Taylor Diana You Are Here the DNA of Performance

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The Drama Review 46, 1 (T173), Spring 2002. Copyright 2002New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

You Are Here

The DNA of Performance

Diana Taylor

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 31May 2000, 6:30 p.m. Id been given a map and ier. Escracheal Plan Condor, organized by H.I.J.O.S.the children of the disappeared. When Iarrived, it was just getting dark. Young people had begun to converge on the designatedstreet corner. I knew some of them: the members of H.I.J.O.S. who had invited me toparticipate, and young activists from Grupo Arte Callejero. The noise was revving up. Avan, tted with loudspeakers, blared rock music. Activists prepared their signs, placards,photographs, and banners. For all the motion and commotion, I felt haunted. These youngpeople with their nouveau hippy chiclong hair, beards, Andean ponchostook me backto the 1970s in Latin America. Thats what I looked like back then. Thats what their

1. A bilingual sign showsthe location of the AthleticClub, where thousands ofpeople were disappeared.(Photo courtesy of GrupoArte Callejero)

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2. H.I.J.O.S. join hands toprotect against police inter-vention. (Photo by DianaTaylor)

parentsthe generation of the disappearedlooked like. They too were activistssomeinvolved in armed resistance movements, most committed to nonviolent social justice. Now,in the year 2000, a new generation of activists was taking to the streets of Buenos Airestonight to protest the hemispheric Plan Condor network organized by the CIA andimplemented by the military dictatorships throughout Latin America during the 1970s and1980s. This network assured that persecuted leftists were caught and disappeared evenif they were lucky enough to escape their own country. In Argentina, these leftists weretortured in two garages, the Orletti and the Olimpo (among many other places), whichfunctioned as concentration camps. Today, people take their cars there to be serviced, manyof them oblivious to this history. H.I.J.O.S. was going to remind all who would listenabout this criminal history through the escrache.

The atmosphere was festive, but serious nonetheless. Be careful, people warned eachother. In ltrators had been known to join escraches and start trouble to provoke policeintervention. Hold hands. Dont let anyone into the circle. Keep an eye on those nextto you. The giant circle inched forward, our trajectory characterized by stops and starts aswe moved togetherdancing, shouting, singingdown the streets of Buenos Aires. Thevan, churning out the music and running commentary, slowly led the way. Neighbors,listen up! Did you know that you live next to a concentration camp? While you were athome, cooking veal cutlets, people were being tortured in those camps. I looked up to seeour audiencepeople on balconies, behind windows, looking down at the massive spectacle.Some waved. Others closed the curtains or retreated inside. Some must have joined thecircle because there were more and more of us (plate 2). We kept going, rst to Olimpo,where the police were waiting, lined up in front of the garage. Then, after writing the crimescommitted there by the armed forces in yellow paint on the pavement in front of the block-long building, the group moved on to the Orletti. Again, the police were waiting, andagain, H.I.J.O.S. covered the street with yellow paint (plate 3).

Marking the space was thrillingmembers of H.I.J.O.S. and all those accompanyingthem started dancing and singing again. Individual members began addressing our group,talking about what the event meant to them. The trauma was palpable, the emotionalpower contagious, and the sense of political empowerment energizing. Even I, a foreignerwith little personal relationship to the context, felt renewed hope and resolve. I had returnedto Argentina with a sense of lossthe Madres were getting older. Although they continue

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their weekly march around the Plaza de Mayo, I wondered how the human rights move-ment would survive their demise. But here were H.I.J.O.S.young, joyful, and deter-mined to carry on the performative protest. If performance transmits traumatic memory andpolitical commitment, those of us accompanying them seemed to have caught it.

Why, I wondered, do so few scholars think about the way that performance transmitstraumatic memory? How do those of us who have not suffered the violence come to un-derstand it? And participate, in our own ways, in further transmitting it? This essayexplores these questions. Like the movement of the escrache, this essay too is characterizedby stops and starts, ideas that jump in and supplement each other. For reasons that I hopere ect only the subject matter itselfcomplex, multilayeredI have not been able toorganize my thoughts into one uninterrupted argument. The jumps, I believe, are part ofmy experience and my re ection on traumatic transfers. My aspiration is that I succeednonetheless in further transmitting them to the reader.

