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Body Traces: Performance Art against Violence in Contemporary Mexico

Abstract

In 2006, then-President Felipe Calder�n declared war on drug cartels in Mexico, and subsequently, an estimated 150,000 or more people have been killed as a result of the ongoing violence. Since the 1994 passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, unknown numbers of women have been murdered, often victims of torture and sexual violence, around the border city of Ju�rez. As early as the 1960s, leftists were being “disappeared” and tortured by a repressive government and police force in Mexico City. Contemporary artists in Mexico have responded to this pervasive violence against the body with an increasingly symbolic language, bearing witness to tragedy on behalf of victims whose voices have been silenced. “Body Traces: Art against Violence in Contemporary Mexico” traces this history of the disappearing body in contemporary Mexican performance, street and land art, focusing on strategies that I call “invisibility tactics,” which include the privileging of traces of the body over its actual presence and substituting either objects or the artist’s own body as indexical references to absent bodies. Further, female artists in particular create work centered on themes of ritual

cleansing and washing as a redemptive action to heal the pain of these absent bodies. My dissertation maps out this tendency for the artist’s body or its symbolic substitutions to do the work of suffering. Utilizing case studies, I examine the work of Nayla Altamirano, Artemio, Enrique Ježik, Teresa Margolles, Lorena Wolffer, and the 1970s “los grupos” movement, among others. In an attempt to, like the artists, bear witness to violence on the collective social body, I argue that, through the ghostly presence that highlights the body’s absence, the trauma of physical violence is rendered most legible. “Body Traces” represents an important contribution to the field of Mexican art history. My project addresses a critical absence in existing scholarship, situating contemporary Mexican performance art within its larger political narrative, and beyond the documentation of hereto understudied artworks, includes some of the first close readings of some of these works. Furthermore, by placing these actions within a theoretical framework that privileges the influence of local antecedents, my work rewrites the history of Mexican performance art from a Latin American perspective.

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