houses in whatever region they live in. But it is the most basic of shapes,
as if drawn with a pencil, a rectangle with a triangle on top. Of course, I
discussed with Alejandro, and since my background is Catholic, there is a
church-like quality to it.
  It contains something of my vision of the sacred, I suppose. I could have
chosen another form, of say a maloca,5 but that wouldn’t be true to my vi-
sion of something scared, which evidently has something Spanish about it
too. My main consideration was to have something narrow, with a roof as
high as we could make it.

VB: You are calling it the Oratorio, which is different from a chapel. In English
it is oratory. Can you explain the difference?

ED: Yes, the difference is that an oratory is not officially consecrated by the
church. It could be a chapel in a house, a place to pray. It is an intimate
space. Like in the airport, the little quiet space is called an oratorio. They
are ambiguous spaces, with no particular faith, no images – or several – and
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 203

several books including the Koran, the Bible. It’s a space of quiet, to pray or
meditate, to rest and relax. But it is not the same as a lounge!
  The design is important. The visitor enters and leaves the one passage
through the Oratorio. There won’t be any doors, it’s open. The ground will
be the grass, so that a little of Nature will enter the Oratorio, and the space
is not enclosed. It’s about the paradox of things that contain absence. It is a
space of shelter [resguardo] and a space of imagination.
  I don’t want visiting the Oratorio to be like visiting a monument, but
more like visiting a sacred place. Not a space of pilgrimage but a place of
rest [descanso], especially for people who don’t have that elsewhere. There
are not many places for dolientes. It is a spiritual space that is historical
without being a monument. The work I am doing now is to think about how
to create that atmosphere.

VB: Imagining the atmosphere and affect as well as the architecture that you
want this space to have. It’s quite delicate.

ED:
Maybe 20 years ago, I visited the piece by James Turrell at the Quaker Meet-
ing House near Houston.6 He works with light, he builds architecture so you
can focus on looking at the sky. He is an inspiration for me. What I am hoping
for here is something like the projects of land art, where you contemplate the
artwork but always within a specific context. I hope the Oratorio will be an
experience of light. And that it becomes part of life. If art doesn’t become a
part of life it has no sense. I take comfort in the fact that when people go to
the cemetery it is as a part of life. People visit with family, they have lunch
together, collect flowers, then they go together. With Relicarios, I remember
people left flowers in the exhibition, they would sing or perform a little cer-
emony. These were the things that people wanted to do in front of the artwork.
  There will be a second part to the project, of course, because the photographs
will also be printed for exhibitions beyond the Oratorio, and those images will
travel. Also, within the Oratorio, it will be possible to put new images up and
remove others, to rotate the images. What I had originally in mind [with the im-
ages] is not possible at the moment because of Covid. It would be irresponsible
to have groups of people brought together. And we can’t visit people’s houses
so we have to pause. I can’t just ask people to send me their objects.

VB: No, that is not the way you work at all. And the people you have been work-
ing with so far – who came to visit before Covid – have they been in touch
with you?

ED: Most of them follow me on Facebook or Twitter. Two of them have passed
away from Covid, and another two are very ill from that small group of
twelve people. What life is giving us is these challenges, and this extended
time. This could have been a 3-month project! Just to go slow is a test for me!
Once I get my booster, my third vaccine, I think I will be ready to start again.
204 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

May 2022
Erika has recently returned from a trip to Tucumán where she was invited to talk
to a group of families of the disappeared and visit the notorious Pozo de Vargas,
a deep well used as a clandestine burial site during the last military dictatorship
in Argentina, where at least 147 individuals were thrown. As usual, we start our
conversation measuring time by the lavender.

ED: The process here is going better than I expected. The mountain has given
me this incredible blossom of lavender. It’s that weird moment when the
idea that existed only in my mind starts happening in front of me. It’s a very
particular moment, it is incredible sense of joy but at the same time it is
peculiar, like you are stepping into your own mind. I can see so clearly now
where the Oratorio should be built.

VB: Is it in a different place from where you thought at first?

ES: Yes we have moved it. We had created a lake so that we could place the Orato-
rio where it would be reflected. But being here, working here, understanding,
how can I put this, the ‘spirit’ of the mountain, I felt it needed to be down in
the midst of the lavender field. So that it feels less exposed. It means there will
be more mystery as you will have to walk through the lavender to reach the
Oratorio. So it is adding these layers of ‘care’ to the construction.

VB: A sensory care. The look and smell of the lavender will have a calming effect.

ED: Exactly. And approaching, the first glimpses of the Oratorio will make you
consider whether you are ready to enter it or not. To go back to Relicarios,
when we showed it at the Museo Tadeo you had to walk up the staircase
to it, before entering the room where all the Relicarios were.7 But many
people just had to sit at the top of the stairs and wait for a while. I think the
same may happen here, walking through this beautiful field, being careful to
avoid stepping into the lavender, passing by the magnolia tree, will give you
time to adjust. It will give you a sense that you are in a safe place of shelter.

VB: How was your trip to Argentina?

ED: So interesting. I gave a talk and afterwards I was speaking with some of the
families there who are all relatives of the disappeared in Tucumán. There
was a lot of positive response and support for the idea of a space like this,
like the Oratorio, precisely because it was not described in terms of a mon-
ument. With a monument there is no space for talking about the duration of
waiting, the sense that these families are forever waiting. I also visited the
houses of five sets of relatives, and I made four images with them.8 In one,
a daughter and a niece of a disappeared man brought the banners that they
 On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared 205

had taken on marches, a shawl of their father’s, a mate [cup for drinking
mate], and a little tin [relicario] with the hair of his child in it. She didn’t
really know her father, so her relationship with him was the experience of
looking for him. Her image of her father is only as one of the disappeared.

VB: Did you feel a difference with Colombia there in Tucumán?

ED: Yes, of course. I used the word doliente in my talk there. I knew I was intro-
ducing something a bit different with that. In Colombia I started using the
word doliente because the way we speak here about victims doesn’t bring
together all those who grieve. Instead, we name the victims from the point
of view of the perpetrators. In terms of ‘victims of the FARC’, ‘victims of
state terror’, and so on. To use the term doliente is to see people from the
point of view of their humanity instead. But in Argentina they had hesita-
tions around the word. It relates somewhat to the different struggles.

VB: Yes, I understand. This word does not sit very well with the slogan ‘los lle-
varon con vida, los queremos con vida’. We want them with life. The idea is
that we will act as if they are still alive, and we demand that the state returns
them to us. That remains the focus, not the pain.

ED: Right, and the Oratorio’s focus is elsewhere, on the experience of having
lived with this absence. The one who searches [el buscador] is the focus.

VB: Who asked you to visit Tucumán, and the Pozo de Vargas?

ED: It was an archaeologist, Andrés Romano, who works as part of a team there.
They have been excavating the well for 20 years, and they have found the
remains of 117 people there, in fragments. There are people who did not
want to bury the fragments of bones, they say ‘my relative was not only
one bone, where is the rest?’ One of the team came across my website, and
saw the images of Río Abajo and Relicarios. His question to me was: what
should we do with the clothes we have found in the well? They are thinking
of making an artwork of some kind. There are three families who agreed to
lend me these clothes, but they are still held by the state as part of the on-
going judicial process, so actually they cannot give them to me at present.
This is for a future project. It will be very delicate, because the clothes are
very intimate, some are underwear, and because some have signs of torture.

VB: How was your visit to the well itself?

ED: It is 40m deep! I went down the shaft twice. The second time was with a
group of relatives, because the group CAMIT had an event going on.9 At the
conference some of the relatives asked me, ‘How was the visit to the well?’,
because they haven’t been. I said it isn’t as one imagines. The archaeologists
206 Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell

have spent 20 years in the well, scrapping and searching, looking for any-
thing that could help in the struggle for justice. It is so clean and the water’s
like glass! It is a site of truth, justice, and memory, though it is not open to the
public, because the judicial process is on-going. But they allow educational
visits and give access to the relatives of those involved in the trial.

VB: So at the Oratorio you will include the images that you made with the fami-
lies from Argentina with those from Colombia, and from Uganda too?

ED: Yes, but they won’t be arranged by country. Because this is not a place with
information to read about these situations, but it is to be a place about the
experience of waiting and hoping. I would like to give a place to and through
these intimate personal conversations, spiritually and metaphorically, as well
as literally, to give people a place. It happens to be here on a mountain in Co-
lombia, but it could have been in Tucumán, in Uganda, or elsewhere.

Notes
1 The Transformative Memory project website is: https://transformativememory.ubc.ca. It
is a knowledge-exchange network of scholars, artists, community-based organisations,
and policy makers engaged with the question of what makes memory transformative
of a sense of self, relations to others, legacies of violence, and connections to the land.
Members include memory workers based in several countries including Colombia and
Uganda.
2 See Chapter 5 in Vikki Bell (2014).
3 See José Carlos Agüero (2021) and Bell (2022).
4 JEP is the justice component of the Integrated System for Truth, Justice, Reparation, and
Non-Repetition (ISTJRNR) established by the 2016 Peace Agreement, signed between
the government and the FARC-EP on 24 November, 2016. The SJP is tasked with investi-
gating, clarifying, prosecuting, and punishing the most serious crimes committed over the
more than 50 years of armed conflict in Colombia, before 1 December 2016 (see https://
www.jep.gov.co/DocumentosJEPWP/2englishversion.pdf).
5 South American indigenous large communal hut.
6 Skyspace at Live Oak Friends Meeting House, Houston, Texas. A retracted skyspace in
the ceiling shows light changing as sun moves through the day and sets at night. Subtle
lighting within the meeting house complements and accentuates these changes. There are
a few restricted hours in which tourists can go into the meeting house.
7 Museo de Artes Visuales de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozado, Bogotá.
8 One of the families said they needed more time to think about which objects they wanted
to bring to be photographed on Erika’s next visit to Tucumán.
9 Colectivo de Arqueología, Memoria e Identidad de Tucumán (CAMIT).

Works Cited
Agüero, José Carlos (2021) The Surrendered: Reflections by A Son of Shining Path, Charles
Walker and Michael Lazzara (eds and trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bell, Vikki (2014) The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional
Argentina, London: Routledge.
——— (2022) Review of The Surrendered: Reflections by A Son of Shining Path Memory
Studies, 15(1): 250–254.
12
ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCE AND
SILENCED HISTORIES
Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas/Parallel
Mothers (2021)

Maria M. Delgado

There has been no shortage of films dealing with the legacy of Spain’s Civil War
(1936–1939) on the nation’s psyche.1 During the dictatorship of General Francisco
Franco (1939–1975), the Civil War could not be mentioned, but filmmakers forged
a language of silence, ellipses, indirect references, and metaphor to capture its
devastating impact both on the victors—as with Carlos Saura’s La caza/The Hunt
(1965)—and the vanquished—as with Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena/
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).2 The transition to democracy and the end of
censorship in 1977 brought both a graphic directness to coverage of the inequali-
ties that marked life for those who had been on the losing side and a new satirical
or farcical lens on the conflict. The former was exemplified by Vicente Aranda’s
adaptation of Juan Marsé’s 1973 novel, Si te dicen que caí/If They Tell You I Fell
(1989) and the latter by Fernando Trueba’s La niña de tus ojos/The Girl of Your
Eyes (1998), punctuating the sanctimonious tone of films like José Luis Sáenz de
Heredia’s Raza (1942) made during the dictatorship. The twenty-first century has
seen a more nuanced cinematographic language in the depiction of the Civil War’s
legacy: for example, David Trueba’s 2003 adaptation of Javier Cercas’ influen-
tial 2001 novel, Los soldados de Salamina/The Soldiers of Salamis, examined
the fractured and unreliable nature of memory and by association the process of
narration in the retelling of the Civil War; Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del
Fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) retold the vindictive genocide of the defeated left
through the merging of horror with a gothic fairy tale; Alberto Morais’ Las olas/
The Waves (2011) deployed the road movie trope to tackle the memory of the
Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp on a Republican prisoner who had been held
there in the aftermath of the War.
Pedro Almodóvar’s 23rd feature, Parallel Mothers, while dealing with the leg-
acy of the Civil War, differs from the films mentioned above in its focus on enforced

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-13
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
208 Maria M. Delgado

disappearances. Over 114,000 civilians are estimated to have been assassinated in

extrajudicial executions between 1936 and 1951 and tossed into unmarked graves
across the length and breadth of the nation.3 This invisible history has been the sub-
ject of key documentaries that have sought to give testimony to those searching for
the remains of disappeared persons, including but not exclusively family members.
They include Lesa Humanitat/Against Humanity (dir. Héctor Faver 2017), Bones
of Contention (dir. Andrea Weiss 2017), Pico Reja: la verdad que la tierra es-
conde/Pico Reja, the truth that the ground hides (dir. Arturo Andújar and Remedios
Malvárez 2021) and El silencio de los otros/The Silence of Others (dir. Almudena
Carracedo and Robert Bahar 2018), a film coproduced by El Deseo, the production
company that Almodóvar established with his elder brother Agustín in 1986. These
films differ in their focus. The Silence of Others, a Spanish–US coproduction, lay-
ers multiple testimonies in chronicling the human rights abuses that affected differ-
ent generations of Spaniards: a daughter who watched her mother taken away by
soldiers from the Nationalist faction (also known as the Rebel faction) during the
Civil War; a past political prisoner living on the same street has his former torturer;
a mother whose baby was taken from her at birth in a state endorsed trafficking
programme that removed new-born babies from those deemed to be ‘unsuitable’
mothers.4 Bones of Contention, a US production, uses playwright and poet Fed-
erico García Lorca’s assassination in the early stages of the Civil War to examine
the wider issue of LGBT+ persecution under the Franco regime. Pico Reja centres
on the closed mass grave from which the film takes its name in Seville’s cemetery,
where over 2,000 civilians are thought to lie. The opening of the grave offers a
means through which to both examine the untold histories and to seek, through
singer Rocío Márquez and poet Antonio Manuel Rodríguez, to provide an artistic
response to issues that the opening of the grave throws up—historical memory, the
narrativisation of the past, and the ethical responsibility of a society to bury the
dead with respect, whatever their political affiliations.5
Parallel Mothers lies at an intersection with these documentaries. Set between
2016 and 2019 and completed as Spain was debating a new Democratic Memory
Bill that came into force in October 2022, it has engaged with Lorca as a symbol
of the disappeared, referenced the role of the documentary in articulating instances
of enforced disappeared, and recognised the importance of artistic interventions in
the framing of a difficult past. In bringing theatre and testimony into dialogue, the
film challenges problematic nostalgia for Francoism embodied in the rise of the
far-right party Vox.6 Drawing on an extensive interview with Almodóvar (2021),
this chapter positions Parallel Mothers not only as a call for restorative justice, ex-
ploring how the unresolved issue of the country’s mass graves haunts the structures
of Spain’s democracy, but also, and equally important, what strategies Almodóvar
employs so that the narrative and objects featured in the film function to ‘unmute’
the inequalities and abuses perpetrated during the dictatorship as well as the en-
forced silence that accompanied these abuses.
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 209

Engaging with the Past

As Paul Julian Smith has persuasively argued, the comic irreverence of Almodó-
var’s cinema and its conceptualisation as ‘zany’ and/or ‘kitsch’ has arisen ‘from a
disrespect for a register coded as “feminine” and for those who identify with wom-
en’s concerns’ (2000: 2). This focus has allowed for a positioning of his oeuvre as
an embodiment of a new Spain putting to one side the concerns of the past, and
‘apolitical’ and ‘ahistorical’ in its themes (ibid.).7 Aligning myself with Smith and
Juan Carlos Ibáñez—the latter notes the reluctance of the Spanish media as much
as the foreign critics identified by Smith to recognise the presence of ‘a political
vein’ in Almodóvar’s films (Ibáñez 2013: 153)—I would argue that if you scratch
the glossy, colourful veneer of an Almodóvar film, a political standpoint is never
far from view. Social unrest rumbles in the background of La flor de mi secreto/
The Flower of My Secret (1995) as novelist Leo observes that Spain is ‘on the point
of exploding’. Carne trémula/Live Flesh’s (1997) pre-credit sequence, set in 1970,
harks back to a pre-democratic Madrid about to enter a state of emergency—slyly
aligning Spain’s centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party), who had come to
power in 1996, the year before the film was released, to the curtailing of freedom
perpetrated during the dictatorship. In La mala educación/Bad Education (2004) the
ways in which the paedophile priest is able to transition without impunity from
the dictatorship into the new democracy acknowledges a Transition that absorbed
the civil service, a military structure, and a political elite who had been able to
consolidate its power base over successive generations between 1939 and 1975.8
References to the disappeared feature in Volver (2006), Los abrazos rotos/Broken
Embraces (2009), La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011), Julieta (2016), and
Los amantes pasajeros/ I’m So Excited! (2013).9 Parallel Mothers, however, as
Almodóvar has acknowledged on repeated occasions, is his most overtly political
film to date (e.g., Almodóvar 2021; Sánchez 2021a) and differs from these earlier
works in its candid treatment of what the mass graves mean for the process of deal-
ing with a traumatic past. Spain is often positioned as second only to Cambodia in
terms of the number of forcibly disappeared persons lying in unmarked graves,10
part of what anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz has termed ‘a funerary apartheid’
that extolled the Nationalist dead and consigned the Republican dead to oblivion
(2019: S64):

People don’t know this. Remembering our past and remembering especially the
darkest parts of our past […] this is our present, because 100,000 disappeared
persons are still in mass graves—it’s important for every generation in Spain,
but especially the younger ones who are not haunted by the phantoms of the
past. I had wanted to tackle the issue of the mass graves in a film for some time
but hadn’t found the right script until Parallel Mothers.
(Almodóvar 2021)
210 Maria M. Delgado

In conceiving a forensic archaeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), as one of the film’s

core characters, Almodóvar recognises the efforts made by local historical memory
associations, funded through ad hoc grants and on-the-ground fundraising, to over-
see the disinterment of the country’s mass graves. The viewer first sees Arturo as
photographer Janis (Penélope Cruz) captures his portrait for a magazine feature.
Just as Janis doesn’t want Arturo appearing with a Hamlet-esque skull in hand for
the photoshoot—‘it’s too obvious’ she states—so Almodóvar eschews a social real-
ist treatment of the subject matter. Instead, historical memory intersects with motifs
of surrogate motherhood and it is ‘unresolved issues’ that Almodóvar (2021) iden-
tifies as the core theme running through the different narrative strands. The result is
a complex melodrama revolving around the chance encounter of two single women
about to give birth in a Madrid hospital, 40-year-old Janis and teenage Ana (Milena
Smit), with far-reaching consequences for both the women and their offspring.
Janis describes her pregnancy as an accident, one of many that feature as plot
mechanisms in the film. Accidents of fate are, however, as core to Almodóvar’s
films as letters are to Ibsen plays; mechanisms through which characters are tried
and tested. Janis and Ana both give birth to the fast and furious strings of Alberto
Iglesias’s score, the coordinated and yellow, green, and purple décor lending a
particular synergy to their meeting: ‘these unreal colours, you’d never find them in
a Spanish hospital. I just don’t like white walls’, Almodóvar acknowledges, ‘they
could appear aggressive but I think they are calming colours. I wanted the [hospital]
room to have the same colour scheme as the rest of the film’ (2021). Motherhood
and memory are thus not disconnected in the film as some critics have claimed,11
but rather part of an interconnected web of references recognising the role of blood
relatives—daughters, sons, nephews, nieces, siblings, grandchildren—­ in cam-
paigning and fundraising through memory associations—as Janis does—for their
relatives’ disinterment. Almodóvar has acknowledged that in the construction of
Janis’s family history, he was inspired in a case he had read about of a ten-year-old
girl whose father had been forcibly taken by falangists to dig his own grave and that
of other Republican comrades:

I chose for that girl to have a very clear memory of the moment where she sees
her father for the last time, and I made her the grandmother. That was the means
through which Janis assumes the legacy of looking for her great-grandfather.
(cited in Ponga 2021)

Janis’s search can thus be seen as an embodiment of Marianne Hirsch’s idea

of postmemory – articulating the relationship that the ‘generation after’ (or
postgeneration(s)) have to the cultural trauma of their parents and grandparents
(Hirsch 2012). It is a relationship mediated not by direct recall memory but by ar-
tefacts, objects, and narrated memories shaped by photographic images where the
indexical and the symbolic merge to powerful effect (ibid.).
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 211

Enforced Disappearance and the Spanish Civil War: Addressing

Institutionalised Silence
The c.200,000 executions, largely extra-judicial or conducted after dubious legal
hearings, that took place in Spain between 1936 and 1945 are part of a systematic
annihilation of the left who had supported Spain’s Second Republic (1931–1939)
(Preston 2012). Enforced disappearance remained—alongside other forms of
endorsed abuse including police brutality, torture, the withdrawal of licenses to
practice of lawyers, teachers, doctors and engineers, and gendered and sexual
repression—a feature of the early Franco years, part of a limpieza social (social
cleansing) perpetrated by the regime to eradicate those viewed as enemies of the
state (Babiano et al. 2017; Preston 2012: 428–517). Historian Jorge Marco deline-
ates the policies—both administrative and discursive—introduced by Francoism
to conceal extrajudicial acts: ‘(1) Not recording the names of the victims, (2)
recording some of them but covering up the real cause of death, (3) “disappear-
ance” of people and (4) burial in mass graves’ (2017: 157). The policies were
facilitated by the destruction of official documents relating to these crimes and
the accumulation of documents relating to human rights perpetrated by los rojos
(those with Republication or left-wing affiliations) (ibid.). An official history was
fabricated to legitimise the coup d’état and situate the defence of the Republic and
its values as a crime—Franco’s Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suner,
termed it ‘back to front justice’ (Preston 2012: 473). The result was a silencing
of the purges committed against those who had supported the Second Republic
and high-profile and consistent commemorations of those who had died from the
Nationalist faction. The Valley of the Fallen, built between 1940 and 1959 us-
ing 20,000 Republican prisoners, became a public monument to the National-
ist dead, a mausoleum for Franco—buried there with high pomp and ceremony
in 1975—and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the fascist Falange
Española executed by the Republicans in 1936 whose remains were transferred
there in 1959. The visibility of the grand public memorials held annually on 20
November—the anniversary of both Franco and Primo de Rivera’s deaths—to
commemorate the Nationalist dead stood in stark contrast to the culture of silence
surrounding the Republican dead, a silence that Almodóvar addresses in the plot-
lines of Parallel Mothers:

The silence of the Franco era was a silence born of fear, a fear that families—
parents and grandparents—had of speaking out, and it became a pathological
fear. In our houses nobody spoke of the War. A number of generations have
therefore grown up without even a minimal understanding of the realities of the
War and the post-War years. When UN rapporteur [Pablo de Greiff] arrived in
2014 to survey what was happening in relation to Francoist crimes, they were
surprised by the fact that it was the great-grandchildren’s generation who were
demanding the exhumation of these unmarked graves. They thought too much
212 Maria M. Delgado

time had elapsed. There is an explanation for what surprised them: Spanish so-
ciety had been rendered mute and terrified for many decades, for longer than the
regime itself.12
(Almodóvar 2021)

By structuring Parallel Mothers through the perspective of a generation, like Janis,

born in democracy and calling for the recovery of the disappeared, Almodóvar, as
Spain’s most internationally renowned living filmmaker,13 affords an international
platform for this timely issue: ‘Once the great-grandchildren’s generation disap-
pear, I’m not sure the great-great-grand-children will have the same interest in dis-
interring the graves, that’s why it’s such an urgent issue’ (2021). Janis’s fortuitous
encounter with Arturo in the film’s opening sequence provides a means through
which the viewer learns of the forced disappearance of her own great-grandfather,
Antonio, one of a cluster of ten men from her village who were brutally abducted
in the early chaotic days of the Civil War.