Escraches, acts of public shaming, constitute a form of guerrilla performance prac-ticed by Argentinas children of the disappeared to target criminals associatedwith the Dirty Warthe undeclared war by the military dictatorship, whichlasted from 1976 to 1983, that disappeared 30,000 civilians. Usually escrachesare loud, festive, and mobile demonstrations involving 300 to 500 people. Insteadof the circular, ritualistic movement around the square that we have come toidentify with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, H.I.J.O.S.Hijos por la Identidady la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio, Children for Identity and Justice,against Forgetting and Silence, the organization of children of the disappearedand political prisonersorganizes carnavalesque protests that lead participantsdirectly to a perpetrators home or of ce, or to a clandestine torture center.Escraches are highly theatrical and well organized. Theatrical because the accu-sation works only if people take notice: Giant puppets, military pigs-on-wheels,and at times huge placards of photo IDs of the disappeared accompany the pro-testers as they jump and sing through the streets (plates 4 and 5). All along theroute, vans with loudspeakers remind the community of the crimes committedin that vicinity. Well-organized because H.I.J.O.S. prepares the community forthe accion: For a month or more before the escrache, they canvas the neighbor-hoods in which perpetrators live and work, showing photographs of them andgiving information: Did you know that your neighbor was a torturer? How doyou feel about working with him? Or serving him lunch? Or selling him ciga-rettes? They plaster the accuseds photograph in the shops, restaurants, streets,and neighborhood walls. When the time for the escrache arrives, H.I.J.O.S. ndthemselves accompanied not just by human rights activists but by those incensedthat they continue to live in such proximity to political violence. With the helpof activist artists such as Grupo Arte Callejero, they poststreet signs that incorporate the photograph to markthe distance to a perpetrators home (plate 6). Whenthey reach their destination, H.I.J.O.S. paint the re-pressors name and crimes in yellow paint on the side-walk in front of the building. Even though the police,always forewarned by the widespread publicity, circlethe targeted property, the protesters peacefully andpersistently go about their work of making the crimevisible. The human rights violators, they remind on-lookers, have not been punished nor, in fact, have theviolations ended. Protesters provide an alternate mapof Argentinas socio-historical space: You are here500 meters from a concentration camp (plate 7).

3. H.I.J.O.S. mark thestreets with bright yellowdenunciations of the crimescommitted by the Argenti-nean Armed Forces. (Photoby Diana Taylor)

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4. A protestor waves a sig-nature H.I.J.O.S. ag thatstates their objective, Judg-ment and Punishment, inthe face of a military pig-on-wheels. (Photo courtesyof H.I.J.O.S.)

5. Escraches are character-ized by their festival mood.Here, a truckload ofH.I.J.O.S. celebrates ontheir way to an escrache.The banner on the truckexclaims: If there is notjustice, there is escrache!!!(Photo courtesy ofH.I.J.O.S.)

While carnivalesque and rowdy, escraches enact collective trauma. These per-formances not only make visible the crimes committed by the military dictator-ships of the 1970s and 1980s, they also make visible the lasting trauma sufferedby families of the disappeared and the country as a whole. However, the inter-related protest movements staged by H.I.J.O.S., by the Mothers, and by theGrandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, use trauma to animate their political activism.They have contributed to human rights efforts by successfully transmitting trau-matic memory from one generation to another, and from the Argentine politicalcontext to an international public that did not live the violence rsthand. Thoseacts of testimonial transfer prove vital to an understanding of cultural agency.

How does performance transmit traumatic memory? The individual focus oftrauma studies clearly overlaps with the more public and collective focus of per-formance studies.

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1. Performance protest helps survivors cope with individual and collectivetrauma by using it to fuel political denunciation.

2. Trauma, like performance, is characterized by the nature of its repeats.3. Both make themselves felt affectively and viscerally in the present.4. Theyre always in situ. Each intervenes in the individual/political/social body

at a particular moment and re ects speci c tensions.5. Traumatic memory often relies on live, interactive performance for transmis-

sion. Even studies that emphasize the link between trauma and narrative (Ca-ruth 1995) or witnessing and literature (Felman and Laub 1992) make evidentin the analysis itself that the transmission of traumatic memory from victimto witness involves the shared and participatory act of telling and listeningassociated with live performance (see Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1996).Bearing witness is a live process, a doing, an event that takes place in realtime, in the presence of a listener who comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event (Felman and Laub 1992:57).

The possibility for recontextualization and transmission of performance andtrauma nonetheless points to important differences. In performance, as RichardSchechner points out, behavior is separate from those who are behaving, thebehavior can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed (1992:85). Thetransmission of traumatic experience more closely resembles contagion (Caruth1995:10)one catches and embodies the burden, pain, and responsibility ofpast behaviors/events. Traumatic experience may be transmittable, but it is in-separable from the subject who suffers it.

6. A sign posted byH.I.J.O.S. informs generalcitizens of the whereaboutsof Massera, a GenocidalMurderer. Below the pho-tos, H.I.J.O.S. post theirsignature logo Judgmentand Punishment. (Photocourtesy of Grupo ArteCallejero)

7. A You Are Here signshows citizens the proximityof El Campito, a formerconcentration camp linked tothousands of disappearances.(Photo courtesy of GrupoArte Callejero)

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Thus, in understanding performance protests driven by traumatic memory, itsimportant to bring trauma studies, which focus mainly on personal pathologyand one-on-one interactions (Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1995), into dialoguewith performance studies to allow us to explore the public, nonpathological causeand canalization of trauma. By emphasizing the public, rather than private, re-percussions of traumatic violence and loss, social actors turn personal pain intoan engine for cultural change.