The photograph can capture something the eye doesn’t see […]. I also felt it was
very powerful, dramatically, that Janis’s great-grandfather had photographed
the people he would end up dying alongside […]. The idea of the photograph as
witness not only to what happened but to what was hidden. [Argentinian author
Julio] Cortázar of course captured this brilliantly in the story that Antonioni
brought to the cinema: Blow Up.
(Almodóvar 2021)

In methodically sharing with Arturo the precise circumstances of his disappear-

ance, Janis gives voice to the testimony of her grandmother and great-grandmother
who witnessed the disappearance—testimony that could not be uttered for fear of
reprisals. Almodóvar deploys black and white portraits of men, women and in-
fants taken by Spanish photographer Virxilio Viéitez (1930–2008) in the 1950s and
1960s to give form to the disappeared. These are the photographs that Janis shows
Arturo in an early sequence, photographs that are attributed in the film’s narrative
to her great-grandfather: the names of the dead spoken aloud by Janis as she clicks
on her mouse to bring up each image on her computer, each life corresponding to
a missing past. Almodóvar encountered these photographs, many taken for identity
cards issued by dictatorship from 1951 to facilitate surveillance and control the
population, during an exhibition of Viéitez’s work. This archival material inter-
spersed through the fictional diegesis of the film (See Image 12.1) serves both to
point to the affective quality of the photograph but also to point to the instability
of the image and the potential for manipulation—a black market in identify cards
operated under the regime, run by local Party officials (Richards 1998: 139). The
photograph therefore reframed in a way that both acknowledges its past but also as
recognises its role within memory politics. The act of sharing the photographs with
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 213

IMAGE 12.1 Relatives walk to the excavation of the grave in Parallel Mothers. Photo-
graph courtesy of El Deseo, S.A., S.L.U.

Arturo becomes a process of remembrance—a way of opening up an arrested past

that can be viewed repeatedly and refuses erasure (Benjamin 2015), a process of
inscribing ‘grievability as a precondition of a knowable human life—to be haunted
is precisely to apprehend that life before precisely knowing it’ (Butler 2010: 98).
Allusions to Spain’s disappeared have, as I noted earlier in the chapter (p. 209),
featured in Almodóvar’s work since Volver (2006). Almodóvar’s participation in
the short 2010 documentary project, Cultura contra la impunidad/Culture Against
Impunity, demonstrates a public alignment with ideas of restorative justice at a time
when he was beginning work on the screenplay of Parallel Mothers. His voicing
of Virgilio Leret Ruiz, the first military officer assassinated for refusing to support
the Rebel insurrection on 18 July 1936, was part of a project involving 15 actors,
including Javier Bardem and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón,14 who ghost the testimony of
those who were unjustly killed or disappeared during the Civil War. ‘I don’t have
a disappeared person in my family but I feel close to these 100,000 families who
continue to search for their relatives to bury them with dignity. It’s not a political
question but simply a human one’ (Almodóvar, cited in Anon 2010).
Parallel Mothers also engages with this ethical issue of recognising the right to
dignified funerary rites for those who had supported the Republican cause. Janis
and Arturo candidly discuss the limitations of the Law of Historical Memory in-
troduced by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government in 2007 [Ley
56/2007] which, among other things, advocated the removal of all symbols and
monuments promoting the military rebellion, Franco, or his dictatorship from pub-
lic squares and streets, and assisted with the search for disappeared persons with-
out establishing a body or a legal framework to oversee such a process.15 Spain’s
214 Maria M. Delgado

former Popular Party Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a vocal opponent of the 2007
Law, is vilified by Janis and Arturo as they leave the photoshoot for his obsti-
nate position in refusing a single euro of state funding for the exhumation of mass
graves. Parallel Mothers inscribes the right to excavation and burial as core to
Spain’s democracy, with Janis functioning as a contemporary Antigone arguing for
the grievability of those discarded by the regime in mass graves.
In the early 1980s, as the structures of a new democracy were taking shape,
Almodóvar was part of la movida madrileña (literally ‘the Madrid scene’), a
counter-­cultural movement that attempted to banish the grey years of the Franco
regime by looking to the future:

We were too busy celebrating our new freedom to think about the mass graves.
In 1978, I wanted to have fun and speak in my films about a new Spain that was
nothing like the old one. La movida wasn’t a movement, it was a generation, a
group of people who found each other, discovering who they were without fear;
a number of us weren’t that young and remembered what fascism has been like.
And while Pepi, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passions were pop films, they were
also my way of avenging myself against Franco—refusing to acknowledge not
only his existence but even the shadow of his existence. I didn’t think about the
reach that the Amnesty Law [Ley 46/1977, granting amnesty to political prison-
ers convicted by Francoist laws and immunity for those who had perpetrated
crimes in the name of the regime] might have.
(Almodóvar 2021)

The Amnesty Law was rooted in compromise—devising a means of releasing po-

litical prisoners while preventing any ways of legally investigating human rights
abuses. Part of a project of national reconciliation, the Law was focused not on
transitional justice but rather on consolidating a new future for Spain as a mod-
ern nation within the European community—Spain joined the EU in 1986—and
a framing of the war as a fratricidal conflict which, as Jorge Marco observes, ‘put
victims on an equal footing with their executioners’ (2017: 159)—effacing the dic-
tatorship’s abuses of those who had supported the Republic and its values.16 Both
the centre-right Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratically elected Prime Min-
ister since the Second Republic (1976–1981), and the Socialist Felipe González
(1982–1996) agreed on the need to promote a unified Spain by side-lining the Civil
War and the dictatorship—what is now referred to as the Pact of Silence or Pact
of Forgetting. In 2018, González continued to stand by his decision to not open
debate on the Pact of Silence, following a request by General Manuel Gutiérrez
Mellado, who had challenged Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero and his fellow
insurrectionists on the night of the attempted military coup of 23 February 1981, to
wait until the major players in the Civil War had died:

The exact phrase used by the general, a man whose service to his country was
exemplary, was the following: ‘Under the ashes there is fire.’ What’s rarely
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 215

discussed in that, during my presidency, the fiftieth anniversary of the start and
finish of the Civil War took place. There were colloquiums, university lectures
and all of that was correct […]. There was not a collective forgetfulness as is
sometimes claimed to have been the case but a moving on from the past. Any-
thing else would have been a settling of scores.
(cited in Wheeler 2018)

Almodóvar recognises the complexities of the transition—often presented as a suc-

cess in comparison to the conflict and human rights abuses that marked the break-
up of the former Yugoslavia (Gunther et al. 2004; Gurrutxaga Abad 2005)—but the
implications of the political decisions made in the 1980s haunt Parallel Mothers:

The [Amnesty] Law and the first steps towards democracy condemned those
who had been condemned to non-existence by the regime to be forgotten for
a second time. It’s sad to think about it but that is effectively what happened.
The left [at the time] was a pragmatic left and did what it could, but they were
also afraid which wasn’t unfounded. Three years later, there was an attempted
military coup. The UCD, the first democratic government, had Francoists and
there were still Francoists in institutions. But it’s also true that Spain lived and
took its first steps in a bloodless transition to democracy and that’s unusual. My
frustration with the left is that when they had an absolute majority, in the mid-
1980s, and should have dealt with the issue of the mass graves, the Socialist
Party didn’t do it.
(Almodóvar 2021)

Forty years on, with the rise of Vox showing that sociological Francoism has not
been entirely dislodged, Almodóvar deploys a forensic approach to narrating the
conditions of enforced disappearance. Janis shares with Arturo the precise date
and details of her grandfather’s abduction in the film’s opening section and she
returns to his disappearance in the closing sequences, informing Ana that he was
made to dig his own grave. The film slows down as Janis and Arturo head to her
family’s village and the process of excavating the grave commences: Almodóvar
approaches the film’s final 15 minutes ‘like a documentary. The narration softens
and the film has a certain stillness in this epilogue. It’s as if the subject matter calls
for this shift’ (2021). The film moves away from the fiction embodied in the film’s
melodramatic plot to the physical remains of a difficult past—the objects and bones
of the disappeared. The families of the disappeared describe the final moments
before their relatives were taken away in detail and the fear of reprisals that kept
them silent for so long. Julieta Serrano excels as the elderly Brígida, hoping to re-
main alive long enough to see her disappeared father—abducted when she was four
months old—buried alongside her mother. Herminia and her sister speak of their
grandfather from details shared by their grandmother: an engraved wedding ring, a
glass eye, the wooden clogs he was wearing. Janis and Arturo listen; Arturo takes
notes; Janis obtains DNA samples. The camera work invites the viewer to listen to
216 Maria M. Delgado

the testimony alongside Janis and Arturo and to then follow the relatives as they
walk to the grave to silently observe the excavation (Image 12.1).
Almodóvar’s research in preparing the film incorporated press materials, photo-
graphic evidence, the 2014 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of
truth, justice reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence,17 testimonials delineating
instances of enforced disappearance, and interviews with Emilio Silva, co-founder
of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) in 2000, and the
forensic anthropologist Francisco Exteberria, a leading specialist in the excavation of
mass graves (Almodóvar 2021; Ponga 2021). As such, practically all the elements in
the final section of the film are based on the findings of this research. The rattle found
in the grave helps to identify Brígida’s father; the glass eye and clogs distinguish
Herminia’s grandfather. These personal objects and identifiers challenge the mislead-
ing narratives constructed by the regime and its apologists; they contribute to naming
and identifying each corpse, what Ferrándiz pinpoints as core components of ‘an
eye-catching bare bones forensic scenography’ of maimed human remains that carry
the evidence of erased abuses: ammunition shells; tying ropes and wires; blindfolds;
quicklime—all part of ‘an evidence-driven interpretative framework where forensic
medicine becomes the crucial memory science and the crime scene’ (2019: S68).
Almodóvar’s camera silently observes the forensic archaeological team at work
in the grave as they gently dust the remains and identify personal possessions that
aid with identification. The viewer is a witness to this process—shown both the
family members holding up the photographs of their disappeared relatives as they
visit the excavation site and point of view panning shots of the corpses in the grave.
Toddler Cecilia—who has inherited the name of her great-grandmother—looks
down into the grave as the past, the present, and the future intertwine. In the film’s
closing moments, the viewer observes the contents of the mass grave from above—
one of Almodóvar’s most distinctive camera positions. After the human remains
have been taken to the laboratory for DNA testing, the film shows family members
and those who have excavated the grave assume the position in which they found
the victims on the grave (Image 12.3): ‘When Exteberria showed me the photos I
thought this a beautiful cinematic image. It’s a homage to the dead who had lain in
this place until then’ (Almodóvar 2021).
As an epilogue, Almodóvar then deploys a quote from Eduardo Galeano’s 1998
non-fiction reflections on dictatorship, trauma, justice, and colonialism, Patas ar-
riba. La escuela del mundo al revés (published in English as Upside Down: A
Primer for the Looking-glass World).

No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it. No matter how much they
break it. No matter how much they lie about it. Human history refuses to shut
its mouth.

Galeano’s words open Raúl Quirós Molina’s 2015 verbatim play, El pan y la sal/ The
Bread and the Salt, crafted from transcripts of Judge Baltasar Garzón trial at Spain’s
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 217

IMAGES 12.2 AND 12.3 The excavation of the grave and the aftermath of the excavation
as relatives and those involved in the excavation assume the
position in which they found the victims in the grave. Photo-
graphs courtesy of El Deseo, S.A., S.L.U.

Supreme Court in 2012 for violating the Amnesty Law through his preliminary
investigation into the enforced disappearance of 114,266 persons between 1936
and 1951. I have written elsewhere on how theatre here offers a way of retrying
the case in the public domain, an alternative sphere for justice, with the audience
as juror reaching conclusions and judgement based on the testimony they hear
(Delgado 2019b). Almodóvar saw the play on its first outing at Madrid’s Teatro del
Barrio in 2015 and was struck by the simplicity of a scenography that focused the
audience’s attention on the delivery of the testimony at the trial by relatives of the
218 Maria M. Delgado

disappeared. In The Bread and the Salt, the testimony was read out by actors framed
by a back wall made up of photographs of the disappeared:

It was very emotional. […At one point] there was a scene in Parallel Moth-
ers where Arturo and Janis met at a performance of the play. I wanted to give
testimony to that civic act [of giving evidence] but I wrote it and rewrote it and
condensed it and, in the end, there was a reason why I had to remove it. Once
you put actors in the roles of the victims or families of the victims, it was so
powerful that it annulled the scenes around it, and almost destabilised the script.
(Almodóvar 2021)

Closing Parallel Mothers with Galeano’s words both inscribes the testimony re-
counted by relatives of the disappeared at Garzón’s trial and recognises the broader
role that the film and works like The Bread and the Salt might have in giving
voice to histories of enforced disappeared, inscribing them into a public or ‘offi-
cial’ domain that refused to recognise them for so long. Equally important, ending
Parallel Mothers with Galeano’s words, referencing his meditation on a military
dictatorship which imprisoned him in Uruguay, also functions as a means of ac-
knowledging wider global histories of enforced disappearance and transnational
human rights processes. Parallel Mothers can therefore be read within a complex
transnational lineage of cultural works countering the institutional silence that so
often surrounds enforced disappearance.

Federico García Lorca, Theatre, Motherhood, and Memory

In August 1936, Federico García Lorca, arguably Spain’s most important twentieth-
century playwright and poet, was murdered by Nationalist forces on the outskirts of
Granada, the city of his birth. His body, thought to lie in a mass grave to the north
of the city, has never been found.18 His iconic position—a queer artist who places
the lived experiences of women at the core of his work—evidently suggests an as-
sociation with Almodóvar who has referenced Lorca’s ‘brilliant plays’ in All About
My Mother (1999) and Volver (Almodóvar 2021). Crucially in Parallel Mothers,
however, Lorca enjoys a more central role, with Almodóvar effectively harnessing
Lorca’s ongoing status as the symbol of Spain’s Civil War disappeared—‘the most
famous, the most universal disappeared person in the world’—to potent effect.

That was my main reason [for drawing on Lorca] but I was always surprised
that at the height of the dictatorship, Francoist artists continued staging works
by this disappeared person. I have always wondered what such right-wing artists
must have felt doing this.
(ibid.)

The deployment of Lorca’s 1935 drama, Doña Rosita la soltera/Doña Rosita the
Spinster—the role that brings Teresa, Ana’s mother, the success she craves—is
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 219

significant here: ‘The conservative mother says that she is apolitical—in Spain it
means that you are conservative—but she finds success and the turning point of her
career in this Lorca play’ (Almodóvar 2021). Doña Rosita was the last play Lorca
premiered in Spain before the outbreak of the Civil War and it revolves around
the social stigmatisation of unmarried women. This is a clear contrast with Janis’s
lived experience—she proudly locates herself as part of a lineage of women for
whom single parenting has proved empowering. Teresa rehearses one of Rosita’s
most famous speeches on the sombre stage of Madrid’s iconic Abadía theatre—a
former church repurposed as a site for innovative performance in 1992—longing
to escape as she is designated ‘an old maid’ by polite Granada society. It is a mono-
logue ‘on the passing of time’, which Almodóvar confesses, ‘I strongly identify
with’ (2021). Lorca may have centred his plays on women who see no possibility of
emotional fulfilment outside the framework of heterosexual love and marriage but,
86 years on, Almodóvar presents a very different picture. Teresa left her husband to
pursue an acting career, Janis’s close friend Elena edits a successful women’s mag-
azine, and Janis and Ana both pursue single motherhood, albeit with the benefits of
economic security. Almodóvar’s reflections on my drawing parallels between his
own rich women characters and Lorca’s female-centred dramaturgy are perhaps
significant here: ‘Perhaps it’s because they [women] were condemned to be silent
for centuries, so they create inside them a much richer world’ (2006).
Parallel Mothers thus functions as a space for celebrating the tenacity, adapt-
ability, and enterprise of these female characters, as well as their commitment to se-
curing restorative justice. It is the women of Janis’s village that hold the testimonial
evidence relating to their disappeared relatives. Janis’s sporting of a ‘We should all
be feminist’ t-shirt as she peels potatoes in her bright kitchen speaks to the wel-
come visibility of gender politics since the case of la manada (the wolfpack)—the
five friends who brutally raped a young woman at the San Fermín celebrations in
Pamplona in 2016, filming the act on a mobile phone. Sparking a national debate
on Spain’s antiquated rape laws, the case is referenced both in Dolor y gloria/Pain
and Glory (2019) and through the details of the sexual assault that Ana shares with
Janis. Almodóvar has referenced the case and its implications as

an important moment for Spain […]. When we were searching for locations [in
Pain and Glory], I found the graffiti mural in Vallecas [southern Madrid] that
referred to the case of la manada and when we went back to shoot three months
later it was gone so we created it as it was.
(Almodóvar 2019)

He concurs that in Parallel Mothers too, the references to the case position the film
at a particular moment in time [2016–2019] with Janis’s t-shirt affirming her com-
mitment to that cause.
The film also offers a space for remembrance and mourning. Janis’s mother
died, like Janis Joplin after whom Janis is named, of an overdose in the early 1980s,
the years when Almodóvar was forging a countercultural cinema of brash colours
220 Maria M. Delgado

and hedonistic role play. The bold colours are still in play here—from his beloved
red on the kitchen cabinets and photo frames of Janis’s bright apartment, and em-
bodied in items of the clothing that bind Ana, Elena, Cecilia, and Janis together—
only now there is room for a sombre quality that was absent from the Manchegan
filmmaker’s early work. ‘My films are more austere from Julieta. There’s more
focus on character, on the psychology of character and on the word. But there’s still
a love of colour, and of the baroque’ (Almodóvar 2019).
The fusion of colours in Janis’s home, from the aqua walls to the burned or-
ange sheets and fruit bowls, presents an easy coexistence of different traditions
and aesthetics. It is a veritable contrast to Teresa’s antiseptic apartment and fur-
ther highlights the contrasting portrait of motherhood that each woman presents,
­Teresa confessing to Janis at one point that she doesn’t have a maternal instinct.
She goes on to leave her grieving daughter home alone following baby Anita’s
sudden cot death to play junkie mother Mary Tyrone on tour in Eugene O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night. Janis, a surrogate mother to Ana, herself had a sur-
rogate mother—her grandmother Cecilia—her own mother as absent as Teresa in
Ana’s childhood. Rossy de Palma’s warm, welcoming Elena, editor of the maga-
zine, ­Mujer ahora (Women Now), is a further motherly figure—a nurturing role
highlighted as she bathes baby Cecilia and offers to ferry water and coffee to the
team exhuming the mass grave in which Janis’s great-grandfather is buried.
Janis’s patio—a nod to Carmen Maura’s rooftop terrace in Mujeres al borde
de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)—
boasts a lemon tree and plants that evoke those in the village where she grew up,
which she returns to in the film’s final section. Ana may accuse Janis of obsession
with her great-grandfather’s grave, but Janis’s cultural heritage is as much rooted
in music—sharing Janis Joplin’s Summertime with Ana the first time they make
love—and food as in her family’s lived history. The recipe for Spanish omelette
that Janis shares with Ana observes the importance of cutting the potatoes to a
certain thickness; Almodóvar’s camera looking down at the potatoes sizzling in the
pan of hot oil. Arturo and Janis share a glass of wine with jamón—a cured ham leg
rests on the kitchen counter alongside a Manchego cheese—as they converse about
Janis’s family history early in the film. Janis’s kitchen is a space of nourishment.
Janis is shown chopping vegetables and enjoying a breakfast of pan con tomate
(fresh tomato on bread). Recurring fish motifs feature on artworks and a framed
painting by Julio Romero de Torres shows one woman holding out a bowl of fruit
to another. Indeed, Parallel Mothers shows cultural heritage to be a combination
of all these elements.

Silences, Secrets, and Lies

While Janis’s kitchen is positioned as a space of domesticity and of motherhood, it
equally operates as the space for the film’s most traumatic confrontations, a space
where the public and private spheres intersect. Over dinner, Ana articulates the
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 221

position of the right when she accuses Janis of being ‘obsessed with the grave’,
advocating instead for a position of ‘looking to the future; the rest is there just to
open old wounds’. Janis angrily challenges her: ‘It’s about time you knew what
country you’re living in’. ‘All countries have their issues but the relationship Spain
has to the Civil War and its own past is absolutely anomalous’, Almodóvar (2021)
elucidates,

the Spanish don’t like to be reminded of the worst part of our past. We don’t
have a good relationship to the past and that isn’t good. Until we resolve the
issue of the country’s mass graves, we won’t be able to close the chapter of the
Spanish Civil War. It’s as serious and as simple as that.

Janis and Ana represent the polarised positions of the two Spains: one calling for
state responsibility for the exhumation of the country’s mass graves so that rela-
tives can bury their dead with dignity and respect; the other promoting a continued
amnesia, a refusal to engage with the complexities and injustices of a history that
has been problematically written to erase the inequalities of the post–Civil War
years. It was only in 2019 that Franco’s remains were removed from the Valley
of the Fallen to a Madrid cemetery. Plans for this polemical site to be repurposed
as part of Spain’s Democratic Memory Law have seen it renamed the Valley of
Cuelgamuros.19 Almodóvar has acknowledged that the Law represents ‘a huge de-
velopment’ (2021): with plans for a post-16 and vocational school curriculum that
addresses Francoist repression and democratic values—thus directly addressing
the ‘gap’ that Janis identifies in Ana’s knowledge on the regime’s abuses; a census
and DNA Bank established to aid with the identification of the unburied and the
state taking legal responsibility for the exhumation of unmarked graves.20 Paral-
lel Mothers was conceived and shot before Spain’s Democratic Memory Law had
been drafted, at a time when all exhumations of unmarked graves were conducted
through private initiatives (cited in Ponga 2021). Janis had to raise the funds for her
great-grandfather’s exhumation through a grant awarded by a charitable foundation
that Arturo is associated with, and the volunteers involved in the excavation wear
ARMH t-shirts (Image 12.2).
Just as decades of living with the fear of reprisals inhibited Janis’s grand-
mother’s generation from speaking out about the abuses enacted on their loved
ones, so Janis lives with the guilt of the secret she holds—that Cecilia is not her
biological daughter. It is information she has obtained invasively, lying to Ana
to obtain a saliva sample and placing the swab in her baby daughter’s mouth on
two occasions. ‘Janis realises’, Almodóvar (2021) explains, ‘that she doesn’t live
according to her own truth, and she can’t stand it any longer and decides to share
her secret with Ana’. Only through these revelations are Arturo, Ana, and Janis
able to move forward across the film’s parallel narratives. Arturo reveals to Janis
that he confessed to his wife that he had an affair and a child with Janis, Ana
dares speak of the gang rape that led to her pregnancy, and Janis shows Ana proof
222 Maria M. Delgado

that the latter is Cecilia’s biological mother—an accidental swap when the babies
were in observation at the hospital and an incident that alludes to the scandal
of Spain’s stolen babies, with Amnesty International (2021) documenting 50,000
infants taken from their mothers without consent. Burying an uncomfortable past
offers no solace in Parallel Mothers. Confronting the injustices of history—at a
micro- and macro-level—Janis finds a way of living with herself and forging a
new family structure.

Conclusion
It’s good [to remember], especially at this time when a far-right party [Vox] is
trying to tell a different history. They are lying about our history. We are talking
about a party that still hasn’t rejected Franco and actively promote themselves
as his followers. Shamelessly, they don’t even try to hide it, spreading hoax
stories that the origin of the conflict lies with the [Second] Republic and deny-
ing the military coup that launched the Civil War. So, of course, we have to tell
young people that this is all a lie, an absolute lie.
(Almodóvar 2021)

Testimony, as Jo Labanyi has noted, is not simply about establishing what might
have happened but a form of insight ‘into emotional attitudes toward the past in
the present time of the speaker’ (2010: 193). Parallel Mothers inscribes a demand
for reparative justice in what remains a divided nation; the act of mourning is con-
ceived as resistance, a form of challenging the Francoist stance that deemed these
lives—to use Judith Butler’s term—‘non-grievable’ (2004; 2010). By staging a
debate about the country’s mass graves in Ana and Janis’s confrontation, Almodó-
var challenges the institutionalised amnesia that curtailed public discourse on the
War and relegated the disappeared to erasure. Paul Preston observes that one of
the numerous roles that Franco cultivated was that of Father of the Nation (2008:
14–20); this symbolic position is dismantled by the queer kinship Parallel Mothers
promotes, allowing for the construction of families, alliances, and communities
across multiple configurations. The film’s end alludes to a fluid family structure
that allows for the possibility of two mothers (Ana and Janis) and a biological
father (Arturo).
Fathers in Parallel Mothers remain largely absent figures. Ana’s father is heard
only through bullying phone calls—suggesting a direct association with the miss-
ing lover in Almodóvar’s 2020 short, La voz humana/The Human Voice. This void
creates a further association with other deficient or distant fathers in Almodóvar’s
oeuvre. Ana’s father, associated with the provincial conservative Granada bour-
geoisie that Lorca denounced in his writings, has a greater concern for keeping
up appearances than his daughter’s welfare—dispatching Ana off to Madrid when
she becomes pregnant, and blocking her return for fear she will ‘stir things up’.
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 223

The ideological curbing of freedom is never far from the film’s surface. Teresa
lost custody of Ana to her ex-husband, confessing to Janis that divorce came with
‘horrendous humiliation’ through the Catholic Church’s highest judicial court, the
Roman Rota; ‘you practically had to admit you were a prostitute for them to annul
your marriage’ Teresa admits to Janis.
While Teresa tells Janis that ‘my work is to be liked by everyone’, Almodóvar’s
own position in arguing for the need to counter the right’s rewriting of history has
met with criticism in both the press and on social media since the Spanish release
of Parallel Mothers in October 2021 (see Navío 2022). The film’s reviews at the
Venice Festival where it premiered in September 2021, and its releases in the United
States, France, and the United Kingdom offer a strong contrast to its reception
in Spain—where its €2.5m box office takings present a distinctive fall from Pain
and Glory’s €6m (Vicente 2021). El País’s Carlos Boyero, whose antagonism to
Almodóvar’s work is well known, categorised the screenplay as ‘opportunistic and
calculating’ (2021), while its snubbing at the 2022 Goya (Spanish Film Academy
Awards) provided further evidence of its lukewarm reception. Former centre-right
Cuidadanos (Citizens) Party politician Marcos de Quinto blamed the film’s box
office performance on Almodóvar’s ‘meddling’ in politics (EDCM 2021).
Parallel Mothers articulates the importance of a functioning grassroots democ-
racy, where the injustices of the past are addressed and lives are grieved. Helen
Graham (2014) writes that

[t]he importance of the mass graves initiative in Spain goes far beyond right-
ing a specific historical wrong, for it offers the constitutional state a means of
identifying and naming all its citizens—past and present—as an act of demo-
cratic inclusion and a reminder that in democracy no section of a citizenry can
be “expendable” in this way, nor should one segment be mobilised against
another.

For Francisco Ferrándiz, ‘[t]he political culture emerging from the mass grave un-
burials has expanded progressively to question all vestiges of Francoism in public
space’ (2019: 572). The Popular Party government may, as the film illustrates, have
withdrawn all public funding for such excavations between 2012 and 2018, and
the Party has committed to repealing the Democratic Memory Law should it win
the next election and form a government in 2023, but countering what Graham
(2014) posits as a ‘democratic deficit at the heart of the state’ is a ‘functioning civil
society and democratic social fabric’ that recognises the need to bury its dead—
whatever their political affiliations—with dignity and respect. By uncovering and
naming these forgotten victims, Parallel Mothers shows a functioning civil society
in action, as well as a way of countering a politics of national reconciliation that
has failed to acknowledge the inequalities and abuses perpetrated during Franco’s
dictatorship and the enforced silence that accompanied these abuses.
224 Maria M. Delgado

Notes
1 This chapter expands an earlier short feature on Parallel Mothers (Delgado 2022). With
thanks to Pedro Almodóvar, Barbára Peiro Asó and Sergio Rey Sánchez at El Deseo.
All quotes are translated from the Spanish by the author. This chapter is dedicated to the
memory of Margarita Delgado (1930–2022) and Tim Beddows (1963–2022).
2 For further details on the many films looking at the Civil War and its legacy, see
Archibald (2012) and Wheeler (2023).
3 The figure of c.114,000 is taken from Judge Baltasar Garzón’s calculation of 114,266
(from 17 July 1936 to December 1951) as articulated in the October 2008 document
where he accepts a written request on the part of 13 memory associations to investigate
the enforced disappearances of these persons (Garzón 2008: 23). Preston mentions a
figure of 130,199 (2012: xviii). This stands in contrast to the figure of 49,272 attributed
to Republican abuses during the Civil War (see Marco 2017: 160). On memory politics
in Spain, see Aguilar (2008).
4 For details on Spain’s stolen babies, see Rabidoux et al. (2020). See p. 222 of this
chapter also.
5 On the role of documentary film in the recovery of historical memory in Spain, see
Hardcastle (2010).
6 Cofounded in 2013 by Santiago Abascal, its current party president, Vox has gained
increasing prominence in the Spanish political landscape, with the 2019 general elec-
tions giving it 52 of the 350 seats in the country’s Congress of Deputies (Congreso de
los Diputados), twice that secured the previous year (see González 2019). On Franco as
a fascist exemplar for Vox, see Ferrándiz (2022).
7 Furthermore, alongside Smith (2000), Vernon and Morris (1995) and Epps and
Kakoudaki (eds) (2009) are among those who have also provided complex readings of
the intersections between aesthetics, (gender) politics, sexuality and the broader social
and cultural landscape in Almodóvar’s films.
8 A reading also promoted by Ibáñez (2013). On the Francoist elites who transitioned into
democracy, see Wright (2021: 138, 139).
9 I have dealt elsewhere with the how these films, like Dolor y gloria/Pain and Glory
(2019), allude to the failures(s) of the left in the democratic era and the problematic
fissures of Spain’s transition to democracy in the years after Franco’s death (Delgado
2016a, 2016b, 2019a).
10 There is ambiguity as to the origin of this statement and where the data that substantiates
it came from, but it is thought that the claim first emerges in a 2013 statement by Jueces
para la Democracia (Judges for Democracy) when referencing enforced disappearances
(Junquera 2013).
11 See, for example, Sánchez 2021b; Salazar 2021.
12 On Pablo de Greiff’s (2014) report, see note 17.
13 The international visibility of Almodóvar’s films, including Oscars for Best Interna-
tional Feature for Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (1999) and Best Original
Screenplay for Hable con ella/Talk to Her (2002), and his position as both a countercul-
tural icon and a highly recognisable auteur, have given him a unique cultural capital among
non-English-language filmmakers. See Epps and Kakoudaki (2009: 1–15). Parallel Moth-
ers secured extensive international sales and was released in over 150 countries.
14 Sánchez-Gijón appears in Parallel Mothers in the role of Ana’s mother Teresa.
15 For further details on the Law and its limitations, see Ferrándiz (2013: 39–45); Gelonch-
Solé (2013: 515); Maystorovich Chulio (2022: 417–420).
16 Michael Richards notes the frequent use of the words ‘cleansing’, ‘purges’, ‘purifica-
tion’ and ‘elimination’ by the Nationalist leaders to justify the regime’s annihilation of
the ideas of Spain’s Second Republic (1998: 26–46). One of Franco’s press officials
identified the regeneration of Spain as dependent on a programme ‘to exterminate a
third of the male population of Spain. That will clean up the country and rid us of the
 Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories 225

proletariat (cited in Richards 1998: 47). This policy of systematic annihilation was ar-
ticulated by Emilio Mola, the General responsible for organising the military coup of 17
July 1936, in his first speech at the commencement of the Civil War: ‘We have to create
the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do
not think as we do’ (cited in Preston 2020: 295).
17 The report produced by Pablo de Greiff (2014) following his Mission to Spain that year
makes a series of recommendations including considering alternatives to and annulling
the effects of the Amnesty Law (22). It also locates ‘the most serious shortcomings […] in
the spheres of truth and justice. No State policy was ever established with respect to truth;
there is no official information and no mechanisms for elucidating the truth. The current
scheme for the “privatization” of exhumations, which leaves this responsibility to victims
and associations, aggravates the indifference of State institutions and raises difficulties
with regard to the methodology, homologation and officialization of truth’ (1, 2).
18 For further details around the circumstances of his death, see Delgado (2015) and Gib-
son (1983).
19 On the Democratic Memory Law, see Boletín Oficial del Estado 2022. Around 33,000
bodies lie in the Valley of Cuelgamuros, over a third are unknown and it is not clear
how many of these are Republican dead transferred to the crypt without their families’
permission. See Ferrándiz (2019: S68–S71).
20 There are estimates of the unearthing of somewhere between 1000 and 2000 bodies be-
tween 1975 and 1981 (Marco 2017: 160), and over 9,000 bodies from 740 mass graves
between 2000 and 2018 (Ferrándiz 2019: S67).

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13
STAGING MEMORY AND STRUGGLE IN
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA
Nadia Davids and Jay Pather in conversation
with Bryce Lease

Jay Pather has directed two of Nadia Davids’ plays, What Remains (2017) and Hold
Still (2022), and in this conversation they discuss their creative collaboration and
the aesthetic and political imaginaries that underpin their work.1 What Remains, a
multidisciplinary work encompassing text, dance, and movement, tells the story of
the unexpected uncovering of a burial ground of the enslaved in Cape Town. When
the bones emerge from the ground, everyone in the city – enslaved descendants,
archaeologists, citizens, property developers – is forced to reckon with a history
sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten. The performance is loosely based
on the events at Prestwich Place where, in 2003, a corporate real estate develop-
ment ‘famously, unexpectedly, struck an eighteenth-century burial ground – one of
the largest ever to be unearthed in the Southern Hemisphere. Nearly 3,000 bodies
were accounted for, from babies who were just a few weeks old – the children of
(en)slaved washerwomen – to men in their late sixties’ (Davids 2019: xi). What
Remains is a path between memory and magic, the uncanny and the known, wak-
ing and dreaming. Four figures – The Archaeologist, The Healer, The Dancer, and
The Student – move between bones and books, archives and madness, paintings
and protest, as they struggle to reconcile the past with the now. Hold Still, a four-
act family drama, focusing on a long-term marriage, generational trauma, and im-
migration, is set in London. Though vastly different in style, focus, and place, the
plays are connected by a deep commitment to the exploration of political life.2

BL: From your situated perspective, how do you see slave histories resonating
in different ways – whether artistically, culturally, museally – in the South
African public sphere?

ND: Such an interesting question – one that points to histories of enslavement in

the Cape. This is certainly something that What Remains references, yet I
DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-14
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
230 Nadia Davids et al.

don’t think about it as a being a play about enslavement, but rather a work
about how histories of oppression are present in the now. I wanted to explore
the idea that an engagement with the historiographic is less about trying to
‘piece together the past’ and more about trying to get to grips with the con-
temporary. What Remains was written at a very particular moment in South
Africa (2015–2016) in the shadow of the profoundly shocking 2012 Mari-
kana massacre and at the hopeful beginning of the Fees Must Fall student-led
protests.3 Like many South Africans, I grapple with a deep and distressing
sense of political defeat, a woundedness and fury around all post-apartheid
­betrayals – and now a new layer of mass state-sanctioned, sometimes fatal
police violence. Prestwich Place, with its layers of material and intangible
meanings, became a prism through which to think about all those present dif-
ficulties, but also about how the past can erupt suddenly, seemingly without
warning and create positive disruption.
The site speaks to the specificities of the unremembered in the West-
ern Cape, finding a particular interface with District Six, but it tells us
something about the country as a whole, about who is cherished and pro-
tected and who is not, about what is remembered and what is consigned
to the forgotten.4 I was also struck, in the responses to Prestwich Place,
about how deep the continuity, the genealogy of struggle is in Cape Town:
the same group of community activists – many who claimed descend-
ancy from those buried – advocated for a decent, spiritually sensitive,
politically appropriate interning of the remains had rallied to memorialise
the District through the District Six Museum. There was something very
powerful about that – about the connection between those two sites, and
how both rotate around the struggle for people of colour people to remain
visible in the city centre and for our histories to be treated with dignity.
Julian Jonker (2014), Ciraj Rassool (2015), and Heidi Grunebaum (2007)
have written wonderfully on this – their theoretical work on Prestwich
Place – around the sediment of memory, inequality, upheaval, and sur-
vival in Cape Town, which was foundational in writing What Remains.

BL: I am curious about the audiences at University of Cape Town (UCT) –

generally speaking, would they have encountered some of these histories,
whether textually, through novels and poetry, or through history classes. Is
there a secure knowledge of the history of enslavement in the Western Cape
in younger generations?

ND: We had a very diverse audience – young people, older people, the audience
was racially diverse, but yes, the play did seem to resonate deeply and par-
ticularly with a university-age audience. Likely the figure of ‘The Student’
allowed them a point of entry, but more, that generation of students had
been grappling with these issues, pushing against them, demanding change,
re-embodying struggle in real time.
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 231

As to the availability of these histories: it’s better now than when I was
their age; a realistic telling of apartheid and colonial histories is part of
secondary school syllabi and I think, even at a community level, narratives
around histories of enslavement in the Cape are spoken about more openly.
When I was growing up, that history was mostly passed over lightly, fleet-
ingly, dismissively in school. It was taken seriously by revisionist historians
who did important, ground-breaking research and it was present in coded
ways within the sphere of community, in the realm of the d­ omestic – in
food, music, religious practices. Narratives of enslavement may not have
been spoken about but that history was/is continuously present through a
repertoire of practice – one that speaks to displacement, trauma, creolisa-
tion, the re-creation of the self, the finding and making of meaning at the
margins – in local foods and recipes, in Cape Malay music – devotional or
recreational – in the lyrics and steps of the Cape Carnival, in local legends
and myths. Present, but not always acknowledged.

BL: That reminds me of Gabeba Baderoon’s argument in Regarding Muslims

that it was not that slaves were invisible in the Western Cape, rather they
were deemed not visible.

ND: Yes, absolutely.

BL: Is there something in What Remains, as well as in your larger body of work,
that you feel is in dialogue with the District Six Museum?

ND: I see the text of What Remains as emerging from the District Six Museum’s
methodologies around script and memory, as well as tethered to its politics
around place. But more, What Remains read as museum-like in the staging,
because Jay invoked, deliberately and wonderfully, the idea of the museum
in the set. He staged it as a repository of some kind – there were the boxes
and archives as the audience entered the space, but there was also the invo-
cation of ‘cold storage’, and of the duplicity of the possibility of a museum
and archive space. I’m sorry that doesn’t directly answer your question
about the relationship between the Museum and Prestwich Place per se, but
it does about where I think the play sits in relation to the two spaces.

BL: There is a strong relationship between form and content?

JP: Yes, in that form needs to shift somewhat, to make way for the material as
well as the mercurial, the not visible.

ND: I think in Jay’s staging of the play in a lateral setting, he’s also suggesting in
a very considered and powerful way the idea of our Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC, 1996-98).
232 Nadia Davids et al.

JP: The lateral setting that Nadia talks to is doing away with the proscenium
staging and seating audiences on either side of the work that unfolds in a
large passageway, that sense of witnessing an encounter with and passing by
of several epochs, an epic.

ND: You’ve staged a process of witnessing, and I think you speak about that in
your director’s notes. The audience is not just witnessing what’s on stage,
they’re witnessing each other across the room – witness the graveyard, wit-
ness the body, witness the witness as they offer testimony, as they try to tell
the story of the country: so much of the TRC was about asking the country’s
unspeakable question, ‘Where is the body?’

JP: In terms of form, the TRC also resembled a kind of neat, classical Greek
tragedy – with all the build ups and moments of confession and catharsis
is yearned for. But the catharsis was inconclusive as there was not much
immediate talk around reparation or redress, while one evokes that form, it
needs to also be disrupted, calling on audiences as complicit accessories to
unresolved history and deeply troubled psyches. One of the ways in the play
itself that gets the spectator to shift from passive watcher to possible col-
laborator was how linear time was disrupted; you’re moving back and forth
although you think you’re moving in one direction. It segues into something
else, and this is Nadia’s writing.
This is also a play that evokes palpable temperatures. It’s the cold stor-
age of the archive on entering but also the heat of impassioned arguments
that explode; there is heat, there is fire, there is literal fire at the end. There
is that promise of a kind of cold reading of a past that is interrupted by
this fiery present. There are quite a few different grammars of experienc-
ing museums and also shrugging off the museum experience; the cold, the
rational watching of the past, and then the realisation, ‘Oh my God, no,
they’re actually talking about now. This is about the student movement
actually, the Fees Must Fall protests that began 2015 and then continues
even up to today, because of how unresolved the basic issue of access to
education is in South Africa’.5 I was obviously drawing the ideas from the
text, but it wasn’t, ‘Oh this is what it means and this is what I would do’.
In just dealing with the subject in quite a visceral way with the cast and
with Nadia, the process of deconstructing and disrupting narrative and
drawing from a fiery present was very refreshing – to feel like you weren’t
simply evoking a past.

BL: Actually, and in that context, did you feel like there were large differ-
ences or distinctions in the various spaces you performed in, from Gra-
hamstown to Cape Town to the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam and in
Rotterdam?
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 233

ND: The play means very specific things in Cape Town; although, at the same
time, I only wrote one character, ‘The Healer’ to be recognisably Capeto-
nian. With the others I wanted something that was undifferentiated – that
was also me trying to work with the idea of making Cape Town slightly
strange. I always think of it as an uncanny, unsettling place and I wanted
to play with that Russian Formalist idea of requesting a ‘second look’, by
making it a little ‘off world’, something both immediately familiar and an
‘estranged’ version of what is familiar (Image 13.1).

JP: Yes, and to direct this sense of the familiar and the estranged was helped
so much by the pattern throughout of pithy dialogue punctuated with mon-
ologues so there is seduction in a conversation and then ‘coming away’
from it into a character’s internal monologue. This nimble form also fuelled
the choreography and creation of the visual images of these iconic archaic
shapes in amongst some realist dialogue. These ideas also lent quite a stark
sense of the set which then also played with iconic shapes. The play is
meant to take place on an actual burial site and we finally settled on a sim-
ple set with grey masking tape that simply marked out the outer edges of the
graves, in the manner of outlines of a dead body that an investigating unit
might leave on the floor when someone is murdered. Something temporary
and make-shift and yet indelible.
But, to answer your question, it changed also because in Cape Town
the work did feel a lot more familiar. The recognition from the audiences

IMAGE 13.1 Shaun Oelf (as the Dancer) in What Remains written by Nadia Davids and
directed by Jay Pather at the Arena Theatre, Cape Town, 2016. Photograph
by John Gutierrez.
234 Nadia Davids et al.

and then the kind of conversations that happened outside. In Grahamstown,

the very cold weather exacerbated the sense of entering cold storage. Also,
at the beginning of the work, I did want a fair amount of settled haze – to
create a sense of moving into something and working through this opaque
haze, and then you make out the figures, the costumes, the stage – but the
cold and the smoke all made it really feel like you were in some sort of a
storage space. A lot of people reacted to that. By way of contrast, the work
in Cape Town was at the Hiddingh Hall on gleaming wooden floors that
gave it warmth These factors around a play that really is pithy and minimal
and susceptible to any shaft in materiality of space did affect access into the
work and sure, how the work was received. But the resonances were most
different in the Netherlands, where beyond staging and setting, one did get
the sense of people being overwhelmed, and to some extent, attacked. There
was a very nervous kind of tension in the audience. In a very strange way,
for me, it felt most emotional in the Netherlands.

ND: It’s the place from which –

JP: – it all emanates.