The protest movements I examine here developed along clear generationallines around the disappeared: grandmothers (las Abuelas), mothers (las Madres)and children (H.I.J.O.S.) of the disappeared, exiled, and political prisoners of theDirty War. Just as the generations share genetic materials, which these groupshave actively traced through DNA testing, there are performance strategieswhat I will provisionally call the DNA of performancethat link their forms ofactivism. One important feature is that these groups see themselves linked ge-netically, politically, and performatively. Here I will look at various iterations ofperformance protest involving photography that have taken place over the past25 years. One clear strategy that reveals both the continuation and transformationof cultural materials becomes recognizable in the use of photo IDs to bring to-gether the scienti c (DNA testing) and performative claims in transmittingtraumatic memory. Strategies, like people, have histories. In this case, the strat-egies work to reappear those who have been erased from history itself.

From 1977, almost at the beginning of the Dirty War, the Abuelas and theMadres started calling public attention to the dictatorships practice of disap-pearing those who opposed them in any way. Among the 30,000 disappearedwho were tortured and murdered, 10,000 of them were women, hundreds ofthem pregnant. They were killed as soon as they gave birth. Their children, bornin captivity, were disappearednot killed in this case but adopted by militaryfamilies. There are still about 500 disappeared childrenyoung people bornin Argentine concentration camps between 1976 and 1983 who may know littleor nothing about the circumstances surrounding their births. However, the mili-tary did not abduct the young children who had already been born to the peoplethey disappeared. These, whom I will call children of the disappeared (as op-posed to the disappeared children), were born before their parents were ab-ducted and were raised by their relatives. Like their disappeared siblings, many ofthese young people grew up knowing little or nothing about their parents. Onemember of H.I.J.O.S. told me that he grew up believing that his parents had beenkilled in an automobile accident. His relatives lied because they did not wanthim, like his parents, to put himself in danger by becoming involved in socialactivism. So there are two sets of children: the disappeared children, who usuallydo not know their history and, hence, the existence of these brothers and sisters;and the children of the disappeared, many of them now informed and active inH.I.J.O.S., who continue to look for their siblings and pursue social justice.

While H.I.J.O.S. explicitly acknowledge their many debts to Abuelas andMadresespecially, perhaps, the fact that these women initiated the genre ofperformance protest now internationally associated with the disappearedtheirown performances re ect ensuing political and generational changes. What strat-egies get transmitted? How do these groups use performance to make a claim?

Lets look rst at how the Madres and Abuelas perform their accusations anddemands.

The spectacle of elderly women in white head scarves carrying huge placardswith photo IDs of their missing children has become an international icon ofhuman rights and womens resistance movements. By turning their interruptedmourning process into one of the most visible political discourses of resistanceto terror (Suarez-Orozco 1991:491) the Abuelas and Madres introduced a model

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of trauma-driven performance protest.1 Each Thursday afternoon, for the past 25years, the women have met in Plaza de Mayo to repeat their show of loss andpolitical resolve. At rst, at the height of the military violence, 14 women walkedaround the Plaza two-by-two, arm-in-arm, to avoid prohibitions against publicmeetings. Though ignored by the dictatorship, the womens idea of meeting inthe square caught on throughout the country. Before long, hundreds of womenfrom around Argentina converged in the Plaza de Mayo in spite of the increasingmilitary violence directed against them (see Taylor 1997:186189). Ritualistically,they walked around this square, located in the heart of Argentinas political and nancial center. Turning their bodies into billboards, they used them as conduitsof memory. They literally wore the photo IDs that had been erased from of cialarchives. Week after week in the Plaza de Mayo, the Madres accused the militaryof disappearing their children and demanded that they be returned alive (aparicioncon vida). After the worst moment of military violence passed, Abuelas andMadresstarted carrying a huge banner in front of them as they walked around the Plaza.With the return to democracy in 1983, they began to accuse the new governmentof granting impunity to the criminals (plates 8 and 9).

Using loudspeakers, they continued to bring charges, naming their childrenand naming those responsible for abducting them. They called the Plaza theirown, and inscribed their emblematic scarves in white paint around the perimeter(plate 9). Even now, they continue their condemnation of the governments com-placency in regard to the human rights abuses committed during the Dirty War(plate 10). Otro govierno, misma impunidad means different government, sameimpunity. Each claim has been backed by performative evidencethe placardswith the photo IDs, the list of atrocities, the identity of repressors. Much as theAbuelas relied on DNA testing to con rm the lineages broken by the military,they and the Madres continue to use photo IDs of their missing children as yetanother way to establish truth and lineage.

This representational practice of linking the scienti c and performative claimis what I call the DNA of performance. What does the performative proofaccomplish that the scienti c cannot achieve on its own? How does this repre-sentational practice lay a foundation for movements that will come after it?