ND: I’m just reminded as you’re speaking, Jay, about how staging makes mean-
ing and in fact some of the technical limitations of the staging at Hiddingh
Hall meant that we had a completely different understandings of the final
moments of the play, that we only ever realised maybe a year later. A fun-
damentally different political read on the ending. Among the final lines of
the play are, ‘We wait, we watch, we try not to get burnt’, and they coincide
with The Dancer in a frenzy of pirouettes-turning and twirling and eventu-
ally collapsing. Because we couldn’t move to a hard blackout in Hiddingh
Hall, I thought that the collapse was emblematic of how eventually one
suffers under the weight of struggle. But Jay said, no, he intended for the
twirling to go on and on ceaselessly, continuous struggle; it was just that the
dancer eventually had to fall down because we couldn’t achieve a full black
out, which would have maintained the impression of the spinning carrying
on and on. And I thought, isn’t this extraordinary? Jay has a much more
optimistic outlook than I do.

JP: I just felt he needed more stamina (laughs). Those lines – ‘We wait, we
watch, we try not to get burnt’ – from the Healer and the Archaeologist,
standing from afar and watching, were significant because right in the mid-
dle of the first version of the production, the student protests started. It was
a moment of paradox. There was so much despair but also so much excite-
ment. The joy was so palpable it was ridiculous. A lot of people, I must say,
also of my generation that I was speaking to, were very enervated. I think we
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 235

felt that in this wave of courage and energy, the plaster was removed and it
that was lacking and kept in check to propagate the intellectual project, had
to fall away. A refreshing sense that a grasp on the truth of what goes on at
these institutions was ironically what would sustain them. Prior to this you
are up against brick walls all the time and there’s a fatigue. You know it’s
never going to get to that space that you’ve always wanted it to. Certainly,
when this happened there was that sense that we could go back and connect
those dots again, have direct honest conversations, a throughline of desire
translated into action, into real action and not just talking about and writing
about it in dry academic text. I’ve always felt like the ending would need to
suggest: keep going. We just needed to keep continuing. A positive note.

BL: That is fascinating. Was it then by accident that you realised you had these
different interpretations?

ND: I think it says something about the fact that we are also of politically dif-
ferent generations. I came of age during a time of extreme stasis politically,
of trusting in the government to do everything that was promised. I was
fortunate to be very young in a moment of wild and beautiful national op-
timism, and that optimism carried us through for at least a decade. I took a
very long time to recognise – and to admit – what had gone terribly wrong.
At the same time, being young and part of a politically privileged generation
meant I also felt a deep allegiance to the idea of the new country, to defend-
ing that idea and to defending the shape that it took, even as I worried about
it, even as I registered early concerns.
I was also outside an immediate history of active struggle – regardless of
how it had touched my family or community because I was largely protected
by age and class. Jay had been an active part of the anti-apartheid struggle.
And then in 2015, I was once again on the outside of the reanimation of
that struggle – this time, it belonged to my students’ generation. I think that
there is more to bind Jay and his generation to this generation of students,
than there is between mine and them. They’ve come of age in much more
obviously heightened times than I did. I remember it used to be a source
of incredible frustration when I was at university, that for the most part, it
was considered very dull for middle-class kids to show any kind of interest
in the immediate past. We were dismissed, shrugged out of conversation,
told to stop ‘dwelling on things’. I suppose it goes without saying that these
back and forths at university – at UCT – were racially coded. Students of
colour, black students were still in the minority in the mid-nineties. We were
encouraged to embrace a certain narrative about the new country and all its
possibilities, but we also had to deaden a number of things in order to go
along with it. It felt as though, nationally, there was often a deliberate damp-
ening of rage, maybe even a cynical mobilisation of political optimism.
236 Nadia Davids et al.

What Remains is an attempt to reckon with what’s happening and trying

to break out of that stasis.

BL: And Jay, did you feel a different generational perspective on this?

JP: I mean, look, for me the work is profoundly optimistic, and possibly in the
manner of protest action around the States of Emergency in the 1980s. The
writing brings into such graphic visibility these points of connection, past
and present, with submerged bodies or bones and the earth, which then mani-
fests in this one character, the Healer, who bears witness to these interlocking
timelines. And then a whole other dynamic embodied by the Archaeologist,
who sees things through a rational, forensic and scientific lens, which col-
lapses, predictably, unable to maintain itself as events escalate and reveal the
deceit of the Chairman of the institution she works for. This leads the Ar-
chaeologist to a state of something much deeper. These are really strong and
positive developments in the human psyche and profoundly hopeful about
passing on these understandings. And then of course, the most obviously
optimistic is actually the protesting Student, who is able to draw from what
neither is able to see, which is the Dancer, the shadow that passes through
wanting rest and unable to. There is a pact between the Student and the
Dancer to the end. For me, this simply puts into form what I feel is a growing
optimism in the space about embodiment of these ideas. The very idea that
we can receive them in our bodies and make them manifest is profoundly
optimistic, as opposed to simply staying with a materialist, dire universe and
trying to get rid of what could be nourishment for sustaining struggle.

BL: Yes, as opposed to trying to exorcise the past in some way?

ND: I have to respond to the optimism, because I am astonished at this reading.

I love it, and I find it gives me a great feeling of energy, but interestingly I
think of the play as being a kind of cri de coeur and a cry of great mourning
for the country. Maybe it’s that, I don’t know – mourning is not necessarily
pessimistic, it’s a recognition. Now we know why the ending is so different
for us both.

JP: Because with the coldest character, the Archaeologist, who is doing this
work as research and inference from materiality, for her to open the other
space, to actually be affected, for it to impact her in a way that makes her
seek home in a way; to seek a kind of a home that has been invisibilised and
that she has put away in order for her to survive in this kind of rational fo-
rensic world – I mean that is huge. That’s quite an affirmation of the ability
for shifts in us. When, in the final moments, the Healer and the Archaeolo-
gist are watching trying ‘not to get burnt’, they are simply watching, they
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 237

are not trying to stop it, they’re not trying to lecture, they’re not trying to
cut it. They are aware that something is happening, they try not to get burnt,
but they are aware that something, that some movement is happening. For
me, whether it is of destruction or creation, the important thing is that there
is movement as opposed to stasis.

ND: Daniel Bensaïd (2002), the French Marxist, talks about melancholic op-
timism, which is taking in the full account of brutalities of the twentieth
century, but remaining optimistic about struggle regardless. Optimism, po-
litical optimism, in this estimation is not naïve hopefulness or misinformed
positivity.

JP: Not at all. It’s absolutely not that kind of optimism.

ND: It’s the idea of continuing with something, that there is something alive
and electric and urgent, full of possibility even within moments that are
submerged with struggle. But thank you, Jay, this has realigned my think-
ing around this. Sometimes you don’t know what you mean when you’re
writing.

JP: Some of the optimistic moments of my life were just around the State of
Emergency in the 1980s, because a community was being formed. Because
we were, you know, sitting on the pavements and – not in a kind of romantic
way, but there was some kind of very deeply felt movement, as opposed to
a sense of resignation and handing over your futures to a government or
governance.

BL: Could you tell us about your next collaboration, Hold Still, which premiered
at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in November 2022? Nadia, your latest
play is set in London and focuses on Ben and Rosa Feigel and their son
Oliver. Ben is the son of a Holocaust survivor and Rosa is the daughter
of apartheid freedom fighters who left South Africa when she was a child.
They both carry histories of displacement and generational trauma, which
that they seek to hide from their own son. In an unexpected way, this is a
return to the terrain of What Remains?

ND: I’ve been thinking how the two plays meet: they’re both casts of four, they
deal expressly with the political life of people of colour, both suggest the
past a rupture in the present – the return of the unconscious as something or
someone hidden from view, but their differences are also very pronounced
and those differences are primarily aesthetic, located around form.
What Remains is, I think, a very atmospheric work; there are whole sec-
tions written as poetry, so much about what’s on the page is suggestive,
238 Nadia Davids et al.

impressionistic. What Remains asks questions about the uncanny and sug-
gests that the haunting at its centre is grounded not only in the spiritual
world but in the material one. With Hold Still, I wanted to write something
very different; an ostensibly straight, three-act play that messed around, just
a little enough to be unnerving, with form. I think this choice has something
to do with being a colonial subject, of having been raised as an outsider,
inside a tradition of English literature and theatre, and of wanting to exer-
cise some mastery over the culture we all had to imbibe – to use that form
to write something about that place. It’s rare, I think for South Africans to
write and perform work about the United Kingdom. We stage work written
by British playwrights… not the other way around. More, to write about the
interior domestic life of people in the United Kingdom, to comment on the
politics of that place, to think about this terrifying moment in British poli-
tics where the figure of the refugee has been so thoroughly demonised by
the political right – transformed into the stranger, the un-being, the figure to
fear and to reject – that felt new and necessary.
There’s lots of British writing about us – some of it intensely interesting
and generative, some of it well-meaning, some of it abysmal, lots of hold-
ing forth on the state of our country – our despicable past, our disappointing
present, our future that apparently ricochets between wonderful and abys-
mal depending on whom you’re speaking to, but very little the other way
round. In that way, the choice to write about this and in this style is politi-
cal. And then to subvert that style, just a little, with monologues that work
a little like ekphrasis in that we, as the audience, are allowed to settle in a
little, we’re granted a small interior glimpse into each character. Though, of
course, these characters have not been ‘British’ or even ‘English’ for very
long, their histories are much more complicated than that.
The three-act, kitchen-sink drama was exactly the sort of stuff I watched
endlessly as a child, and what I was taught constituted ‘good theatre’,
and these characters with their witty back and forth, their familiarity and
ease with all things theoretical – with politics and psychoanalysis, with an
easy-reach towards talking ‘culture’ and very performative outrage about
­unfairness – was exactly what I thought middle-class British liberalism was.
I grew up in the Apartheid state and the contours of my childhood were
shaped by two brutal states of emergency – I remember hearing so many
arguments between adults about ‘what to do’, but they were never like the
conversations between Ben and Rosa. In those long-ago arguments, there
wasn’t – or didn’t seem to my childish ear – to be space for long, nuanced
disagreements: Ben and Rosa, on the other hand, are trapped in an endless
back and forth about ‘what to do’ until they arrive back at the place of their
own beginning, of their own histories, which is that you act because right
action is the thing to do, not because you are sure of what the outcome will
be. The only certainty in struggle is that it’s the moral thing to do, there’s no
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 239

IMAGE 13.2 
Mwenya Kabwe (as Rosa Feigel), Lyle October (Oliver Feigel), and
­ ndrew Buckland (Ben Feigel) in Hold Still written by Nadia Davids and
A
directed by Jay Pather at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, 2022. Photo-
graph by Mark Wessels, courtesy of Baxter Theatre Centre.

certainty in the result. So, after all I’ve said about the play being about the
United Kingdom, it both is and isn’t – I always find myself back in South
Africa. This time, grappling with middle-class left liberal quandaries in a
deeply unsettled – and unsettling – time in the country.

BL: Jay, your exploration of lighting and projection enables you to break with
naturalism and explore memories that crash up against one another and cre-
ate tension in the family living room. What was particular about the explo-
ration of the domestic space as opposed to the more abstract spaces you
explored in What Remains?

JP: Yes, it was challenging to remain faithful to the text itself and how it unfolded.
One of course has to, but my first impulse in the first reading was indeed to
disrupt the domestic space drastically and not give in to a domestic reception
of a domestic space. But again Nadia does provide for that already in the
text itself. What we have in Nadia is a forensic artist. Nothing is left without
rigorous question and turning around over and over. Our exploration of text
(cast and production team) was so fertile as layer upon layer of intentions lay
sometimes near surface at others deeply under. For the two lead characters,
married with a teenage child, to start to reveal tremors and then huge rifts in
240 Nadia Davids et al.

their relationship in the space of thirty theatrical minutes is a triumph and

richness of text. So in some respects then it’s very similar to What ­Remains in
terms of what we had to uncover amongst the lines. In this instance though the
text was the thing, its choreography was intact and it was tight and held it all
together but with just enough space for the imagination to travel.
So, while I became much more mindful of this, the rehearsal process, be-
sides unearthing the dense text, was full of other experiments in movement
and image that I think gave some surreal impetus in the actual staging while
staying close to the naturalism. And this in turn informed the choices in set
design, lighting, and projection.
The most obvious intervention was when each character breaks away
into expansive, incredibly beautiful monologues. Here, the use of projec-
tions transported us to forest, massive oceans, black and white footage of
steam trains and smoke and sepia jail cells and family portraits pulling us
out of the domestic into something larger, both spatially and temporally.
With the set, while it was clear that we had to have that kitchen sink living
room, we worked on emphasising the hyper realism of holding it as a piece
of archive. And this was then complemented with the back wall that is less
real, uniformly grey and seems to separate from the actual living room and
moreover disintegrates about three-quarters of the way up – the pieces at the
top held precariously by gut.
On the floor outside the confines of the Persian rug that as a centrepiece
holds the archival lounge, there are line drawings (in masking tape) that re-
semble debris as if this tiny lounge is in the midst of pulling out of the tiny
Islington semi-­detached home and exploding. And of course, this is indeed
what happens, significantly when someone from the outside, an illegal mi-
grant, is let in and the space has to confront that. So, scenic elements as well
as projections flip us out of a taut naturalism. And this was enough for me
since that piece of archive in the centre, the neat middle-class, left-leaning
family had to be replicated for us to see the cracks beginning to appear,
the threat of dissolution and impending rupture and then for these parts
to at the very end be held with a combination of strength and grace by the
central character, Rosa. It is a play of great precarity but not without hope
and courage.

Notes
1 The first interview took place over Zoom on 17 May 2022 and was extended through
subsequent conversations in October 2022 and March-April 2023.
2 In its first iteration in 2016, What Remains was staged at the Arena Theater at the Univer-
sity of Cape Town. In 2017, it was invited to the South African National Arts Festival in
Grahamstown, one of the largest global festivals of its kind. A run at Hiddingh Hall, Cape
Town followed in July, and then a staging at the 2017 Afrovibes Festival at various cities
in the Netherlands. Hold Still premiered at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2022.
 Staging Memory and Struggle in Contemporary South Africa 241

3 The Marikana massacre is the name given to the killing of 34 miners by the South African
Police Service (SAPS) on 16 August 2012 during a six-week strike at the Lonmin plati-
num mine at Marikana near Rustenburg in South Africa’s North West province.
4 In Nadia Davids’s own words, ‘the story of District Six as a place of refuge for emanci-
pated slaves, for the impoverished, the city’s underclass, for its refugees and immigrants
is well known to the people Cape Town and it occupies a very specific space in South
Africa’s imagination as one of the greatest, most unresolved signifiers of apartheid tri-
umph. Today, the area remains mostly undeveloped; an expanse of overgrown grass and
smashed brick that begins at Zonnebloem and stretches to the edge of the city centre.
Behind it, Devil’s Peak, ahead, the Habour. And in that stretch of emptiness lie three
narratives; the memory of a creolised living space in which Kwame Anthony Appia’s
fashioning of “cosmopolitanism” was largely realised, the destructive and exacting power
of apartheid spatial planning, and the failure of the current government to make good on
its promise of land restitution’ (2017: 114).
5 ‘The 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests were the largest, most
effective mass political movement the country has known in 20 years. #RhodesMustFall
was initially aimed at the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape
Town, a figure the students described as emblematic of widespread institutional racism,
an oppressive colonial learning culture, and a system predicated on economic and racial
exclusion. Students at the University of Witwatersrand expanded on the call to decolonise
the curriculum under the hashtag #FeesMustFall, demanding that there be no increase in
fees in 2016 and an end to outsourcing university workers’ (Davids 2017: 110).

Works Cited
Baderoon, Gabeba (2014) Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid, New York:
New York University Press.
Bensaïd, Daniel (2002) A Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique,
London and New York: Verso.
Davids, Nadia (2017) ‘“Sequins, Self & Struggle”: An Introduction to the Special Issue’,
Safundi, The Journal of South African and American Studies 18(2): 109–116.
——— (2019) What Remains, Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Grunebaum, Heidi (2007) ‘Unburying the Dead in the “Mother City”: Urban Topographies
of Erasure’, PMLA 122(1): 210–219.
Jonker, Julian (2014) ‘The Silence of the Dead: Ethical and Juridical Significances of the
Exhumations at Prestwich Place, Cape Town, 2003-2005’, Master’s Thesis, University
of Cape Town, http://hdl.handle.net/11427/4675.
Rassool, Ciraj (2015) ‘Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead, and the South African
Memorial Complex’, in D. Peterson, K. Gavua, and C. Rassool (eds), The Politics of
Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 133–156.
14
MARKETING A MASSACRE
When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism

Katrina Phillips

The stage lights turn red. An actor portraying Lieutenant Colonel David William-
son strides across the stage with a large cooper’s mallet slung over one shoulder.
Actors playing Williamson’s militiamen, guns at the ready, stand guard around the
stage. Other actors playing Lenape men, women, and children cower before him,
their faces unrecognisable when bathed in the red light. They sing, they pray, and
they cry as a leader among them, Isaac, pleads with Williamson for mercy. The
singing grows louder as Williamson calls out: ‘Isaac, once Chief Glikkikan, come
to judgment!’ Isaac kneels at the table in front of Williamson, who raises the mal-
let above his head and brings it down with all his might. Isaac’s wife, Anna, is the
next victim called to the front. The theatrical executions continue under the glow
of the red stage lights until none remain standing. The soldiers set the cabin on fire
and exit.
This is the dramatic apex of Trumpet in the Land, an outdoor drama staged
in New Philadelphia, Ohio, since 1970. The drama, written by Pulitzer Prize-
winning playwright Paul Green, centres on a dark moment in the state’s past: the
Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782, also known as the Moravian Massacre. Led by
Williamson, a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen slaughtered 96 Chris-
tian Lenape Indians at a Moravian mission, charging that the Lenape had partici-
pated in raids on American settlers. The Lenape had vehemently denied the charges,
but the militia still voted to kill them.1 After the Lenape spent a night praying and
singing hymns, the militia led them to one of two ‘killing houses’ – one for men,
and one for women and children. The militiamen restrained the Lenape, used mal-
lets to stun them, and then scalped them before piling bodies in mission buildings
and burning down the village.
Nearly 200 years later, the Ohio Outdoor Historical Drama Association, Inc.
(OOHDA) returned to the horrors of Gnadenhutten to create a regional tourist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-15
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 243

destination. Green’s conception of what he called ‘symphonic’ outdoor dramas

shaped the growth and development of a national industry that began in 1937 with
the premiere of Green’s The Lost Colony in Manteo, North Carolina. Unlike the
historical pageants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were
often staged as commemorative events, outdoor dramas were distinctly designed
as regional tourism ventures. From Minnesota’s Song of Hiawatha and Texas’s
Beyond the Sundown to California’s Lost River and North Carolina’s Unto These
Hills, Native history has long been a powerful pull for outdoor drama enthusiasts.2
The Institute of Outdoor Drama, now known as the Institute of Outdoor Theatre,
holds the records of more than 180 outdoor dramas that premiered between 1907
and 2010, and close to one-third of those outdoor dramas draw heavily on regional
Native history. The geographic and chronological range of these productions, as
well as their reliance on Native people, places, and histories, demonstrates how
these outdoor dramas were – and continue to be – an integral part of the American
tourism industry.
This essay examines the long, contested use of Native people, Native places,
and Native history in the outdoor drama industry, particularly in the staging of
Trumpet in the Land. Outdoor dramas are typically considered their own form
of tourism, and they are rarely put into conversation with frameworks like dark
tourism – the practice of visiting sites associated with death, destruction, or disas-
ter. However, I argue that the continued reenactment of the Moravian Massacre –
through a theatrical portrayal geared toward a white American audience – highlights
how these contemporary theatrical productions engage with these historical narra-
tives of difficult pasts in relation to dark tourism. Retold on stage every summer in
New Philadelphia for more than 50 years, OOHDA’s story of the murdered Lenape
caught between the British and the American factions in the midst of the Ameri-
can Revolution stands as a marker of the marketability of America’s troubled –
and troubling – past.

When Tourism Goes Dark: The Creation of Dark Tourism

‘Dark tourism’, coined in 1996 by scholars John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2010:
3), has transnational applications, from sites of genocide in Rwanda and the bat-
tlefields of the American Civil War to the Catacombs of Paris and the concentration
camps of World War II. Lennon and Foley argue that memory and remembrance
are central to dark tourism: ‘If one considers memory and the representation of the
past in the context of dark tourism’, they write, ‘one can chart an obsession with
the past’ (2010: 146).
But, as self-proclaimed dark tourist Dagney McKinney reminds us, ‘haunted
houses, abandoned places or just mean people’ are not always what we would con-
sider dark tourism. ‘All dark tourism is macabre’, McKinney writes, ‘but not all
macabre tourism is dark tourism’ (McKinney n.d.). There is a thin line, as au-
thor Elizabeth Becker argues, between ‘memorialization and manipulation’ in the
244 Katrina Phillips

development of dark tourism (2013: 106). Memory is central to dark tourism; as

cultural historian Itay Lotem contends, ‘Memories are not airborne, but need to be
appropriated, interpreted and reinterpreted according to changing public contexts
and priorities in order for them to still exert any influence over individuals and the
public alike’ (2021: 7). On the surface, dark tourism seems entirely oppositional to
tourism, the act of travelling for pleasure or relaxation. But for historian Tiya Miles,
the popularity of ghost tours on former plantations, cemeteries, and manor homes
in the American South underscores the powerful pull of dark tourism, which, in
essence, brings together ‘pleasure and pain, death and discovery, in touristic op-
portunities that highlight mortality, violence, atrocity, and suffering’ (2017: 116).
As people, nations, and governments around the globe continue to reckon with
the horrors of the past – such as the 2007 passage of Spain’s Law of Historical
Memory that sought to recognise those who were persecuted or murdered during the
Spanish Civil War and under the fascist regime of Francisco Franco3 – these spaces
of memory and history underscore the power of dark tourism as a means of attempt-
ing to understand the past. The marketability of sites of trauma like Tuol Sleng, a
high school that became ‘the Auschwitz of Cambodia’, has turned what Becker calls
‘the dark side of human nature’ into ‘a profit point for tourism’ (2013: 105).
There are, though, few surprises in dark tourism. Many dark tourism sites are
deliberately reinterpreted specifically for tourists and, in many instances, these
tourists already know the story. The seemingly unending lines of tourists patiently
waiting to enter the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam highlight history’s grip on
the present. The literal recreation of the Alamo as a shrine to the fallen – visitors
are asked to remove their hats before they enter and are not allowed to take pictures
inside the structure itself – turns a site of American manifest destiny and settler co-
lonialism into a place of reverence.4 Tuol Sleng has become what Becker calls ‘the
centerpiece of the dark tourism, or genocide trail’ promoted by the tourism minis-
try, and it is the single most popular destination for tourists who travel to Phnom
Penh. Tours of the Tower of London are led by the Yeoman Warders (also known
as ‘Beefeaters’), who blend history and humour in a way that belies the tower’s
blood-soaked realities.5 Both the Alamo and the Tower of London, like other sites
of dark tourism, purposely steer their visitors to their respective gift shops at the
end of their guided tours. For visitors, it is a jarring jolt back to the capitalistic – if
not downright kitschy – nature of these sites.
Dark tourism, like the practice of tourism writ large, is often a double-edged
sword. Hal Rothman infamously dubbed tourism a ‘devil’s bargain’, arguing that
the ‘embrace of tourism triggers a contest for the soul of a place’ (1998: 11). Argu-
ments arise around appropriate behaviour at dark tourism sites: is it ‘right’ to take a
smiling selfie at Auschwitz (Drury 2019)? What about slave castles in West Africa,
like Ghana’s Elmina Castle or Senegal’s Island of Gorée, which were designated
UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the late 1970s? What about Robben Island, also
now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where former prisoners often lead portions
of the tours and continually relive the traumas of their resistance to apartheid?
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 245

Many dark tourism enterprises encourage their visitors to more deeply engage
with the horrible histories that happened in these particular places. Performances
produced by the Staging Difficult Pasts research project – including the 2020 film,
‘The Disappeared from Spain and Argentina: Art, Testimony, and Justice’ and the
2019 performance piece, ‘Pasados conflictivos en escena’, both staged at the ESMA
Memory Museum, the largest of the 340 detention centres that operated during Ar-
gentina’s last dictatorship (1976–1983), offer thought-provoking interventions on
memory and conflicting pasts.6 Both, the film and the performance, presented what
organisers called ‘an alternative approach to the building that functioned as a unit
of torture’ (Staging Difficult Pasts: November 2019). Their unflinching examina-
tions of crimes against humanity center the project’s main goal: to examine how
theaters and museums shape public memories of difficult pasts.
Trumpet in the Land, though, does the opposite: it shields its audience from the
centuries of genocide perpetrated against Native people in what became the United
States. Characterising Trumpet in the Land as dark tourism helps explain not only
the outdoor drama’s touristic viability but also what is at stake when Native history
is coopted for tourist enterprises. The outdoor drama markets itself as an authentic
production in an authentic place with an authentic claim to a historical event, but
it also protects the audience from the actual historic event through Green’s use
of artistic liberties and the use of predominantly non-Native actors. The outdoor
drama does not intend to shame its majority-white audience for the horrors of his-
tory. Instead, it is touristically effective through the simultaneous sanitisation and
dramatisation of the massacre at Gnadenhutten. Green has already dramaturgically
interpreted the history for his audience. The focus on resurrection, redemption, and
restoration temporarily takes the audience back in time to witness the dramatic
reenactment of the massacre before returning to the comfort of the present.
There are plenty of theatrical productions, museum exhibits, and public forums
that stage difficult pasts, using these pasts as inspirations for their plots. They are
set in different historical and geographical regions, but those that turn to difficult
narratives of Native history within what is now the continental United States re-
quire additional analysis and critical examination. This essay asks the reader to
more thoroughly question what it means to stage a difficult past like this: a massa-
cre of Native people. There is no arc of redemption in Native history, and yet turn-
ing these dark moments into tourist enterprises requires a collective redemption
of America. Green’s creation of fictional characters that serve to move the story
through its redemptive arc removes the sense of responsibility that forms the core
of dark tourism.
Trumpet in the Land is dark tourism masquerading as history with the intention
to have audiences leave the amphitheatre believing what they have just seen. They
are not invited or encouraged to explore the history itself – one could argue that
they are implicitly encouraged not to explore this history. Nor is the amphitheatre
directly sited on the grounds of the massacre; that site sits approximately 20 min-
utes away. The amphitheatre is designed to blend as closely as possible into its
246 Katrina Phillips

surroundings, allowing visitors’ imaginations to wander through the woods. Some

sites of dark tourism invite tourists to simply imagine what it would have been
like in these moments of historical anguish and pain. Others stage reenactments,
forcing audiences to contend with history as it happened. The darkest side of dark
tourism, though, is when tourists are allowed to witness a dramatised recreation,
one that moves beyond historical accuracy and offers an opportunity for redemp-
tion that the people who suffered this trauma never received.
Dark tourism in theory is different from dark tourism in practice, which profits
from pain and suffering, and Trumpet in the Land profits off the annual recreation
of Native trauma. Imagine – in the year 2022 – that an enterprising group of Ameri-
cans intent on boosting their regional tourism economy might turn to the horrific
histories of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Bear River Massacre, the Sand Creek
Massacre, the Long Walk of the Navajo, or the Sandy Lake Tragedy.7 For Native
people, this would be akin to productions that would celebrate the proponents of
apartheid, Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile, the Khmer Rouge’s control
of Cambodia, or Argentina’s Dirty War. The memory work of settler colonialism –
what Patrick Wolfe (2006) calls ‘the practical elimination of the natives’ – runs
parallel to the genocidal practices and crimes against humanity perpetrated around
the world.
I do not make these comparisons for the sake of sensationalism. Native history
is a history of devastation and resilience, a history of violence and ‘survivance’.8
The power of theatre hinges on the ability of the playwright, the director, the cast,
and the crew to provoke both an emotional and a critical response from its audi-
ence. The power of dark tourism hinges on a site’s ability to be interpreted in a way
that provokes an emotional response from its visitors. Here, though, Native trauma
is deliberately painted as a historical tragedy and a drama. This is not to say that
history and theatre cannot coincide – instead, the script takes liberties with the his-
tory of Gnadenhutten in order to elicit a particular response from the audience. As
historian Jeffrey Ostler argues, ‘Pointing out that U.S. military forces sometimes
attacked peaceful Indians […] often evokes a sympathetic response’, but it rarely
challenges people to ‘think more broadly about the underlying causes of the con-
flict’ (2015: 153).

Staging the Story: History versus Drama in the Birth of the

Outdoor Drama Industry
The outdoor drama, also known as symphonic drama, began with Paul Green, who
wrote more than a dozen outdoor dramas throughout his storied career. From The
Lost Colony (1937) and The Common Glory (1947) to Faith of Our Fathers (1950)
and Cross and Sword (1965), Green left an indelible mark on the genre – and on
American conceptions of history. While Green also wrote stage plays, including
the Pulitzer Prize-winning In Abraham’s Bosom (1927), his outdoor symphonic
dramas were a new movement for American theatre. ‘The narrow confines of the
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 247

usual Broadway play and stage’, Green once proclaimed, ‘are not fitted to the dra-
matic needs of the American people’ (Mitgang 1981: 23).
Outdoor dramas are not plays, pageants, or musicals. Historical pageants, for
Laurence Avery, were ‘chronicles, with events following one another as historical
chronology, not dramatic necessity, dictated’ (1998: 11). As David Glassberg has
shown, these pageants, which usually commemorated a particular event in local
history, fell out of favor in the years preceding World War II (1990: 1). Pageants
were never meant as a long-term economic stimulus; instead, they functioned as
a means to bring local residents and communities together (Phillips 2021: 17).
Outdoor dramas, on the other hand, draw tourists and tourist dollars to a particular
place. Roanoke Island, home to Green’s The Lost Colony since 1937, went from
being ‘obscure [and] poverty-stricken’ to almost a boom town with new shops, cot-
tages, and hotels (TIME 10 July 1939: 48).
Despite their insistence that these productions were rooted in history (Phillips
2021), these playwrights turned to ‘the spirit of history’, giving themselves the
leeway to play with historical chronologies and historical figures in order to create
stirring outdoor dramas (Lindsey 1959). When the subject matter of these outdoor
dramas turns to difficult histories, such as the forced removal of the Cherokee from
their homelands in the 1830s (the subject of Kermit Hunter’s Unto These Hills,
which opened in 1950) or the Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s decade-long attempt to
build a pan-Indian confederacy (the basis of Allan W. Eckert’s Tecumseh!, which
premiered in 1973) in the early nineteenth century, the question of history versus
dramatic narrative becomes even more pressing. These tensions underscore one of
the most crucial fundamentals of outdoor dramas and the element that sets outdoor
dramas apart from other forms of theatre – the role of place. Audiences are invited
to suspend reality and allow themselves to be transported elsewhere when watch-
ing plays or musicals. While a production’s location is often crucial to its plotline,
such as New York City in West Side Story or Oklahoma’s eponymous setting, the-
atregoers need not travel to these places in order to see a particular production.
Outdoor dramas, though, are not designed to be touring productions. Like Trum-
pet in the Land, many of these productions center on historical narratives of diffi-
cult, and frequently genocidal, pasts. As a Native scholar of Native history, it seems
imprudent, almost negligent, to call this history ‘difficult’ – for whom is it difficult?
Is it difficult for those of us who know and understand the horrors our ancestors
experienced (and survived)? Or is it difficult for those who do not wish to know,
those who would prefer a sanitised, censored version of history? For the outdoor
dramas based on Native history, this adds an additional layer of complexity. In the
case of Trumpet in the Land, set on the Ohio frontier in the 1780s, place plays as
crucial a role as the actors themselves. The Moravian Massacre, which occurred in
the midst of the American Revolution, highlights the role of place and time in both
outdoor drama and dark tourism.
The traditional story of the American Revolution is one wherein the principal
actors are the American colonists fighting against the British loyalists, the plucky,
248 Katrina Phillips

rag-tag American army against the formidable British army and navy forces. Na-
tive peoples, if they are referenced at all, are usually depicted as misguided con-
sorts of the British who soon disappear from the narrative altogether. They are
rarely depicted as individual and collective forces who, in the words of Colin Cal-
loway, ‘did not throw themselves blindly into the fray but weighed the words and
actions of both parties’ (1995: 41).
Similarly, this narrative ignores the effects of the American Revolution on the
‘home front’ of Native nations as villages and crops and stored supplies were de-
stroyed by marching armies who either deliberately caused the destruction or sim-
ply saw it as an inevitable consequence of war (Calloway 1995: 46, 47). In other
areas, such as the Southern backcountry, the American Revolution was, ‘from start
to finish, an Indian war’ (Calloway 1995: 43). As Calloway contends,

The agony of the American Revolution for American Indians was lost as the
winners constructed a national mythology that simplified which had been a
complex contest in Indian country, blamed Indians for the bloodletting, and jus-
tified subsequent assaults on Indian lands and cultures.
(1995: 293)

The American Revolution was still raging across the colonies and what was, at
the time, the American frontier when Williamson led the massacre at Gnadenhut-
ten. Rob Harper emphasises how the violence and retaliation on the Ohio frontier
were cyclical in the revolutionary era (2007, 2008). Eric Hinderaker argues that the
war on the Ohio frontier overlapped with the American Revolution but outlasted
it by more than a decade (1997: 218). This was a war waged on Native lands, a
war that came on the heels of the tumultuous 1760s. Pontiac’s Rebellion and the
Paxton Boys’ massacre of Susquehannock Indians in Conestoga, Pennsylvania, for
instance, both occurred in 1763. Virginia frontiersmen murdered several Mingo
Indians in the 1774 Yellow Creek Massacre, one of the sparks that lit the somewhat
obscure Dunmore’s War (Hinderaker and Mancall 2003; Parkinson 2006; Middle-
ton 2006; White 1991).
As Gary Nash reminds us, ‘Our history books rarely record the names of Red
Jacket or Cornplanter of the Seneca, Attakullakulla and his son Dragging Canoe
of the Cherokees, Red Shoes of the Creek, White Eyes of the Delaware, or Little
Turtle of the Miami’, men who were as much the dominant revolutionary figures as
Washington, Hamilton, Nathanael Green, Richard Henry Lee, and John Paul Jones.
‘Moreover’, Nash argues, ‘they were well-known to the revolutionary leaders, for
Indian tribes of the interior were formidable adversaries who could never be ig-
nored’ (2014: 282). As Nash and others have shown, Native peoples and Native
histories have long been discounted in the retellings that followed. Native people
become objects, rather than subjects, in history. They are simply acted upon; they
have not been seen as active participants in the events that occurred before, during,
and after the war.
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 249

The massacre at Gnadenhutten, like the Yellow Creek Massacre, highlights the
brutality of the revolutionary era. It also underscores the impossible position Na-
tive nations were caught in throughout the war. David Zeisberger, a Moravian mis-
sionary, preached to the Lenape in Pennsylvania beginning in the 1760s. Born in
1721, Zeisberger immigrated to what’s now North America in the 1730s. He even-
tually became a missionary among Native nations in New York and Pennsylvania.
Like other missionaries who preached the benefits of Christianity, he encouraged
Native converts to stop practicing their traditional ways of life. Zeisberger started
living among the Lenape in Pennsylvania in the 1760s as continued colonial set-
tlement pushed the Lenape west and into Ohio in the early 1770s. Zeisberger built
a settlement at Schoenbrunn, near what is now New Philadelphia, and the ‘suc-
cess’ of his conversion and assimilation efforts at Schoenbrunn led the Moravians
to build additional settlements at Lichtenau, which means ‘pasture of light’, and
Gnadenhutten.
Gnadenhutten, in essence, means ‘huts of grace’, but it can also be translated as
‘place of mercy’.9 Mercy, though, was in short supply as the American Revolution
raged throughout the region. Neither the British nor the colonists entirely trusted
Zeisberger or his assistant, John Heckewelder. The British arrested Zeisberger and
Heckewelder in 1781, charging both men with treason. Other Lenape who resisted
the Moravian push to convert and assimilate also distrusted the missionaries. The
painful irony of the name of this place and the destruction wrought upon it by
Williamson and his militia underscore what is, for Lennon and Foley, one of the
most difficult aspects of the phenomenon of dark tourism – the ‘interpretation and
development of major sites of extermination and mass killing’ (2010: 27).
The Moravian Massacre is often included in the laundry list of what R. Douglas
Hurt calls the ‘sporadic cruelty’ that permeated the Ohio frontier in the revolu-
tionary era (1996: 84). A year before Williamson wreaked havoc at Gnadenhut-
ten, American forces led by Colonel Daniel Brodhead had marched from Fort
Pitt in western Pennsylvania with 300 men to burn Coshocton – another Lenape
­settlement – and to destroy Lichtenau. Hurt argues that Brodhead ‘set a high stand-
ard for the murder of both peaceful and hostile Indians by executing 16 prisoners
who could not prove their loyalty to the Americans’. Brodhead’s victims included
a chief named Red Eagle, who was ambushed and tomahawked in the head as
he tried to reason with Brodhead (Hurt 1996: 85, 86). Other missions, including
Gnadenhutten, narrowly escaped Brodhead’s rampage.
It seems all the more questionable, then, that the OOHDA would turn to the
Gnadenhutten massacre as inspiration for what they hoped would become the linch-
pin of their tourist economy. Why, we could well ask, would tourists make what
Hannah Sampson (2019) calls ‘the worst parts of history a piece of their vacation,
if not the entire point’? Is it what Philip Stone deems ‘memorial mania’, meaning
the exponential rise of dark tourism enterprises (cited in Sampson 2019)? Or is it
the painful truth of history – that, without the Moravian Massacre, the region may
not even register on a potential tourist’s radar? In a place like New Philadelphia,
250 Katrina Phillips

less than half an hour from the site of the massacre, the town’s bucolic feel belies
the region’s violent history. The OOHDA’s decision to make the bloody history of
Gnadenhutten the epicenter of regional tourism simultaneously centres the Mora-
vian Massacre as a singular episode, not as one of many pieces of a difficult past.

From a Road Trip to Reality: The Role of the Landscape in

Trumpet in the Land
Trumpet in the Land is Ohio’s longest-running outdoor drama, and it is one of a
handful that popped up across the state in the second half of the twentieth century.
In 1964, a Methodist minister named Arthur Kirk took a road trip to see two other
outdoor dramas: Bardstown, Kentucky’s The Stephen Foster Story and Cherokee,
North Carolina’s Unto These Hills. That winter, Kirk wrote to the general managers
of both dramas for information about creating an outdoor drama. The general man-
agers encouraged him to reach out to Mark Sumner, the longtime director at the
Institute of Outdoor Drama. By September of 1965, Kirk started forming the Ohio
Outdoor Historical Drama Association, Inc. (OOHDA). Green agreed to write the
script in 1967, and the outdoor drama opened in New Philadelphia in the summer
of 1970 (Phillips 2021: 145, 146).
New Philadelphia is about two hours northeast of Columbus, Ohio; an hour and
a half south of Cleveland, Ohio; and about two hours west of Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-
vania. Like other American towns and cities with outdoor dramas, the focus is not
on what New Philadelphia currently is – what matters is the past. Built along both
sides of the Tuscarawas River in the early 1800s, the town once held abundant
natural resources (Knisely n.d.). Now, though, New Philadelphia feels like count-
less other towns across the Midwest that have passed their heyday and are, in a
sense, clinging to what they once were but are no longer.
Outdoor dramas tend to start around dusk or sunset. It is a deliberate choice,
one that offers a natural replication of the now-typical artificial theatrical lighting
system, and Trumpet in the Land is no different. Organ music plays over the sound
system as ticketholders find their seats and settle in for the show. The set pieces
include a small stream and a waterfall, adding to the ambience of the music and the
murmurs from the audience as they wait for the show to start. The show begins with
a fireplace, ladder, trunks, and a flag that sits on stage right. There is a rock forma-
tion center right, and stage right holds an altar, a baptismal font, and a church sign.
Like other outdoor drama amphitheatres, the Schoenbrunn Amphitheatre makes
the rest of the world melt away. This amphitheatre, like other outdoor drama ven-
ues, is strategically designed to immerse its audience in the site itself, to make
visitors forget how close they are to restaurants, hotels and other structures that
do not fit the eighteenth-century narrative at hand. The amphitheatre is set back
on the hills, carved out of the hill itself. It is an unassuming setting – there’s none
of the opulence or grandeur that might greet you at a Broadway theatre, but that’s
part of the allure, part of the draw of outdoor theatre. Green once called outdoor
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 251

dramas ‘the theatre of the people’, underscoring what he believed to be the differ-
ence between outdoor dramas and Broadway productions (Phillips 2021: 20). It is
the drama’s opening night in the summer of 2021, and as I step up to the box office
to pick up my ticket the woman behind the glass reminds me that it’s general seat-
ing in the amphitheatre.
The Three Sisters Snack Bar sits behind a handful of picnic-style tables, offer-
ing a potential shelter from the weather. I see audience members buying popcorn
and bottled water. A boy drops his bottle of pop, which sprays across the floor. The
Turtle Gift Shop is tucked next to the men’s bathroom. The gift shop is a small
space, not much bigger than the box office. It feels like a time capsule from, say,
the 1950s, the age of B-Westerns and John Wayne, only here it feels like a place
that time forgot. The shop sells foam tomahawks, ‘Wild West’ plastic bow and ar-
row sets, and those Indian dolls with elaborate buckskin clothes and tightly woven
braids. I buy a handful of old programs for a dollar each, hardly believing my luck
at finding potential archival materials in the gift shop.
The opening night audience is mostly older people and families with children.
Some groupings include three generations – kids, parents, grandparents. Several
Gen X/Millennial-aged couples stroll in. A teenage girl tries to describe a musical
to her father because she cannot remember the name. It’s soon apparent that she’s
talking about Rocky Horror Picture Show. ‘Oh, that’s the one where Tim Curry
is the villain’, he says. ‘He’s not THAT bad, is he?’ she replies. Her father stops
dead in his tracks. ‘HE EATS EDDIE’, he says, incredulously. About half a dozen
teenagers, working as ushers, stand along the front of the stage and in the aisles. A
group of ticketholders stand at the entrance to the amphitheatre debating where to
sit. ‘The acoustics make it so there aren’t any bad seats’, the head usher reassures
them, anxiously trying to keep the line moving. Some folks have brought blankets
to keep warm once the sun sets behind the trees.
The stakes here are high. Considering Trumpet in the Land as dark tourism –
moving beyond its classification as an outdoor drama – invites us to consider the
ramifications of settler colonialism and the genocidal practices that undergird the
creation and maintenance of the United States. I have long questioned what is at
stake in the staging of outdoor dramas like Trumpet in the Land. My 2021 book,
Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American
History, wrestles with this very question, and the ongoing erasure of Native history
from the collective American consciousness – and conscience – underscores how
damaging these seemingly innocuous productions truly are. Dark tourism relies on
and profits from pain and suffering. It relies on our desire to imagine the unimagi-
nable. But there is another, more sinister element for Native Studies scholars. Some
might argue that it is possible to stage the story of Gnadenhutten without reenacting
the massacre. But the voyeuristic nature of dark tourism, coupled with the abso-
lution of the audience, requires it, despite the ongoing knowledge production of
Native and Indigenous scholars over the last few decades. The massacre makes the
drama dark and macabre, and it is directly tied to the slaughter of Native people.
252 Katrina Phillips

The continued staging of the production stands in opposition to the scholarship and
in direct opposition to the ongoing advocacy work of Native and Indigenous na-
tions across the country and around the world. What is it, then, about this story in
particular that makes it financially feasible – in short, why do people come to Trum-
pet in the Land? How does Green’s dramatic reinterpretation shape – or obscure –
this story of a difficult past? And, perhaps most importantly, how does Green’s
script make this massacre marketable – and profitable?

When History Comes to Life: The Re-Creation of History in

Trumpet in the Land
Trumpet in the Land is one of Green’s later outdoor dramas. Some of his earlier
scripts included The Common Glory, a dramatised tale of the Jamestown colony’s
formation through American independence from Britain. The drama opened in
Williamsburg, Virginia in 1947 and ran until 1976 (Molineux 2001). Faith of Our
Fathers premiered in Washington, D.C. in 1950 and focused on ‘the benevolent,
wise and just character of the Father of Our Country’, George Washington.10 Cross
and Stone opened in 1965, became Florida’s official state play in 1973, and closed
in 1996 due to decreased state funding. Berea College commissioned Green to
write Wilderness Road for the college’s centennial celebration in 1955, a drama
that followed two ‘mountain brothers, John and Davy Freeman’, in the years lead-
ing up to the Civil War.
While this is not an exhaustive overview of Green’s oeuvre, Green was a mas-
ter at turning history into drama. He used historical figures as characters while
also introducing fictional characters or events that would help drive the plotline. In
Trumpet in the Land, as in his other scripts, Green takes substantial liberties with
the historical events, adding love triangles, stories of unrequited love, and some
comedic relief. Green expertly heightens the tensions between his protagonists and
antagonists, collapsing backstories and motivations in order to center his dramatic
narrative. Green’s decisions, though, offer the audiences at the Schoenbrunn Am-
phitheatre a chance to escape history through the outdoor drama.11 Furthermore,
the casting of non-Native actors in the roles of Native characters offers an addi-
tional layer of protection and isolation from this history. Many outdoor dramas that
use Native histories as the basis for their scripts do not cast Native actors, and many
of the Native nations whose histories are coopted for outdoor dramas are not asked
to consult or creatively participate in these productions (Phillips 2021).
Zeisberger is, as expected, the lead character. Sister Susan, who wants nothing
more than to marry Zeisberger, is another major role. In addition to the named
Lenape characters like Isaac, formerly known as Chief Glikkikan, Green includes
Lenape leaders White Eyes and Konieschquanoheel, also known as Captain Pipe.
White Eyes is depicted as a calm, sensible ally, while Konieschquanoheel is
painted as an angry warrior who vehemently despises and distrusts Zeisberger and
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 253

the missionaries. What Green omits, though, is Konieschquanoheel’s motivation.