DNA functions as a biological archive of sorts, storing and transmitting thecodes that mark the speci city of our existence both as a species and as individ-uals.2 Yet it also belongs to the human-made archive, forensic or otherwise. Thishuman-made archive maintains what is perceived as a lasting corerecords, doc-uments, photographs, literary texts, police les, ngerprint and DNA evidence,digital materials, archaeological remains, bonessupposedly resistant to changeand political manipulation. What changes, over time, the archive maintains, is thevalue, relevance, or meaning of the remainshow they get interpreted, evenembodied. The scienti c, archival evidence of DNA offered by the Abuelaswas clearly central to their strategy of tracing their loved ones while accusing themilitary of their disappearance.

Testimonial transfers and performance protest, on the other hand, are twoforms of expressive social behavior that belong to the discursive workings of whatI have called the repertoire. The repertoire stores and enacts embodiedmem-orythe traumatic or cathartic shudder, gestures, orality movement, dance,songin short, all those acts usually thought of as live, ephemeral, nonre-producible knowledge. The embodied experience and transmission of traumaticmemorythe interactions among people in the here and nowmake a differ-ence in the way that knowledge is transmitted and incorporated. The type ofinteraction might range from the individual (one-on-one psychoanalytic session)to the group or state level (demonstrations, human rights trials). The embodiedperformative dimension of these protests was as important as the scienti c evi-

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dence because it brought attention to the national tragedy in the rst place.Abuelas and Madres performed the proof. On a state level, human rights trialsand commissions, such as Argentinas National Commission on the Disappeared(which issued Nunca Mas [1986] to report its ndings) or South Africas Truthand Reconciliation Commission, understand the importance of live hearings inmaking citizens feel like co-owners of the countrys traumatic past.3

In-between and overlapping systems of knowledge and memory constitute avast spectrum that might combine the workings of the permanent and theephemeral in different ways. Each system of containing and transmittingknowledge exceeds the limitations of the other. The live can never be con-tained in the archive; the archive endures beyond the limits of the live.

DNA of performance, then draws from two heuristic systems, not only thebiology and the performance, but the archive and repertoire. The linkage refutescolonial notions that the archival and biological is more lasting or accurate thanembodied performance practice. Both binary systems prove fragile on an indi-vidual basis, both susceptible to corruption and decay. Biologist RichardDawkinsmakes an important contribution to our thinking about genetic and cultural formsof transmission that helps in thinking about the repertoire/archive: the culturalreplicators he calls memes (coined to evoke imitation, memory, and the Frenchmeme to sound like gene). Examples of memes include many of the same em-bodied practices and forms of knowledge that I associate with the repertoire:tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of buildingarches (1976:206). Though a scientist, Dawkins challenges prejudices that val-orize the permanence of the archival and scienti c over the repertoire. Neitherindividual genetic or memetic materials usually last more than three genera-tions.4 Books fall apart, and songs may be forgotten. Transmission is a form of ormeans towards longevity, but it does not guarantee longevity or permanence.Things disappear, both from the archive and the repertoire. Neither cancopying- delity (208), as Dawkins calls it, account for transmission; this tooproves faulty, both with genes and memes, in the archive and in the repertoire.Ideas and evidence change, at times beyond recognition. Cultural materials,Dawkins concludes, survive if they catch on. Memes need to be realized phys-ically (207) in the public arena. The Madres movement, Dawkins would say,

8. In the early days of theprotests of the Madres delPlaza de Mayo, mothersand grandmothers of thedisappeared waved the dia-pers, on which they hadpinned the childrens photos(1983). Signs in the back-ground read: No: to Am-nesty, Judgment andPunishment; the banner infront of the women reads:Grandmothers of thePlaza de Mayo. The dis-appeared and detained forpolitical reasons. Mothers ofthe Plaza de Mayo.(Photo by GuillermoLoiacono)

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9. Madres de Plaza deMayo continue their con-demnation of their govern-ments human rights abuses(2000). They carry a bannerthat reads: Those who ac-cept economic restitution [of-fered by the government tothe families of the disap-peared] prostitute them-selves. (Photo by DianaTaylor)

was a meme that caught on. Human rights movements throughout LatinAmer-ica, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and other areas have started per-forming photographs of their disappeared. Each new manifestation of theperformance re ects individual characteristics, yet it belongs to a recognizablefamily or genre.

DNA of performance, however, differs somewhat from Joseph Roachs ge-nealogies of performance. In thinking about the transmission of cultural mem-ory, Roach explores:

how culture reproduces and re-creates itself by a process that can best bedescribed by the word surrogation. In the life of a community, the processof surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceivedvacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fab-ric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of de-parture [...] survivors attempt to t satisfactory alternatives. (1996:2)

His example: The King is dead, long live the King. Surrogation explainsnumerous reiterations that involve a narrowing down: instead of the two royalindividuals, we have one King. The act of substitution erases the antecedent.King is a continuous role that endures regardless ofthe many individuals who might come to occupy thethrone. The model of surrogation stresses seeminglyuninterrupted continuity over what might be read asrupture, the recognizable one over the particularitiesof the many.