While Konieschquanoheel was among those who initially tried to stay neutral, he
allied with the British in the wake of Colonel Brodhead’s attack on Coshocton
and spent the rest of the war resisting American incursions into Ohio Country. As
retaliation for the massacre at Gnadenhutten, Konieschquanoheel helped defeat the
Crawford Expedition in 1782. Later, Konieschquanoheel participated in St. Clair’s
defeat in the 1791 Battle of the Wabash, and he was likely at the 1794 Battle of
Fallen Timbers and perhaps at the 1795 signing of the Treaty of Greenville (Jack-
son 2010).
Here, Konieschquanoheel is one of the antagonists. His open alliance with
Simon Girty, one of the most notorious figures to emerge from the American
Revolution (perhaps second only to Benedict Arnold), deliberately distances Ko-
nieschquanoheel from the wise White Eyes and the pious Isaac. Green describes
the character of Colonel David Williamson in the script as ‘a thin, ascetic, brood-
ing sort of man, narrow-faced, clean-shaven and with a burning eye – a fanatic
of hate where Indians are concerned’ (1972: 45). Throughout the outdoor drama,
Williamson’s narrative arc – and what Green uses as the character’s motivation – is
the supposed murder of Williamson’s mother, beaten and scalped by Natives as a
young Williamson hid in the bushes (1972: 46).
Historical sources that center on Williamson or the Moravian Massacre make
no mention of any such event. In fact, in the wake of Gnadenhutten, Williamson
marched his militia toward the settlement at Schoenbrunn, intent on murdering the
Moravians there. Warned ahead of time of Williamson’s intentions, the people of
Schoenbrunn quickly left and escaped Williamson’s wrath. Undeterred, William-
son and his men turned toward Killbuck Island, massacring more peaceful Natives
who supported the American war effort (Griffin 2008; Mann 2008). I do not make
this point simply to argue that Green and his fellow dramatists did not accurately
represent the past in their scripts. Rather, it underscores one of the foundational
tenets of the practice of outdoor dramas: that the power of the story and the power
of the land collectively supersede the power of the history.
Unlike other difficult pasts – and unlike the international and transnational turn
toward a reckoning with these histories – Trumpet in the Land remains firmly en-
sconced in the vision of what Patricia Nelson Limerick calls the ‘innocence of
intention’ (1987: 36). The singularity associated with the turncoat Girty and the
murderous Williamson increases the audience’s expected sympathy toward the un-
suspecting Lenape. It is an opportunity for the audience, both individually and
collectively, to confidently assert that they would never have acted in such a way.
The character of Benjamin Washington Campbell, one of Williamson’s men who
gallantly refuses to participate in the slaughter, is one of the fictional characters
Green paints as a historical figure. Campbell is in love with Esther, one of the
Christianised Lenape, but a Lenape character named Michael also loves her. Mi-
chael is shot by Williamson’s men as he tries to escape the slaughter, then dies
254 Katrina Phillips

after telling Campbell and his comrades about the massacre. But none of these
characters – not Campbell, not Esther, not Michael – are based on people of the
past. Green’s choices are not rooted in history, and they deliberately heighten the
audience’s emotional connection to the plot while also obscuring the history itself.
Here, as is common across dark tourism enterprises, the audience is implicitly
encouraged to imagine what they might do in this instance. Would they, like Ben,
stand up to the hellbent-on-revenge Williamson? Would they, like Isaac, bravely
accept their fate? Would they, like Sister Susan, faithfully follow a man to a dan-
gerous frontier? In Trumpet in the Land, Green has crafted a drama that squarely
delineates between the good characters and the evil characters, one wherein good
and evil are established through an implicit framing of Christianity as the saving,
salvaging grace. It is a drama that separates the ones driven by love from the ones
driven by hate. After Ben and his comrades bury Michael, the scene shifts to the
fort at Detroit where Zeisberger and Heckewelder have just been released and the
charges of treason have been dismissed. Ben rushes in, discovers that Esther has
escaped the slaughter, and breathlessly shares the terrible news of Gnadenhutten.
The final scene returns to the now-destroyed Gnadenhutten in the wake of the
war. Zeisberger tasks Ben and Esther – along with two other Lenape converts who
have grown close to Ben’s two comrades – with helping build the nation as they
remember those who perished at Gnadenhutten. As the music swells around the
remaining missionaries and their wives, a chorus of voices begins to sing out from
the back of the amphitheatre. The non-Native actors playing the murdered Lenape
have made their way to the rear, behind the audience, and the somewhat startled
members of the audience turn around in their seats to see the darkened, ghost-like
shadows that ‘burst into their challenging call to the audience and to the night
around, the music also thundering forth its affirmation and its command’ (Green
1972: 96).

Dark Tourism and Difficult Pasts

As Miles reminds us, we interpret our lives through ‘the lens of the past, sometimes
for better, sometimes for worse. But in this epic quest for history we encounter a
fundamental challenge: the past exists on another plane of time, far away from us.
We cannot fully access the past because it is no longer present’. To visit the past,
Miles contends, ‘we require a sort of mental time machine, such as the feeling
of transcendence that can be invoked by standing at an atmospheric historic site,
viewing rare objects in a museum, reading a gripping historical study, or perhaps
encountering a ghost’ (2017: 14). The ghosts of Gnadenhutten, which rise every
summer at the Schoenbrunn Amphitheatre, are a fantastical, fictional, and dramatic
recreation of a dark moment in American – and Native – history.
Outdoor dramas, particularly those that use Native histories as the basis for their
scripts, offer up an important set of questions around landscape, historical recrea-
tions, and public memory. History may tell a story and serve as a vehicle for drama,
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 255

even as those histories become repurposed and repackaged for tourists. Few of
these dramas seek to upend the typical story of American history, which then often
requires a reframing of history as it truly happened. These productions also require
a careful consideration of how Native people are perceived in theatrical produc-
tions. In many instances, the allure of dark tourism sites rests on a seemingly sim-
ple question: why? In the case of Trumpet in the Land, it is easier to accept Green’s
narrative structure than it is to accept that Williamson carried out this self-assigned
mission – and several others – without reservation and without remorse. William-
son was not the only rogue revolutionary who murdered innocents and allies, as
evidenced by the violence carried out by the Paxton Boys, the perpetrators of the
Yellow Creek Massacre, and countless other atrocities that line the pages of history.
Death and destruction are hallmarks of dark tourism. The scale of Gnadenhutten
on its own may not match the scale of Tuol Sleng, the slave castles, Nazi concen-
tration camps, or other dark tourism sites. But tourists come to New Philadelphia
for the same reason they go to Chernobyl, the National September 11 Memo-
rial Museum, or the Tower of London: because it is a calculated and consciously
temporary engagement with the horrors of the past.
The staging of Trumpet in the Land mirrors the careful staging of other dark
tourism ventures. The pageantry and solemnity that often accompany curated
dark tourism experiences are crafted, created, and often recreated in order to elicit
particular emotions or invoke particular sentiments, from the Alamo and Robben
Island to Lidice.
The prevalence, popularity, and profitability of dark tourism ventures continue
to increase. At the Schoenbrunn Amphitheatre in New Philadelphia, mere min-
utes from the village of Gnadenhutten, the dramatised recreation of the Moravian
Massacre underscores the power of dark tourism and the power of America’s dark
history. Dagney McKinney argues that it is impossible to ‘fully appreciate’ dark
tourism sites without first learning about the tragedies that occurred in these places.
‘Horrific as they may be’, McKinney contends, ‘these events are a part of a coun-
try’s history – oftentimes their very recent history – and have shaped them into the
places they are today. To fully understand a place, we need to acknowledge and
learn about its history’.
As contributors to this volume, we have been asked to consider the interactions
of memory and history, looking closely at, among other things, the rise of attempts
to reinterpret public memory. The atrocities carried out by the militia at Gnadenhut-
ten only scratch the surface of the lurching, stumbling conquest of Native lands and
Native nations by American governmental officials, missionaries, and militaries.
This history is a collection of difficult pasts, one made even more challenging by
the myriad ways scholars, practitioners, and performers approach these subjects.
As a historian, I have long wrestled with how outdoor historical dramas privilege
the drama over the history. In a previous study, I came to the conclusion that the
history is not what matters in these productions, despite what their promotional
materials might say (Phillips 2021). Trumpet in the Land is no different. It is not a
256 Katrina Phillips

carefully curated museum or a tenderly caretaken space. It is not the Kigali Geno-
cide Memorial or the beaches of Normandy. Instead, it is an ephemeral production,
one that relies on its own intangibility. Staging these difficult pasts requires an
engagement with those pasts – and yet Trumpet in the Land continually evades
that engagement. The drama offers a safety valve, an escape hatch that allows its
audiences to avoid a reckoning with American history. Dark tourism and public
memory both have the power to transcend borders. To reckon with them – and with
the creation and maintenance of transnational memory through tourism in general –
one must endeavor to underscore the critical reformulation of historical thinking
and the practices used to stage difficult pasts.

Notes
1 There were several militiamen who voted against the massacre, and some left the village
instead of participating in the massacre. Two Lenape boys survived the massacre, later
retelling what had happened in the village. See Hurt (1996: 91) and Harper (2007: 630).
2 The use of ‘Native’ throughout is deliberate in order to be inclusive of a larger group.
While ‘American Indian’ is the language used in federal policy, it technically only refers
to the continental United States. ‘Native American’ is also specific to the United States,
while ‘Native’ and ‘Indigenous’ are more broadly inclusive.
3 See Maria Delgado’s chapter in this collection for an analysis of Spain’s Law of Historical
Memory, pp. 207–228.
4 See Flores (2002) and Burrough, Tomlinson, and Stanford (2021).
5 Observations of the author, based on a 2019 tour of the Tower of London.
6 Documentation of these performances are available on stagingdifficultpasts.org. Please
see Cecilia Sosa’s chapter in this collection for an analysis of Pasados conflictivos en
escena pp. 89–103.
7 The Sandy Lake Tragedy occurred in 1850 when President Zachary Taylor colluded
with Minnesota Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey and Indian agent John Watrous
to illegally move Ojibwe people from Wisconsin to unceded lands in Minnesota. Sev-
eral hundred Ojibwe people died when they were trapped in Minnesota Territory over
the winter without adequate provisions, and more died on the return trip to Wisconsin.
The Bear River Massacre occurred in 1863 when a company of California Volunteers
attacked a Shoshone camp led by Bear Hunter. Hundreds of Shoshone men, women, and
children were slaughtered. In 1864, a military unit led by John Chivington massacred
Cheyenne and Arapaho people led by Black Kettle along the banks of the Sand Creek in
what’s now Colorado. This is known as the Sand Creek Massacre. In what is now called
the Long Walk of the Navajo, more than 10,000 Diné people (also known as Navajo)
were forcibly removed from their homelands to the Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort
Sumner in today’s New Mexico in the 1860s. The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 oc-
curred when US Army troops from the 7th Cavalry murdered about 300 noncombatants –
mostly women, children, and elders – along the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek on
the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Wounded Knee is considered the end of
the Plains Indian Wars.
8 Ojibwe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor uses ‘survivance’ to mean both the survival
and the resistance of Native people. For Vizenor (1999, 2008), Native people have not
simply survived the genocidal elements of settler colonialism; rather, they have contin-
ued to maintain and pass down their cultures, languages, and histories.
9 Gnade can be translated to ‘mercy’, and the ‘n’ makes it possessive. Hütten, while plural
for hut, would not necessarily be a literal translation. In essence, it would be a plural
 Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism 257

indication of people living in mercy. Translation and explanation courtesy of Rachael

Huener, July 2021.
10 ‘Faith of Our Fathers: Paul Green’s Magnificent Symphonic Drama’ pamphlet.
11 There are some significant shifts in the 2021 staging of Trumpet in the Land from
Green’s original script, and these are likely not the only changes made to the script since
its premiere more than 50 years ago. Some scenes have been cut, while others have been
slightly altered.

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EPILOGUE
10 Strategies for Exhibiting Absence and Loss:
Objects, Narratives, and Trauma on Display

Joanne Rosenthal

This essay is based on a presentation I gave in Buenos Aires in 2019 at the Parque
de la Memoria-Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado, the Memory
Park and Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. The presentation was one
element of a workshop organised in collaboration with staff at the Memory Park as
part of the Staging Difficult Pasts project. In it, I shared a range of international ex-
amples from museums, artists, and sites of memory which, in one way or another,
spoke to the topic of exhibiting absence and loss. The content of the presentation
was conceived with the workshop participants in mind, in particular artists, aca-
demics, curators, and human rights activists, all of whom were deeply engaged
with cultural production in post-dictatorship Argentina. However, my hope is that
the principles outlined here might resonate more broadly and offer a menu of pos-
sibilities for application in diverse contexts. As was the case with the presentation,
this essay is organised into ten principles to consider when exhibiting absence and
loss. For a topic this complex, and from the length of the piece alone, it should be
self-evident that this ‘menu’ of options is not intended in any way to be an exhaus-
tive survey, but rather functions as an opportunity to consider the principles as
broader strategies or to provoke further questions for the curator.

Show What Is Missing

The first example I’d like to present is connected in a fairly straightforward way to
the central theme of exhibiting absence and loss. It relates to the Isabella Stewart
Gardener Museum in Boston, which people are often familiar with for one unfor-
tunate reason. In 1990, 13 artworks were dramatically stolen from the museum
galleries in a theft that shook the art world. Among the important works taken were
several by Rembrandt and Degas. In the face of this disaster, the museum was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003315827-16
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license.
260 Joanne Rosenthal

forced to consider the question of what to do in response. How to deal with the
loss of these treasures from their collection and the resulting voids in the museum’s
permanent displays?
Their answer was elegantly simple: to exhibit the absence that remained. Where
paintings had been stolen by removing them from their frames, the vacant frames
were left in place, as stark evidence of what was now missing. As noted on their
website: ‘Today empty frames remain hanging in the Museum as a placeholder for
the missing works and as symbols of hope awaiting their return’.1
Additionally, the museum created new art in the shadow of this loss, inviting
the French artist Sophie Calle to produce interventions born out of the missing
artworks. The first of these took place in 1991 and was entitled Last Seen. Calle
interviewed museum staff including security guards and curators, asking them to
share their memories of the paintings. The texts from these interviews were then
exhibited in the museum, together with photographs showing what was left behind
on the empty walls. Returning to the museum in 2013, Calle was struck by visitors,
who, on seeing the empty frames hanging in the galleries, did not necessarily know
what they were looking at. A new body of work resulted from this visit, What Do
You See?, exploring how the absences created by the still-missing artworks had
shifted in meaning over time.

Consider the Transformation of Presence to Absence

In 2008, the Wellcome Collection in London staged an exhibition called ‘Life Be-
fore Death’, which focussed its attention on the mysterious transition from life to
death. The exhibition comprised photographs by the German photographer Walter
Schels who, together with Journalist Beate Lakotta, interviewed a number of ter-
minally ill people of different ages as they came to the end of their lives and antici-
pated the arrival of their own deaths. The photographer was granted permission to
photograph the individuals both before they died and in the moments immediately
after their death.
The exhibition strategy was conceived in a stark, minimalist style: white walls
with pairs of black and white images, depicting each subject before and after death.
Glancing at the left-hand image of each pair, the visitor could meet the gaze of
the individual in question, open-eyed, alert, alive. The accompanying photograph
on the right showed the same person with their eyes closed, after the moment of
their death. The photographs depicted just the faces of the subjects, dramatically
enlarged. Little information was provided, apart from a brief, often deeply moving
text, edited from conversations Schels and Lakotta had with the subjects in the im-
ages before they died.
One powerful example came from a woman called Beate Taube, who died of can-
cer at just 44 years old. A quotation from her read: ‘I think that after I have died, the
suffering won’t show on my face. If my soul is able to float away, as I hope it will, I
will lie there completely at peace’. Visiting the exhibition, I was taken aback by how
 Epilogue 261

peaceful the photographs were. Moving from person to person, there was no sug-
gestion of pain, just a haunting sense of quiet, particularly in the posthumous photo-
graphs. In its quiet profundity, the exhibition was able to confront visitors with the
ultimate loss, the loss of human life; to show the closing moments of each subjects’
life, as well as what is left behind at the very moment that this loss comes into being.

Recognise that What Is Absent Is Often Still Present

In the aftermath of loss, how can museums and galleries show the presence of ab-
sence? This could be absence on a large scale, of people and entire communities –
the disappeared in post-dictatorship Argentina, the victims of the Holocaust – or
perhaps losses suffered on a more individual level. An important characteristic of
difficult and traumatic pasts is that what has been lost is still felt to be present in
some sense, even if no longer visible. What visual strategies can be deployed to
make absence felt and render it visible to visitors in the gallery space (Image 15.1)?
The photographs featured here are stills from a video work called ‘Reflect-
ing Memory’ by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. Attia’s work deals with,
amongst many other things, ideas of trauma, repair, and healing. ‘Reflecting Mem-
ory’ is poetic, layered, and deceptively simple in much of its execution. The film
draws upon the neurological condition known as phantom limb syndrome, a phe-
nomenon that affects amputees or those who have lost limbs in other ways, such

IMAGE 15.1 Kader Attia, Reflecting Memory, 2016. Single-channel HD digital video

projection, colour, sound, 48:01 min. Courtesy of the Artist, Collection
MACVAL, France, Collection MAC Marseille, France, Galleria Con-
tinua, Galerie Krinzinger, Lehmann Maupin and Galerie Nagel Draxler.
262 Joanne Rosenthal

as bomb blast survivors. Although the limb is no longer there, they still feel it as
a part of their physical self. The body feels the presence of something that is now
absent. The syndrome is common and can be distressing and sometimes painful.
In the film, Attia uses phantom limb syndrome as a metaphor for collective trauma
and the experience of communities that have been traumatised by displacement,
exile, loss. They feel the pain of what is no longer there. This is a loss that can be
felt but not seen.
‘Reflecting Memory’ explores the complexities of the notion of healing from
such loss. Using carefully positioned mirrors, Attia was able to stage scenes in
which amputees appear as if their missing limbs have miraculously returned to
them. A lady types on a typewriter with two hands, and a man sits at a table with
both arms outstretched. Only later in the film does it become clear that the subjects
in these shots are amputees. A visual illusion is at play. The lost limbs are conjured
back into being, through reflecting what remains onto itself. These scenes are in-
terspersed with interviews of surgeons and therapists, historians and anthropolo-
gists, reflecting on phantom limb syndrome and its possible application beyond
medicine, as a phenomenon that might help us to understand societal pain and
trauma. Attia describes his work as a ‘reflection about the complexity of memory,
the working of memory, the duty of memory and its representation; about “repair”
as a form of “re-appropriation”, but above all as a form of resistance’.2 The film is
a useful example of how to visualise absence, and in particular, traumatic loss. The
artwork suggests that any hope for the possibility of healing, whether individual or
collective, rests on both our ability to see ourselves as whole, but also our capacity
to bear witness to what has been lost.

Confront Visitors with the Complicity of Looking

In 1997, the Jewish Museum in Vienna staged an exhibition called Masks: An at-
tempt to define the Shoah. The exhibition was the museum’s first attempt to grapple
with the ethics and possibilities involved in exhibiting a collection of objects that had
been in the museum’s stores for several years but had never been shown to the public:
death masks of concentration camp prisoners. The masks had been created during the
Second World War from the bodies of murdered Jews, and, after sitting for nearly
five decades in the anthropological collections of the Museum of Natural History in
Vienna, had been handed over to the Jewish Museum. These masks had been com-
missioned during the war by officials at the Natural History Museum for the purposes
of ‘scientific’ research into the ‘Jewish race’. As such, the masks bore painful witness
to the dehumanisation and objectification of Jews during the Nazi era.
Curators at the Jewish Museum foregrounded this problem of objectification
and display in the concept for the exhibition. Before visitors arrived at the room in
which the masks were shown, introductory galleries laid out the narrative context
for the story of the masks. An array of archival materials provided the documentary
basis through which the masks came into being, such as correspondence between
 Epilogue 263

officials at the Natural History Museum and the Institute, which prepared the death
masks and profited from the trade of human remains. The masks, ostensibly the
centre of the exhibition, were displayed in a deliberately stark and clinical man-
ner, with no interpretation or captions. The anonymity of the masks was at first a
challenge to the curators, closing off the possibility of visitors engaging with the
personal circumstances of the individuals who had been objectified and stripped
of their humanity. But ultimately, this allowed the curators to keep the focus on
the magnitude of the crimes being remembered; crimes against humanity, not just
against the individuals represented in this exhibition.
Walking into the next room, visitors were unexpectedly confronted with their
own faces, looking at the masks just moments earlier. Cameras discretely installed
behind the death masks had filmed visitors in the act of looking and broadcast that
slightly delayed footage in the next room. In doing so, the exhibition executed a
powerful reversal. Without realising or consenting, the visitor was transformed from
subject to object. As the exhibition’s curator Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek has written,

The real centre (of the exhibition) was this room, with its monitors showing the
visitors as they observed the masks. In the end, the focal point was not so much
the other, the other person and her history. It was us, and our own history. How
did we engage these others – who had been othered by being killed – and the
bestiality that enabled their murder?
(2016: 108)

Through the exhibition’s organisation and design, in problematising the display

of such difficult objects, it shifted the focus from the masks to its own audiences,
confronting visitors with the complex question of how we are all to some degree
entangled in these histories.

Personalise the Loss

The next example moves us to the more recent past. ŠTO TE NEMA (‘Why are you
not here?’) is a monument conceived and produced by Aida Šehović, a Bosnian-
born artist. The monument commemorates the Srebrenica genocide, the murder of
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995, during the Bosnian
war. It rejects many of the familiar conventions of monumental architecture, choos-
ing transience over permanence. The artist calls it a ‘nomadic monument’ because
it travels every year to a different city. It is annually assembled and disassembled
in one day, the anniversary of the genocide.
A huge mass of porcelain cups is laid on the ground in a public square, each
cup representing one of the genocide victims. Šehović and a team of volunteers
fill the cups with coffee in a moving ritual of communal remembrance. Passers-by
are invited to participate in this act of commemoration, to personally engage with
the monument. The filled cups of coffee sit untouched, a painful reminder of the
264 Joanne Rosenthal

absence of those lost. The memorial is strikingly simple and yet humbling in scale.
The pouring of coffee evokes the sort of intimate social relations that were violently
brought to an end by the genocide and the painstaking act of filling each individual
cup is an embodied way of honouring every one of the 8,373 individual victims.