While it is imperative to think of performance as apractice that persists and participates in the transmissionof knowledge and identity through surrogation, it isequally urgent to note the cases in which surrogationas a model for understanding cultural continuity is re-jected precisely because, as Roach notes, it allows forthe collapse of vital historical links and political moves.Whether one sees cultural memory relying on or re-

10. Madres de Plaza deMayo carry protest signsthat read Another govern-ment, the same sell-outand Another government,the same impunity (2000).(Photo by Diana Taylor)

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11. The Anatomy ofGenerals shows how pho-tography was used as evi-dence during the Trial ofthe Generals in 1985.(Photo by Daniel Muzio)

jecting surrogation might well depend on the beholder. There are many examplesin the colonial history of the Americas of colonizers and evangelists celebratingsuccessful substitutions (believing that their values and images had supplantedpagan ones) when in fact a performative shift and doubling had occurred thatboth preserved and protected the antecedents.5 A pagan deity might continueto exist within the Catholic image meant to replace it without the colonizersknowing. The strategy of using photographs of the disappeared, which links thesevarious movements, is also a way of highlighting, rather than lling, those va-cancies created by disappearance. Thinking about a DNA of performance helpsfocus on certain kinds of transmission that refuse surrogation. The use of theseimages suggests, as does the analysis of DNA, that some things do not disap-pearevery link is there, visible, resistant to surrogation. Grandmothers, moth-ers, the disappeared, and the children establish a chain in and throughpresentation and representation.

These claimsthe genetic and the performativework together. The rela-tionship is not simply metaphoric. Rather, I see both as interrelated heuristicsystems. They are linked and mutually sustaining models that we have developedto think about the transmission of knowledge. Moreover, they work both ways.Forensic specialists have long relied on representation, performance, and live pre-sentation to convey an understanding of their ndings.

The photograph Anatomy of Terrorism (plate 11) shows the use of photog-raphy as evidence during the Trial of the Generals which, in 1985, broughtthe nine leaders of the three consequitive military dictatorships from 1976 to 1983to trial for crimes against humanity. The room is in darkness; the audience sitsfacing the illuminated screen; a director asks people to focus on the photographof the cracked skull. The scales of justice, engraved on the high-back chair to theleft, promise due process. The demonstration effects social change, as those inattendance have the power to pass judgment. Scienti c explanations and proofs,the photograph shows, depend for their validity on the way in which they arepresented and viewed by jury and judge. The theatrical nature of this presentationis not metaphoricrather it delivers the claim itself. Facts cannot speak for them-selves. The case needs to be convincingly presented. So too, thinking about a

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DNA of performance means that performance contributes to the proof of theclaim itself.

The photographs used by Abuelas and Madres and later (in a rather differentway) by H.I.J.O.S. present a kind of proof, evidence of the existence of the peoplein them. The photos became particularly vital at the beginning of themovements,in the absence of other social and legal structures that could redress the crimesagainst humanity committed by the armed forces. Like DNA, the photo IDsstrive to establish the uniqueness of each individual. No two human beings havethe exact same DNA, even though our shared genetic makeup is strong enoughto link us all to the prehistoric Lucy. Like DNA testing, photo IDs usually serveto identify strangers in relation to the State.6 Normally categorized, decontex-tualized, and led away in of cial or police archives, they grant the governmentpower over the marked citizen. Photographed in conditions of absolute same-nesswhite background, frontal pose, hair back, ears exposed, no jewelrytheindividual differences become more easily accessible to scrutiny and positiveidenti cation. The tight framing allows for no background information, nocontext, no network of relationships. The images appear to be artless andprecise. Yet they are highly constructed and ideological, isolating and freezing anindividual outside the realm of meaningful social experience. The images tendto be organized in nonaf liative categoriesthat is, individuals may be classi edas criminals or subversives but not as members of a particular family.

DNA and photography offer radically different proofs of presence of course,each one making visible what is totally inaccessible to the other. We cant test aphotograph for DNA any more than we can recognize physiognomies by lookingat our genes. But both DNA and photographs transmit highly coded information.Like DNA, the images and strategies conveyed through these performances buildon prior material, replicating and transforming the received codes. Not all theinherited materials get reusedsome are incorporated selectively, others get dis-carded as junk DNA. DNA, moreover, does not dictate biological determin-ism. Recent studies have shown the degree to which it is capable of changing,rather than simply transmitting codes in the process of cultural adaptation throughmessenger RNA. So too, these performances change the socio-political en-vironment even as they develop within it. The information conveyed throughthe performances, like the genetic information, appears in highly coded andconcentrated, yet eminently readable form. The images function asmarkers, iden-tifying an entire movement.

The performance protest using photographs in itself was an example of ad-aptation to the political context. In Argentina, the photo ID has played a centralrole both in the tactics of the armed forces and in the protests by relatives of thedisappeared. When a whole class of individuals (classi ed as criminals and sub-versives) was swept off the streets, their images in the archives disappeared withthem. Although the government claimed not to know anything about the missingpersons, witnesses have testi ed that they saw of cials destroy the IDs and otherimages of prisoners in their control (Pantoja 2000). Families of the disappearedtesti ed that members of the military or paramilitary task forces raided theirhomes and stole photographs of their victims even after the military had disap-peared the victims themselves (see Taylor 1997:277, n.13). The idea, supposedly,was that by disappearing the documentary evidence of a human life one coulderase all traces of the life itself. This strategy works as the negative image of whatRoland Barthes has called the special credibility of the photograph (1985:10).Destroy the photograph; destroy the credibility or the very existence of a life.Both the Madres and the military enactin their own waysthe faith in pho-tography as one particular type of evidence.

When the Madres took to the Plaza to make the disappearances visible, they

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12. & 13. The use of mir-rors in the photography ex-hibit Memoria Gra ca deAbuelas de Plaza deMayo forces the spectator toask herself whether or notshe is one the children of thedisappeared. (Photos byGabriella Kessler; courtesyof Paula Siganevich)

activated the photographsperformed them. The need for mobility, combinedwith the importance of visibility from a distance, determined the oversized, yetlight placards that the women paraded around the plaza. This, like all perfor-mances, needed to engage the onlooker. Would the national and internationalspectators respond to their actions, or look away? And by wearing the small IDsaround their necks, the Madres turned their bodies into archives, preserving, anddisplaying the images that had been targeted for erasure. Instead of the body inthe archive associated with surveillance and police strategies, they staged the ar-chive in/on the body, af rming that embodied performance could make visiblethat which had been purged from the archive.7 Wearing the images, like a secondskin, highlighted the af liative relationship that the military tried to annihilate.The Madres created an epidermal, layered image, superimposing the faces of theirloved ones on themselves. These bodies, the images made clear, were con-nectedgenetically, af liatively, and now of course politically. This representa-tional tactic of indexibility mirrored the more scienti c one undertaken by theAbuelasto establish the genetic link between the surviving family membersand the missing children by tracing DNA.

The Abuelas, in turn, picked up the representational strategies used by theMadres to further develop the use of photography in searching for their disap-peared grandchildren. While they have continued to use DNA testing to nd themissing, they have also begun to rely heavily on photography. In a recent ex-hibitMemoria Gra ca de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo at the Centro Cultural Re-coleta in Buenos Aires (April 2001)they displayed the same photographs thatthe Madres have long paraded around the plaza. Here, they set up the photos infamily unitsthe photos of the missing father and the missing mother. Next toit, however, they inserted a mirror in place of the photo of the disappeared child.Spectators looking into that mirror need to ask themselves: Am I the missingchild? Plates 12 and 13 show a mother and daughter walking through the space.Although a photography exhibit might seem to belong more to the archivethan to the embodied repertoire, this one works like a performance installationthat produces shock and hopefully, on some level, recognition. Themuseum spaceitself transforms into a politically haunted yet all-toolive environment oftrauma. A person cannot walk through the space without being caught in the

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frame. The installation demands live participation and identi cation. Even thephotographer, as these images illustrate, nds herself re ected and implicated inthis exhibit that does not allow itself to be viewed or photographed withoutengagement. The spectator may not be the disappeared child, but 500 childrenremain disappeared. Not just personal, or even national, issues of memory andidentity are at stake. As the Abuelas put it, encontrarlos es encontrarnos ( ndingthem is nding ourselves; Abuelas 2001). Memory, as the Abuelas installationmakes clear, is an active political practice: When they ask us what we do, wecan respond, we remember (Abuelas 2001). Traumatic memory intervenes,reaches out, catches the spectators unaware, and places them directly within theframework of violent politics. The mirrors remind the onlookers that there areseveral ways of being there. The DNA of performance places participants andspectators in the genealogical line, heirs to a continuing struggle for nationalidentity and de nition.

Like Abuelas and Madres, associations that politicize af liative bonds, H.I.J.O.Semphasizes the groups identity as an organization based on (but not reduced to)biological kinship. Just as the Madres consider themselves socio-political mothersof all the disappeared, so too H.I.J.O.S. struggle to ensure justice for all thedisappeared by bringing criminals to trial: Juicio y castigo ( justice and punish-ment) is their motto and their sights are clearly set on the repressors. Memory,for most of these young people who grew up without their parents, is also, onone level, a political project.

Like the Madres, H.I.J.O.S continue their ght against impunity and forgettingthrough the highly visible use of public spectacle, using their bodies to humiliatethose in power. Like the Madres, H.I.J.O.S. meet at a predetermined time andplace to carry out their protest en masse. Other visual features of their activismresemble the Madresthe use of the long horizontal banner with their nameon it (plate 14) and the large placard photographs of the disappeared (plate 15).

Nonetheless, their performances in fact look and feel very different. WhileH.I.J.O.S., like Abuelas and Madres, admit that their personal loss animates them,they act from a position of joy and hope (Hemispheric Institute 2000). Insteadof the ritualistic protest and mourning of the Madres, con ned to the Plaza de

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14. The H.I.J.O.S. marchbehind a long, horizontalbanner similar to one usedby the Madres. (Photo cour-tesy of H.I.J.O.S.)