Don’t Overlook the Mundane

When it comes to exhibiting difficult narratives, it doesn’t necessarily follow that
the objects exhibited must themselves be weighty or fraught. From a curatorial
point of view, it can often be more effective to tell difficult stories with objects that
are disarmingly ordinary and mundane.
The Museum of Broken Relationships was founded by two Croatian artists in
2006. When their relationship came to an end, they came up with the idea to crowd-
source a collection of objects dealing with the topic of failed relationships. The mu-
seum exists in physical form in Zagreb and Los Angeles and online with a virtual
collection. The relationships explored by the museum are far more expansive than
merely romantic or sexual, encompassing platonic, familial, parental, professional
ones as well. At the heart of the concept is the belief that objects are powerful con-
tainers for our emotions and effective tools for bearing witnesses to pain and loss.
Anyone can donate an object to the collection through the museum’s website.
Object donors can either send the object itself or an image of it, along with a brief
description, which functions as the object’s label. In any other context, a toaster
would be a bafflingly mundane object to find on a museum plinth, but in this con-
text it is far from mundane; instead, it is a symbol of a romantic relationship that
evidently came to an acrimonious end. The caption on the toaster, written by the
owner reads: ‘This is the toaster of vindication. When I moved out and I crossed
the country, I took this toaster. That will show you. How are you going to toast
anything now?’ Similarly, but perhaps more poignantly, is an iron in the collection,
with the object label: ‘This iron was used to iron my wedding suit. Now it is the
only thing I have left.’ In another display, a pile of Werther’s Originals caramel
sweets bears the words: ‘I bought these for you, but you died first.’ We aren’t told
what kind of relationship is being remembered here, but in this encounter with
such a disarmingly ordinary exhibit, a remarkably powerful emotional response is
elicited.
The museum’s exhibition continues to grow and has toured internationally. The
model they have created is incredibly simple and inexpensive to produce. Each
exhibit in the gallery consists of one crowd-sourced object with one caption, writ-
ten by the donor. The stories encountered are moving, funny, uplifting, devastating.
The disarmingly simple objects offer entry points to surprisingly powerful stories.
It is interesting to imagine this ‘single object-single story’ model being used to
tell a more unified, coherent narrative, such as the story of a particular historical
period. What objects might people bring and how might individual testimonies be
utilised to represent collective experiences of conflict or loss?
 Epilogue 265

Reconstruct the Genealogy of What Was Lost

‘Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for
Palestine, 1978’ is an archival exhibition that was staged at the Museu d’Art Con-
temporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2015. This was an exhibition about another
exhibition, using exhibition-making as a medium through which to address exile
and loss.
The Barcelona exhibition took as its subject matter a group art exhibition which
had been produced in Beirut in 1978. The original exhibition, the ‘International
Art Exhibition for Palestine’, was organised by the Palestine Liberation Organisa-
tion (PLO) and brought together the work of 200 artists from over 30 countries, in
solidarity with the Palestinian people. To realise this ambitious project, the PLO
worked in collaboration with international solidarity groups, anti-fascist and anti-
imperialist networks, such as the International Resistance Museum for Salvador
Allende. In 1982, during the siege of Beirut, the building where the exhibition had
been stored was bombed and many of the artworks and most of the archival records
were irretrievably lost.
Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri, the curators of the MACBA show, engaged
in an exhaustive attempt to reconstruct the history of the original exhibition, car-
rying out years of research to recover the remaining traces of its development
and production. Fortuitously discovering the original exhibition catalogue in a
library, they were able to interview the artists and individuals who had been in-
volved to reconstruct the complex networks and conditions in which the exhibi-
tion was created.
Through these excavations into the history of the PLO exhibition, the MACBA
curators reconstructed its lost history through testimonies and collected memories.
They chose to organise this huge volume of stories in the gallery space using verses
from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘In the Presence of Absence’ as a guide. It is in-
teresting to note that the exhibition featured no original materials. Exhibits were
displayed in various forms of reproduction, as photocopies, duplications, projec-
tions. In an interview in 2015, the curators stated: ‘our intention was to recreate a
world that doesn’t exist anymore and of which scant traces remain’.3

Let the Voices of the Missing Speak for Themselves

The Emmanuel Ringelblum Archive at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
is a priceless record of everyday life in unimaginable circumstances, documenting
the experiences of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto. In addition to day-to-day
life, it offers a rare encounter with the inner lives of those who were facing at best
an uncertain and worrying future, and later, as events unfolded, confronting death
and destruction. The archive was clandestinely assembled in a heroic act of self-
memorialisation by historians, writers, and others living in the Ghetto, working
in secret as the ‘Oyneg Shabbos’ group.4 These individuals operated in extremely
266 Joanne Rosenthal

IMAGE 15.2 Permanent exhibition at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Insti-

tute, Warsaw. Photograph by Bryce Lease.

dangerous circumstances to ensure that the material traces of their lives and expe-
riences would survive, even if they might not. The extensive materials collected
include newspapers, posters, artworks, diaries, essays, all of which were buried
for safe-keeping in crates and milk cartons. Whilst a number were recovered after
the war, some are still yet to be found. In 1999, the archive was formally added to
UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register (Image 15.2).
In 2017, the Jewish Historical Institute opened a new exhibition of the Ringel-
blum Archive. The title of the permanent exhibition, What We’ve Been Unable
to Shout Out to the World, is a quote taken from the written testimony of David
Graber, who at nineteen was an active member of the Oyneg Shabbos group. On 3
August 1942, as he buried one part of the archive, Graber wrote,

One of the streets next to us has been already blocked. The moods are horrible.
We expect the worst. We’re in a hurry… Goodbye. I hope we will manage to
bury it…What we’ve been unable to shout out to the world, we buried in the
ground.5

The first-person register of the exhibition’s title is appropriate. Comprised primar-

ily of the extraordinary documentary materials salvaged by the group, the exhi-
bition needs to do nothing more than let the protagonists in this story speak for
themselves.
 Epilogue 267

Inscribe Memory in the Landscape

Opened in 2018, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama is the
first memorial in the United States to commemorate the victims of lynching. It was
initiated by the Equal Justice Initiative to create the space – emotional as well as
physical – for Americans to grapple with this tragic part of their history. The slogan
of the MASS Design Group, the Boston-based design company who created the
concept, is ‘design that heals’.
The memorial comprises 800 steel columns, suspended from above, repre-
senting each of the 800 counties in which lynchings took place. Each column,
or monument, is engraved with the names of the victims where these are known.
Those whose names have not been recovered are commemorated with the word
‘unknown’. Where possible, the age of the victim is included, as well as the alleged
‘crime’ used as justification for the lynching. Gathering this information, which
detailed over 4,000 lynchings, required significant research and cataloguing efforts
due to the lack of documentation in this area. The nearby Legacy Museum displays
jars of soil, collected from the locations where lynchings took place, the names of
the victims printed on the front.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative has said:

I think we have to try to get people to understand that when we confront this
history, we don’t have to fear punishment. I’m a lawyer. I defend people who
have done things that are terrible. And I’m persuaded that each of us is more
than the worst thing we’ve ever done. Because of that, I want to talk about this
history of enslavement and of native genocide and of lynching and segregation,
not because I’m interested in punishing America. I want to liberate us.
(cited in Klein 2020)

Adjacent to the main memorial lie duplicates of the 800 steel columns. These du-
plicates are intended as a call to action to each of the 800 counties represented, to
claim their monuments and erect them on their own territory as markers of memory.
As they lie unclaimed on this site, the columns additionally function as monuments
to the refusal of many to engage in this process of memorialisation and reckoning
with the past.

Expose Multiple, Conflicting Voices

In considering how museums might exhibit difficult narratives, it might be useful
to think about the limitations of operating with a single curatorial voice, as is often
the case in traditional museum exhibitions. Allowing space to conceive of multiple
and even conflicting voices might open up interesting possibilities for new ways to
stage and interpret difficult stories. In Jews, Money, Myth, which I curated for the
Jewish Museum London in 2019, we ended up arriving at the idea of including a
268 Joanne Rosenthal

Jews,
IMAGE 15.3  Money, Myth, view of exhibition gallery on entry, featuring com-
missioned film by Jeremy Deller. Photograph by Ian Lillicrapp.

multiplicity of voices through the complex and fraught process of the exhibition’s
development (Image 15.3).
The exhibition historicised the evolution and circulation of ideas connecting
Jews with money and financial greed. Unsurprisingly, this involved dealing with
material that was uncomfortable and, in some cases, had been produced explicitly
to propagate antisemitic ideologies. One of the most troubling exhibits to deal with
was a nineteenth-century sculpture of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the head of the
British branch of the Rothschild banking family, created by the French artist Jean
Pierre Dantan. Rothschild is grotesquely depicted as subhuman and bestial, clutch-
ing onto bags of coins with demonic greed. The exhibition team reflected on how
or even whether to display such a startlingly offensive object, carefully considering
the ethical dimensions of this decision and the possibilities of finding ways to call
attention to these considerations through the display methodology itself. We con-
sidered a number of options but could not reach consensus. Ultimately, we decided
to exhibit the sculpture oriented away from visitor sightlines to avoid giving it too
much attention.
This is just one of many fraught conversations that took place as we negotiated
the question of how to curate these difficult narratives and unsettling artefacts. At a
certain point, it became clear that the ambivalences and contestations we routinely
found ourselves engaged in deserved some form of expression in the exhibition it-
self. The mechanism we agreed upon for this purpose was a set of ‘alternative cap-
tions’, which made visible to the public some of the invisible processes that were
taking place behind the scenes. These alternative captions animated the gallery
 Epilogue 269

space with a multiplicity of voices, representing the differing perspectives of the

individuals who put the exhibition together. They dealt with the ethics of display
as well as more philosophical concerns, such as how to avoid apologetics when
debunking myths. The caption positioned alongside the Dantan sculpture read

Exhibition Curator: I am worried about the ethics of showing this much antise-
mitic material. The Rothschild sculpture is so gruesome I
wonder if we should even show it.
Museum Director: I know what you mean. That sculpture is really upsetting. I
wonder if we should find a different way to display it. How
about using a mirror in the showcase and displaying the
object with its back to us? That way it won’t be clearly on
show. People will have to make a particular effort to look at
it and will see themselves looking back as they look.
Exhibition Curator: I am not sure about that. Wouldn’t this be giving the sculp-
ture too much attention? Wouldn’t we be perversely treating
it with too much respect?

These captions were among the last texts written for the exhibition, compiled at the
absolute latest point possible before installation began. They had not been part of
our interpretation strategy until the very end. Ultimately, they forced their way in.
Abandoning the need for consensus, we instead decide to harness the conflicting
voices towards a creative purpose.

Notes
1 ‘The Theft’, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/about/theft-story.
2 Attia cited in https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/what-we-mean/reflecting-
memory-2016/.
3 Salti and Khouri cited in ‘Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art
Exhibition for Palestine, 1978’, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232340.
4 See https://onegszabat.org/en/.
5 See https://www.jhi.pl/en/exhibitions/what-weve-been-unable-to-shout-out-to-the-
world--permanent-exhibition, 105.

Sources Cited
Heimann-Jelinek, Felicitas (2016) ‘Exhibiting Murder’, Przegla̜ d historyczny 107.1: 101–109.
Klein, Ezra (2020) ‘Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal’, Vox, 20 July.
INDEX

Note: Italic numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

Abderhalden, Heidi 121, 128, 129, 132; Education 209; La piel que habito/
Sozialer Phantasie 121; see also The Skin I Live 209; La voz
Mapa Teatro humana/The Human Voice 222; Los
Abderhalden, Rolf 121, 124, 128, 129, 132; abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces
see also Mapa Teatro 209; Los amantes pasajeros/ I’m
Abolition Legacy Foundation 168 So Excited! 209; Madres paralelas/
absence 261–262; strategies for exhibiting Parallel Mothers 16, 207–223;
259–269; transformation of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de
presence to 260–261 nervios/Women on the Verge of a
acting 115, 149, 219 Nervous Breakdown 220; Pepi,
activating the asterisk concept 24 Luci, Bom 214; Riding on a Cloud
acts of remembrance 16 104, 105, 115, 116, 119; Todo sobre
Adjaye, David 27 mi madre/All About My Mother
Adorno, Theodor W. 2, 87; ‘The Meaning 218, 224n13; Volver 209, 213, 218
of Working Through the Past’ 72 American Civil War 243
African Americans: co-performance Americanness 13, 24, 26–27
24; diasporic divide between American Revolution 243, 247, 248,
Africans and 23; embodied 249, 253
experience of slavery 31; history amnesia 1, 85, 221, 222
12, 22–23; identity 27; pursuit of Amnesty International 222
citizenship 32 Anderson, Benedict 126
African Continuum Theatre Company 27 Andrade, Oswald de 123; Anthropophagic
Agamben, Giorgio 74–75 Manifesto 123
Allende, Salvador 173 Andújar, Arturo: Pico Reja: la verdad que
Almodóvar, Pedro 16, 207–223; Carne la tierra esconde/ Pico Reja, the
trémula/Live Flesh 209; Hable truth that the ground hides 208
con ella/Talk to Her 224n13; anthropophagy 123
Julieta 209, 215, 220; Laberinto anti-colonial nationalist struggles 138–152;
de pasiones/Labyrinth of Passions history of 151; see also museums;
214; La mala educación/Bad theatre
272 Index

anti-Communists 40, 49–50 Beyond the Sundown 243

anti-theatrical 2 Bhabha, Homi 133
Anushilan Samity 143 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 15, 138,
Apor, Péter 41–42 141, 142
Aranda, Vicente Si te dicen que caí/If They Bharat Mata/Mother India 145–146, 153n9
Tell You I Fell 207 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British
Araujo, Ana Lucia 155–156, 159 Slave Trade 159
archeological fiction 132 Biddick, Kathleen 73
archives 18, 73, 130–134, 149, 168 Birringer, Johannes 89
Argentina 94–95, 97; dictatorship 90 Bjerregaard, Peter 5
Aris Gold 132 black annotation 33–34
artefact 5–6, 8, 91, 127, 139–140, 155, Black Lives Matter 166
160, 169 blackness 23–25, 27
artes vivas 122–124 black performance 13, 22–23, 25; ‘palpable
Asch, Chris Myers 26 black familiar’ 25
Assmann, Aleida 10, 96 black redaction 33–34
Association for the Recovery of Historical Black Repertory Theatre 27
Memory (ARMH) 216, 221 Black women 155–156, 162; stereotypical
Attakullakulla (Cherokee leader) 248 portrayals of 168
Attia, Kader 261–262 body, use of 25
audiovisual documentation center Bom (pop film) 214
(CEDAV) 174 Boric, Gabriel 173, 175
auriferis delirium 125, 135 Borja-Villel, Manuel 124
authenticity 5, 33, 40–42, 85, 127, 130 Borelli, Melissa Blanco 9, 25
Avery, Laurence 247 Bose, Rashbehari 143, 145, 146, 148,
awkward objects 12; and collateral 153n10
memories 77–80, 78 Bose, Subash Chandra 138, 142, 143–144,
Azadee-ke-Diwane (Freedom’s passion) 146, 153n10
138, 142, 143, 145 Boyero, Carlos 223
Azad Hind Fauj 143 Britzman, Deborah 7
Brodhead, Daniel 249, 253
Bachelet, Michelle 172–173, 177, 181, 183 Bruzzone, Félix 98; Cuarto Intermedio
Bachmann, Gábor 41 89, 100
Baderoon, Gabeba 231; Regarding Bunch, Lonnie, III 24, 33
Muslims 231 Bunche, Ralph 27
Bahar, Robert: El silencio de los otros/The Butler, Judith 150–151, 222
Silence of Others 208 Butler, Shelley Ruth 11, 175
Banerji, Anurima 10
Bardem, Javier 213 Calderón, Guillermo 177–178; Villa +
Bear River massacre 246, 256n7 Discurso 177, 180, 180–182
Becker, Elizabeth 243–244 cannibalism 123
Belfast Agreement 8 Canning, Charlotte 29–30
Bell, Vikki 16, 190–206 capitalism 6, 74, 124, 163, 175, 178
Benjamin, Walter 72, 75–76, 87, 106, Carlos III, King 125
111; ‘The Author as Producer’ Carpenter, Faedra Chatard 24–25
85; ‘Edward Fuchs: Collector and Carracedo, Almudena: El silencio de los
Historian’ 75 otros/The Silence of Others 208
Bennett, Susan 139, 146; Theatre & Carrasco, Víctor 182
Museums 139 Casey, Valerie 5
Bennett, Tony 3, 126 Casson Mann 56
Bensaïd, Daniel 237 Castellanos, Ángel Díaz 125–128, 134–135
Bergson, Henri 100 catachresis 134
Berry, Chuck 22 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins 23, 26
 Index 273

Catrileo, Catalina 172 Cuarto Intermedio (Bruzzone and Swaig)

Catrileo, Matías 172 89, 100; see also Recess: A
Cellular Jail 142–143, 145 Practical Guide for Trials Against
censorship 4, 118, 147, 149, 207 Humanity
Cercas, Javier 207; Los soldados de cuenta pública 172–173
Salamina/The Soldiers of Cultura contra la impunidad/Culture
Salamis 207 Against Impunity (documentary
Chakravarty, Ananthbondhu 147 project) 213
Chamorro, Ruben 92–93, 95 Cultural Center Matucana 100 173
Chatterjee, Partha 144, 149 Curry, Tim 251
Chile 172–186
Christie, Agatha 4 Dahl, Roald 4
Civil War: American 243; Lebanese 14, Dantan, Jean Pierre 268–269
104; Spanish 207, 211–218, 244 dark tourism 242–256; creation of
Clark, Laurie Beth 90 243–246; death and destruction as
classic drama 98 hallmarks of 255; defined 243; and
Cleary, Damon 56 difficult pasts 254–256; enterprises
Clifford, James 14, 101 245, 249, 254; and memory 243–
collateral memories 77–80, 78, 86 244; and remembrance 243–244;
collective memory 8, 118 sites 244–246, 255
Colombia 125, 129, 131 Davids, Nadia 12, 16, 229–240; Hold
colonialism: digital 5; legacies of 10; settler Still 16, 229, 237, 239, 240n2;
244, 246; Spanish 12 What Remains 16, 229–231, 233,
colonial modernity 127, 134–135 236–239
commemorated body 16 Decolonising/decolonial actions 3, 5,
common memory 11 9–10, 124
communalism 147, 148, 153n14 Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom
communities (postnational communities) 9, gallery 31–34
17, 63, 96, 132, 144, 150, 183–185, DeFrantz, Thomas 25
222, 247, 261–262 Delgado, Maria M. 12, 16
Condenados (Condemned) 97 Diamond, Elin 3
Connerton, Paul 146 dictatorship(s) 14–15, 26, 89–98, 172–177,
Conquergood, Dwight 24 181–186, 207–209, 212–214, 223,
contact zones 14 245, 259
contemporaneity 60 Diettes, Erika 16, 190–206; Relicarios
contested pasts 7 (Reliquaries) 190, 191, 192–193,
Conwill, Kinshasa Holman 34 195, 199, 202, 204–205; Río Abajo
Coogler, Ryan: Black Panther 22–23 190, 196, 199–201, 205; Sudarios
Cooper, Anna Julia 26 (Shrouds) 190, 195–196, 199
co-performance 34–35; Blacksonian difficult knowledge 7
experience 24; defined 24; difficult objects 263
dramaturgy of 24–25; politics of difficult pasts 10
26, 28 Di Girólamo, Claudia 183
copy 29, 79–81, 130 digital colonialism 5
cosmopolitan memory 9–11 discourse of memory 11
counterdispositives 124–127 Discurso de un hombre decente
countermemory 7, 8 (Teatro) 133
Covid pandemic 191, 194, 203 displays 3, 9, 12–13, 39–44, 48, 130,
Crimp, Douglas 126 160, 260
critical theatricality 3 dispositive 124
Crooke, Elizabeth 7–8 Dolor y gloria/Pain and Glory 219, 224n9
Cross and Stone 252 Doña Rosita la soltera/Doña Rosita the
Cruz, Penélope 210, 212–216, 219–223 Spinster 218–219
274 Index

Douglass, Frederick 30 Faver, Héctor: Lesa Humanitat/Against

Dragging Canoe (Cherokee red chief) 248 Humanity 208
drama(s): classic 98; vs. history 246–250; feminism 13, 22, 186, 219
outdoor (see outdoor dramas) Ferdinand VI, King 125
Dramatic Censorship Act 153n18 Fernández Alba, Antonio 125
dramaturgy: of co-performance 24–25; Ferrándiz, Francisco 209, 216, 223, 224n6,
defined 24 224n15, 225n19
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence 26 First World War 142
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 27 Fleming, Ian 4
Duras, Marguerite 107 Foley, Malcolm 243, 249
Dutt, Utpal 147; Ekla Cholo Re (Walk forced disappearance see enforced
Alone) 147, 151 disappearance
Dyer, General 142 forgetting 79, 83, 86, 197–198, 214
Foucault, Michel 124–126
East India Company 142 Franco, Francisco 207, 213, 214, 218,
Echeverría, Bolívar 130 222, 244
Elejalde, Israel 210, 213–216, 220–221 Fraser, Andre 3
Elliot, Mary N. 29 Frelon, Phillip 27
embodied memory 15, 120
empathy 6, 30–31, 78, 83, 85, 115 Gadar Party rebellion 143
enforced disappearance 16, 187n4, 211–218; Galeano, Eduardo 216, 218; Patas arriba.
engaging with the past 209–210; La escuela del mundo al revés 216
Federico García Lorca 218–220; and García Lorca, Federico 16, 208, 218–220,
institutionalised silence 211–218; 222
memory 218–220; motherhood Garzón, Baltasar 216, 218, 224n3
218–220; silences, secrets, and lies gender politics 5, 16, 219
220–222; and Spanish Civil War generational memory 16
211–218; theatre 218–220 The Gita 145, 152n8
Engels, Friedrich 142, 152n6 Glassberg, David 247
erasure 1, 43, 73, 145, 152, 162, 177, globalism 17
180, 251 global memory 11, 91
Erice, Víctor 207; El espíritu de la Global North 95, 96
colmena/The Spirit of the Godse, Nathuram 148
Beehive 207 Golden Room 97–98
Escobar, Pablo 133 Gonzalez, Anita 25
ESMA Memory Museum 12, 14; La visita González, Felipe 214
de las 5 (The 5 o’clock Visit) 91; Graber, David 266
as site of passage 100–101; trans- Graham, Helen 223
affiliative encounters inside 89– ‘Great Patriotic War’ 1
101; as UNESCO World Heritage Green, Paul 243, 245–247, 250, 252–255;
Site 101 In Abraham’s Bosom 246; The
ESMA trials 98 Common Glory 246, 252; Cross
Estallido Social (social upheaval) 16, 175, and Sword 246; Faith of Our
181, 185 Fathers 246, 252; The Lost
ethics of engagement 94 Colony 243, 246–247; Wilderness
ethno-fiction work 130–134 Road 252
Eurocentrism 5, 9 Grunebaum, Heidi 230
exhibitionary habits 15 ‘Guarded Walls Rise’ 62
experience economy 6 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 140
experiential museums 6
Exteberria, Francisco 216 Halbwach, Maurice 8
fascism 10, 12–13; engendered 86; Halter, Roman 65
Hungarian 39; in Spain 211–220 Hamera, Judith 2
 Index 275