Mayo, H.I.J.O.S. organize carnivalesque escraches. The word escrache is ety-mologically related to scrace`,which is the equivalent of expectorar, meaning roughlyto expose (Lillo 1982). While in fact Abuelas and Madres have been exposingthe military since the two groups began, their staging differed from theH.I.J.O.S.s: they chose to focus their claims on the disappeared (and by extensionaccuse the military) rather than directly outing individuals and organizations.Because they entered the public arena more than a decade after the fall of themilitary, H.I.J.O.S. can afford to be more confrontational and daring in their useboth of techniques and of public space. Setting off into the dark corners of BuenosAires during the Dirty War would have proved suicidal; Abuelas and Madres, bynecessity, had to stay in the most visible place in Argentina and emphasize thetraditional (nonconfrontational) nature of their demands. They presented them-selves simply as harmless mothers looking for their children. Members ofH.I.J.O.S can directly challenge perpetrators and force Argentinas criminal poli-tics and politicians into the open. Now in their 20s, they enjoy the physicalexertion that characterizes their brand of activism. Their targets range from little-known physicians who assisted in torture sessions to the CIA, to the notoriousAstiz (known as the angel of death, who in ltrated theMadres group and killed14 of them), to the U.S.-run School of the Americas that trained torturers, tothe infamous Campo Olimpo and Plan Condor. The escraches aim to heightenpublic awareness, emphasizing that these crimes, criminals, and criminal orga-nizations continue to go unpunished, even under todays supposedly democraticgovernment. Current neoliberal economic policies in Latin America, they argue,simply continue the economic policies of the dictatorship in more modern guise.

H.I.J.O.S. also promise to continue: Si no hay justicia, hay escrache (if theresno justice, there will be escraches). Two can play the waiting game. The agingAbuelas and Madres have spawned the next generation of activists. H.I.J.O.S. alsocontinue to use photographs in several different ways: they hunt down recentphotographs of their military targets to use in their escraches and in their publi-cations (plate 16). Military repressors, not surprisingly, are now the rst to burntheir own photographs as they struggle to change their look and reinvent iden-

DNA of Performance 163

15. Like the Madres,H.I.J.O.S. carry large plac-ard photographs of the dis-appeared in their protestactions. (Photo by MarianoTealdi)

tities. (To paraphrase Barthes yet again: eliminate the photograph, eliminate thecriminal/crime.) H.I.J.O.S. follow their prey and sneak photographs of themwhen no recent ones are available. Some might argue that this is one example ofways in which H.I.J.O.S. inherit strategies used by the military as well as by theMadres. H.I.J.O.S., after all, target the perpetrators, follow them to their homes,and make sure that they feel watched and unsafe no matter where they are. Theyorchestrate a public relations war on their enemies, just as the military tried toconvince the general population that their victims were dangerous guerrillas. Thedifference, of course, is that their tactics serve to identify individuals responsiblefor gross crimes against humanity. And the performative interruption, no matterhow unwelcome, does not engage in violence or threaten the criminals life.H.I.J.O.S., like Madres and Abuelas, claim institutional justice, not private ven-geance.

Another use of photography is far more personal, related to themore individualand private dimension of trauma. While H.I.J.O.S., like Madres and Abuelas, donot highlight individual or personal loss and trauma, trauma de nes them, notjust as individuals haunted by personal loss and pain, but as a group shaped inresponse to atrocity. Some members of H.I.J.O.S. form collages and installationswhere they insert their own photographs next to their missing parent(s). Thesenew family photographs of course give a sense of physical proximity and in-timacy that was denied them in reality.

As individuals, some children of the disappeared from Tucuman sat for a seriesof 33 portraits by Julio Pantoja, an important Argentine photographer who tookthese images as his own act of protest in the face of ongoing political impunity.8

Asked to decide for themselves how they would like to be represented in thephotos, these young people depicted their personal pain and their continuedstruggle with their history. Of the 33 photographs in the collection, 12 of thechildren posed with a photo of the disappeared parent. The centrality of thephotographs, on one level, bespeaks a profound personal truth: these childrenonly know their parents from photographs. Many of them are now the same ageas their parents were when they disappeared (plates 17, 18, and 19).

These portraits illuminate the political hauntology, which I de ned elsewhereas the moment of post-disappearance [...] that visualization that continues to actpolitically even as it exceeds the live (1999:64), I sensed at the escrache. In