Harper, Rob 248 Imperial Legislative Council (1919) 142

Hartman, Saidiya 156; Scenes of Imperial War Museum (IWM) 12, 13; First
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and World War Galleries 60; Holocaust
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Galleries 53–71
America 30 in-between 14–15, 113–115, 118
Hazrat Mahal 141 India 138; communal politics in 153n15;
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 75 Islamic rule over 141; Mughal rule
Helton, Laura 73 in 138, 152n2; right-wing politics
heritage objects 5–6 in 148; Struggle for Independence
heroic pasts 7 141
Hicks, Dan 9–10; The Brutish Museums 9 Indian anti-colonial nationalism 141
H.I.J.OS 95 Indian National Army (INA) 143, 146
Hinderaker, Eric 248 Indian National Congress 138, 144, 147,
Hindu nationalism 141 148, 150
Hindustan Republican Army 143 indigeneous communities 128–132, 135
Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary indigenous histories 16
Party 143 Institute of Outdoor Drama 243, 250
Hirsch, Marianne 99, 210 Institute of Outdoor Theatre 243
Historical-Artistic Monument 125 institutionalised silence 211–218
Historically Black College and University Integrated System for Truth, Justice,
(HBCU) 27 Reparation, and Non-Repetition
historical materialism 75–76 (ISTJRNR) 206n4
historical memory 208, 210 International Slavery Museum (ISM) 15,
historical trauma 7 155–170; histories of 159–162;
historicism 75 massacres 162–164; resistance
history: vs. drama 246–250; re-creation of 162–164; voyages 162–164; World
252–254; in Trumpet in the Land Heritage Sites 165–167
252–254 intersectionality 96
Holocaust 13; exhibition 46; Galleries 53–71;
historiography 57; memory 10 Jaar, Alfredo 174
hooks, bell 155, 162 Jackson, Mahalia 33
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean 126 Jackson, Shannon 3
Hördler, Stefan 69 Jaffrelot, Christophe 152n3, 153n17
Horváth, Zsolt K. 41 Jallianwala Bagh 141, 144, 145, 147;
House of Terror Museum (Budapest, museum 142; massacre of 1919 138
Hungary) 13, 39, 39–44 Jay-Z 24
Howard University 27 Jefferson, Thomas 26
human rights 15, 18, 91, 94, 98–99, 101, Jews, Money, Myth (exhibition) 267, 268
172–179, 181–187 Jiménez, Danilo 133
humour 4, 61, 98, 100, 244 Johnson, E. Patrick 23
Hurt, R. Douglas 249 Johnson, Georgia Douglas 27
Huyssen, Andreas 10 Jones, Douglas A. 156
Jonker, Julian 230
Ibáñez, Juan Carlos 209 Joplin, Janis 219, 220
Ibarra, Alejandra 176 Jugantar Samity 143
Ibn Khaldun 106
identitarian myths 3 Kantor, Tadeusz 8, 72, 76, 79–81, 83–84,
Iglesias, Alberto 210 86–87; The Country House 83;
immersion (immersive technologies) 13, Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes
29, 40, 53, 69–70, 122 83; The Return of Odysseus 8, 79,
immersive environments 3, 50 83–84; Today is My Birthday 8, 79
immersive technologies 6 Kellerman, Marek 67
imperialism 1, 10, 163 Khouri, Kristine 265
276 Index

Khoury, Elias 113; Three Posters 113 loss: genealogy of 265; personalising
Kidd, Jenny 5 263–264; strategies for exhibiting
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 26 259–269
Kirchner, Nestor 90, 98 Lost River 243
Kirk, Arthur 250 Lotem, Itay 244
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 4, 89 Luci (pop film) 214
Kobialka, Michal 8, 14, 104–119 Lyotard, Jean-François 84
Kovács, Attila F. 41
Krichman, Andrea 93, 102n6 Macri, Mauricio 91
Kubrick, Stanley 4; 2001: A Space Madison, D. Soyini 2
Odyssey 4 Mahatma Gandhi 138, 143, 144, 147–148,
Kumar, Kapil 141 150–151
Kumar, Manoj 144; Mere desh ki mitti 144 Make America Great Again hats 34–35
Kushner, Tony 60, 65 Malvárez, Remedios: Pico Reja: la verdad
que la tierra esconde/Pico Reja, the
Labanyi, Jo 222 truth that the ground hides 208
La Despedida (Teatro) 132 Mangeshkar, Lata 144; Sare jahan se
La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My aacha 144
Secret 209 Mapa Teatro 12, 15, 120–137; De los
La imaginación del futuro (La dementes, ò faltos de juicio 15,
Re-Sentida) 182 120–122, 125–130, 127, 131, 132,
Lakotta, Beate 260 135; Testigos a las ruinas 133
La manada (the Wolfpack) 219 Marco, Jorge 211, 214
La María, Teatro: Los millonarios 182 Marikana massacre 230, 241n3
la movida madrileña 214 Marmato Defence Committee and the
Landsberg, Alison 33 Regional Indigenous Council of
Lanzmann, Claude 65 Caldas (CRIDEC) 132
La Re-Sentida, Teatro 182–183; La Marmato mine 128, 129, 131
imaginación del futuro 182 Márquez, Iván Duque 17
Last Seen 260 Márquez, Rocío 208
laughter 97–100 Marsé, Juan 207; Si te dicen que caí/If They
Lebanese Civil War 14, 104 Tell You I Fell 207
LeDroit Park 26, 27 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) 22–23
Lefebvre, Henri 72, 76 Marx, Karl 132, 142, 152n6
legal process 97–100 Masks: An Attempt to Define the Shoah
Lehrer, Erica 9, 11, 72, 77, 175 (exhibition) 262
L’Enfant, Pierre Charles 26 massacres 242–256
Lennon, John 243, 249 Masse-Mensch (Toller) 114
Library of Santiago de 173 mass graves 16, 208–223
lies: and secrets 220–222; and silences materialism: historical 75–76; new 74
220–222 Maura, Carmen 220
‘Life Before Death’ (exhibition) 260 McAvoy, Eva Nieto 5
Limerick, Patricia Nelson 253 McCormick, Selmon 156
Lincoln, Abraham 26 McKinney, Dagney 243, 255
Liss, Nicky 63 melancholic commemoration 50
Lithuania 45–48 Mellado, Manuel Gutiérrez 214
Liverpool Maritime Museum 159 Mello, Jorge 129–130
living archives 130–134 memorial museums 41
London, Sugar Slavery gallery (LSS) Memory Abierta 90
170n8 memory/memories 2, 218–220; boom 3;
Londoño, Nadis Milena 192 collateral 77–80, 78, 86; collective
Long Walk of the Navajo incident 246 8; common 11; cosmopolitan
Los millonarios (La María) 182 9–11; counter-memory 7, 8; crisis
 Index 277

3; cultures 11; discourse of 11; as multidirectional memory 11

discursive construct 11; embodied mundane objects 264
15, 120; generational 16; global 11, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos
91; historical 208, 210; inscribing Humanos 12
in landscape 267; and motherhood Museo Vivo (Teatro) 132
218–220; multidimensional 5; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
multidirectional 11; and museums (MACBA) 265
11; and objects 6; performed 7; Museum of a National Museum of Memory
politics of 14, 90; post-memory 5, of Colombia (MCM) 17
7, 210; public 3, 6; in South Africa Museum of Memory and Human Rights
229–240; and struggle 229–240; (MMHR) 15, 172–187n2; new
studies 10; and theatres 11, 218– generations 183–184; overview
220; transnational 90, 96, 256 173–176; political analysis 176–
Mere desh ki mitti (Kumar) 144 183; theatre 176–183
methodology of extraction 131 Museum of Natural History 26
Mihály, Mózes 38 Museum of Occupations and Freedom
Miles, Tiya 244, 254 Fights (Vilnius) 13, 39–40, 45–48
Mitchell, Timothy 126 Museum of the American Indian 26
Mitra, Royona 9 museum regimes of truth 3
Mitre, Santiago: Argentina, 1985 102n9 Museum Reina Sofía 120–121, 124,
mnemonic refractions 6–10 126, 129
mnemonic wars 8 museums 2; culture and 149–152;
mnemotechnics 16 experiential 6; of independence
Mockus, Antanas 133 141–146; memorial 41; and
modernity 127, 134–135 memory 11; narrative-dominated
Modi, Narendra 145 139; of past and present 139–141;
Moody, Jessica 159 as performative institutions 23;
Morais, Alberto 207; Las olas/The Waves politics of violence 149–152;
207 theatre-like 42; theatre’s challenge
Moravian Massacre 247, 249, 255 to politics of 146–149; as
Moreno, Alejandro: La amante fascista 182 transferential space 33
Morris, Rosalind 134 Museums of Independence 12, 140
motherhood 218–220; and memory 218– Musgrove, George Derek 26
220; and theatre 218–220 Muslim League 147
Mountbatten, Louis 147 Mustakeem, M. 161
Mroué, Rabih 14, 104–119; Again We
are Defeated 104, 105, 110, 111, Naftal, Alejandra 90, 93–94
111, 112, 119; As if Seen by a Bird Nana Saheb 141
Standing on Top of a Cow 106–108, narrative-dominated museum 139
108; Before Falling Seek the narratives: and objects 259–269; and
Assistance of Your Cane 104, 116, trauma on display 259–269
117, 118, 119; The Crocodile Who ‘Narrative Time’ 28
Ate the Sun 116–119, 117; Image(s), narrativisation 59
mon amour 106–108, 108; Nash, Gary 248
Inhabitants of Images 104; Looking National Commission of Truth and
for a Missing Employee 104, 110, Reconciliation 172
119; Pixelated Revolution 104, 105, National Commission on Political Prison
113, 119; Riding on a Cloud 104, and Torture 172
105, 115, 116, 119; Swept Under nationalism 36n4
the Carpet 104–106, 112, 113, 118, National Mall 25–26
119; Three Posters 112–113 The National Museum of African
Mujer ahora (Women Now) 220 American History and Culture
Müller, Heiner 121 (NMAAHC) 12–13, 22–23; and
278 Index

African American culture 27–29; Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi 177–178,
architectural shape 27–31; ‘black’ 181–182, 185, 188n22
space 23; Defending Freedom, ‘Pasados Conflictivos en Escena’
Defining Freedom gallery 31–34; (Conflictive Pasts on Stage) 89
importance of 25–27; location Patas arriba. La escuela del mundo al
25–27; Slavery & Freedom gallery revés (Galeano) 216
27–29 Pather, Jay 16, 229–240
Native lands 17, 248, 255 Patraka, Vivian M. 6
Nazi Germany 45–46 patriotism 36n4
Nazism 73 Peace Accord with the Revolutionary
necropolitics 3 Armed Forces of Colombia, the
Nehru, Jawaharlal 138, 144, 148, 150 People’s Army (FARC-EP) 17
Nehruvian scientific archaeology 140 Peace Agreement 206n4
Nield, Sophie 48 performance 13, 22–23, 25, 33; black
non-violent strategies 143 13, 22–23, 25; culture 27;
Nora, Pierre 10 historiography 72–77
nostalgia 6, 144, 208 performativities 2–3
Nunca Más 94 performed memory 7
Perón, Juan Domingo 98
Obama, Barack 22 Philip II, King 125
objects 5; awkward 12, 77–80, 78; difficult Phillips, Katrina M.: Staging Indigeneity:
263; heritage 6; and memory Salvage Tourism and the
6; mundane 264; museal 9; and Performance of Native American
narratives 259–269; and trauma on History 251
display 259–269 photography 34, 174, 199
O’Dwyer, Michael Francis 142–143 Piñera, Sebastián 183
Ohio Outdoor Historical Drama Pinnock, Winsome 155; Rockets and
Association, Inc. (OOHDA) Blue Lights 15, 155, 157–159,
242–243, 249–250 167–169
O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey into Pinochet, Augusto 246
Night 220 pluriversal praxis 10
‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Poland 48–52, 72–88, 94, 97
Ukrainians’ 1 Polish People’s Republic (PRL) 49
Operation Barbarossa 67, 71n1 political activism 16
Oratorio (composition type) 190–206, 192 political agenda/agencies 1, 176
Orbán, Viktor 40–41 politics: of co-performance 24, 26,
Ortiz, María Luisa 174 28; gender 16; identity 3, 52;
Ostler, Jeffrey 246 interventionalist 2; of memory
outdoor drama industry: exploitation of 14, 90; metanarratives in 4;
Native Americans in 12; history vs. transnational 14
drama in birth of 246–250; native populism 85, 138, 149
history in 243; native people in post-colonial 10; agency 134; movements
243; native places in 243 18n1; nation 140; states 15; theatre
outdoor dramas 242–256; amphitheatres 139, 146
250; and Native histories 254–255; post-conflict 10, 17
symphonic 243, 246; as touring Postlewait, Thomas 29–30
productions 247; touristic viability postmemory 5, 7, 210
of 245 presence, transformation of 260–261
‘The Presence of Absence’ 57–59
Pact of Silence (Pact of Forgetting) Preston, Paul 222
175, 214 Primo de Rivera, Jose Antonio 211
Pain and Glory 223 public memory 3, 6
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 265 Putin, Vladimir 1
 Index 279

Quinta Normal de Agricultura 187n7 Sampson, Hannah 249

Quinto, Marcos de 223 Sánchez, José Antonio 130
Quirós Molina, Raúl 216; El pan y la sal/ Sánchez-Gijón, Aitana 213
Bread and Salt 216, 218 Sand Creek Massacre 246
Sandhani, Sapna 147
race/racism 1, 2, 9, 10, 15, 73, 74, 156, Sandy Lake Tragedy 246, 256n7
162–163, 262 Sarkar, Tanika 143, 153n20; Bengal 1928–
Rajk, László 41 1934; The Politics of Protest 143
Rajoy, Mariano 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul 112
Ramírez, Juana 133 Sati, Jamal 113
Rancière, Jacques 80 Satyagraha 143
Rani of Jhansi 141 Saura, Carlos 207; La caza/The Hunt 207
Ranke, Leopold von 75 Savarkar, Veer 142, 145, 148
Rankin, John 30–31 Scarso, Jacek Ludwig 3
Rashtriya Sevak Sangha (RSS) 142, scenographic design 13
145, 148 Schels, Walter 260
Rassool, Ciraj 230 Schmidt, Maria 40
realität 5 Schnitman, Juan 98
Recess: A Practical Guide for Trials Scilingo, Adolfo 102n8
Against Humanity 89, 97–100 sculpture of terror 43
Red Fort 138, 141, 145, 149, 152, 152n1 Second World War 18, 45, 243, 247, 262;
Reflecting Memory 261, 261–262 Galleries 53–56
Reina Sofía Museum 12, 15 secrets: and lies 220–222; and silences
remembrance 10, 16, 170, 213, 219, 220–222
243, 263 Šehović, Aida 263
Rendell, Ruth: Carne trémula/Live Sen, Kaushik 147, 148, 153n16
Flesh 209 Sendyka, Roma 72, 77
reparative labour 2 Serrano, Julieta 215
replicas 128–130 Shakespeare, William 115; Hamlet 115
residual trauma 165 Sharpe, Christina 33–34, 157; ‘The Wake’
Resnais, Alain: Hiroshima mon amour 157
106–107 Shiner, Larry 5
restitution 10, 129 Shoah 65
restorative justice 16, 208, 213, 219 Sieg, Katrin 9, 10; Decolonising German
Restrepo, Alejandro Vélez 202 and European History at the
Reznik, Genri 18 Museum 9
rhetoric 1–2, 8, 18, 32, 48, 113, 181 silence(s): institutionalised 211–218; and
Ricoeur, Paul 28 lies 220–222; and secrets 220–222
Rocky Horror Picture Show 251 silenced histories 207–223
Rodríguez, Antonio Manuel 208 Silva, Emilio 216
Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 213 Singh, Kavita 140
Rojas, Tatiana Wolff 174 site-specific work 16, 120–137
Rolnik, Suely 121–122, 123 The 1619 Project 74
Romano, Andrés 205 slavery: memory of 15, 26–32, 74,
Rothberg, Michael 11, 96 155–171, 229–230; embodied
Rothman, Hal 244 experience of 31; see also
Rothschild, Nathan Mayer 268 International Slavery Museum
Rowlatt Act 142 (ISM)
Ruiz, Virgilio Leret 213 Smith, Paul Julian 209
social remembering 42
Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis: Raza 207 socio-political experimentation 3
Sala de Bovedas 125, 128 Sodaro, Amy 41, 173
Salti, Rasha 265 Song of Hiawatha 243
280 Index

South Africa: ethnographic performances 218–220; and museum piece 2; and

in 12; Fees Must Fall protests 232; political analysis 176–183; politics
memory and struggle in 229–240 of violence 149–152; post-colonial
South African National Arts Festival, 139, 146
Grahamstown 240n2 theatrical displays 43
South African Police Service (SAPS) 241n3 theatricality 13, 48, 52; critical 3
Sozialer Phantasie (Abderhalden) 121 theatrical space 40, 44, 48
space: museums as transferential 33; Thompson, Jennifer 180
theatrical 40, 44, 48 Thompson, Selina 162; Salt 15, 155–170
Spain 94, 129; Democratic Memory Law Tidal Basin 26
221; Historical Memory Law 244; Till, Emmett 22–23, 33–34, 36n8
Second Republic 211, 214 Till, Mamie 33–34
Spanish Civil War 207, 211–218, 244 Toller, Ernst: Masse-Mensch 114
spatial dialectics 76 Toro, Guillermo del 207; El laberinto del
spectacle 2, 4–6, 13, 38–52 Fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth 207
spectators/audiences 3, 4, 6, 24–25, 40, 48, Torres, Julio Romero de 220
50, 84, 89, 92, 94, 97–99, 108, 158, totems 60
164, 176 Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (TSG) 159
Spivak, Gayatri 133–134 transmediality 3
Stalin, Joseph 1 transnational memory 90, 96, 256
Star Wars 98 transnational refractions 10–11
The Stephen Foster Story 250 transversal reconceptualizations 12
Stevenson, Bryan 267 trauma: historical 7; residual 165
Stobart, John 165 trauma on display: and narratives 259–269;
stolen babies 222, 224n4 and objects 259–269
Stoler, Ann Laura 9 traumatic pasts 7
‘The Story of O.J.’ 24 Trueba, David 207; Los soldados
Strawson, Galen 59–60 de Salamina/The Soldiers of
struggle: and memory 229–240; in South Salamis 207
Africa 229–240 Trueba, Fernando: La niña de tus ojos/The
Suárez, Adolfo 214 Girl of Your Eyes 207
Subash Bose museum 145 Trump, Donald 34
Summertime 220 Trumpet in the Land 242, 243, 245–246,
Sumner, Mark 250 247, 253–255; re-creation of history
Suner, Ramón Serrano 211 in 252–254; role of landscape in
Swaig, Mónica 98; Cuarto Intermedio 250–252
89, 100 truposznica 79–81, 82, 85–86
symphonic outdoor dramas 243, 246 2001: A Space Odyssey 4
Szuchmacher, Rubén 92, 95, 102n4
Umfunktionierung 85
Tagore, Abanindranath 153n9 UNESCO: Memory of the World Register
Taylor, Diana 9, 33 266; World Heritage Sites 244
Taylor, Zachary 256n7 United Kingdom 94, 123
Tejero, Antonio 214 universal jurisdiction 95
Tellas, Vivi 96 Unto These Hills 243, 247, 250
testimony 43, 65–66, 91, 93, 99, 112–113, US Holocaust Memorial Museum 10, 38
208, 212–213, 216–218, 266 U Street 26, 27
theatre/performance historiography 72–77
theatres 218–220; challenge to State- V-1 flying bomb 54–55, 55
sponsored museum politics Valech Commission 172, 187n4
139; of history 4; and memory Velázquez, Teresa 128
11, 218–220; and motherhood Viéitez, Virxilio 212
 Index 281

Villa + Discurso (Calderón) 177, 180, Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady
180–182 72, 77
visitors and complicity of looking 262–263 Wilczyk, Wojciech 72, 77
voices: of missing speaking for themselves Williamson, David 242, 253
265–266; multiple/conflicting Wirklichkeit 5
267–269 Wohl, Leonard 61
Wolfe, Patrick 246
Wacek, Franciszek 78 Wolff Rojas, Tatiana 174, 178
Wajda, Andrzej 51; Kanał 51 World Heritage Sites 165–167
Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis 105 Wounded Knee Massacre 246
Warsaw Uprising Museum 13, 39–40,
48–52 Yaade-e-Jallian (Remembering Jallian) 138
Washington, D.C. 26; black culture 26; Yellow Creek Massacre 248, 249, 255
black theatre and performance
culture 27 Zafar, Bahadur Shah 141–142
Washington, George 26, 252 Zeisberger, David 249, 252, 254
Wawrzyniak, Joanna 9 Zelensky, Volodymyr 18n1
Wayne, John 251 Ziemilski, Wojtek 12, 13, 72, 80–87,
Weiss, Andrea: Bones of Contention 208 92–97, 99, 102n4; The Impossible
West Side Story 247 Scene 89, 92–97, 100; We Walked
What Do You See? 260 just this Way 80–87
What We’ve Been Unable to Shout Out to zoom 191, 240n1
the World (exhibition) 266 Zubrzycki, Geneviève 4
White, Hayden 70 Zych, Magdalena 72, 77