164 Diana Taylor

them, the young people hold photographs of the pre-vious generation of young people. The faces in bothphotographs (the ones taken by Pantoja and the onesthe children are holding) demand a double take. Thephotographs of the disappeared, if anything, seemmorehopeful than their heirs. Soon, the childrenwhowillalways be known as children of the disappearedwill be older than their parents were at the end of theirlives. The portraits, however, indicate that the children,both genetically and visibly, resist the tugs of surroga-tion. While many of the children idealize their missingmothers and fathers, they havent taken up their ghtin any straightforward wayexcept as the ght for jus-tice and human rights. Rather, they assume their placein a line that signals rupture and continuity. The placeof the missing member of the family is reserved, madevisible, through the photograph. In 4 of these 12 cases,the children chose the same photos used by the Madresin their demonstrations. The isolated headshots have arecognizable history. In these photos, the parents reap-pear as the disappeared. By including these particularimages in their own portraits, the children acknowledgenot just the existence of their parents but the violenthistory of political struggle surrounding the images ofthe disappeared. Unlike the familial photographs cho-sen by the other 8 children, these 4 are oversized,cropped, and mounted to be viewed in the publicarena. Used formerly as weapons in a war of images,

they (like the violent loss) prove impossible to domesticate. Like the Madres, thechildren struggle to repossess the images and recontextualize them, either byreintroducing them in the domestic space, or by holding them against their ownbodies. They, like the Madres, have become the paradoxical living archive, therepertoire of the remains. We see the past reiterated, not in the photographsas much as in the positioning of the children themselves. The children, like theMadres, represent themselves as the conduits of memory.

H.I.J.O.S. at times use the blown-up photo IDs of the disappeared in theirrallies (plate 20). I nd the use of the same recognizable photographs of thedisappeared in theH.I.J.O.S. escraches interesting, especially considering that theyappear in H.I.J.O.S. demonstrations after the Madres have stopped (for the mostpart) carrying theirs. The Madres continue to wear the small ID photo, encasedin a plastic pocket, around their necks. The large images on placards, however,belong to the past. The Madres goal now is less to give evidence of the existenceof the missing than to denounce the politics of impunity. We know who thedisappeared were, the Madres said when they changed strategy in 1983. Nowlets see who the disappearors are (Flores 2001). H.I.J.O.S., on the other hand,never sought to give evidence in the same way. They entered the political arenalong after the Madres had declared, We know who the disappeared are. Theynever needed to prove, as the Madres once did, that their loved ones were missing.Their use of the photographs re ects the power of the repertoire more than thearchive, the point being to mark the performance continuities rather than positiveidentity. When H.I.J.O.S carry the photo IDs in their rallies, they index thecontinuity of a political travestythe fact that the repressors have not been pun-ished. Some gains have been made by H.I.J.O.S.: The medical doctor targetedby H.I.J.O.S. for his role in torture sessions lost his job. Astiz, facing extradition

16. The H.I.J.O.S. trackdown recent photos, like thisone, of their military tar-gets, to use in escraches.(Photo from the publicationH.I.J.O.S.; courtesy ofH.I.J.O.S.)

DNA of Performance 165

20. The H.I.J.O.S. useblown-up photo IDs of thedisappeared in their rallies.(Photo by Mariano Tealdi)

charges from several governments, cannot leave the country. At home, the situ-ation has become uncomfortable and his movement restricted. Because he is thetarget of repeated escraches he simply cannot nd a place to hide. Argentina hasrecently asked Pinochet to be extradited to answer charges of his role in PlanCondor. The hope for human rights groups is that the various justice systemswill form their own hemispheric, and even global networkperhaps, ironically,following the model of Plan Condor. Torturers and murderers will not be ableto hide, either at home or abroad. But much remains to be done. And H.I.J.O.S.vows to keep up the escraches until justice has been served.

By carrying the photo IDs during their rallies, however, H.I.J.O.S. point tothe continuity of a representational practice. They are quoting the Madres,even as they acknowledge other in uencesthe carnivalesque images by Goyaamong others. They, like the Madres, take the archival photographs and doublyremobilize them: they signal both the archival use of the ID and the performativeuse associated with the Madres. The archival photos are again performed, butnow in a more complicated manner that signals various artistic and representa-tional practices as well as the clearly de ned political ones. The photographs, I

1719. Holding pictures oftheir parents, the children inthese photographs are nownearly the same age as theirparents were when they dis-appeared. (Photos by JulioPantoja)

166 Diana Taylor

contend, serve as place-holders in a sense: a way of securing the place of thedisappeared in the genealogical chain. They assure that the disappeared are neitherforgotten nor surrogated. No one else will take their place. Plate 20 layers thefaces, allowing them all to be seen partially, to reinforce the idea that nothingdisappears. H.I.J.O.S. continue the genetic lineand to some degree the politicaltrajectory of de ance9calling attention to the violence of the breaks. Unlikesurrogation in Roachs genealogy of performance, which covers up the vacancyby substituting one gure/person for another (the King is dead, long live theKing), the DNA of performance, like plate 20, demonstrates the continuity with-out surrogation. The speci c linkthough missingcan and needs to be iden-ti ed for the genealogy, and the denunciation, to make sense.

Performance, then, works to transmit traumatic memory, drawing from andtransforming a shared archive and repertoire of cultural images. These perfor-mance protests function as a symptom of history (i.e., acting out), part andparcel of the trauma. They also assert a critical distance tomake a claim, af rmingties and connections while denouncing attacks on social contracts. And, liketrauma, performance protest intrudes, unexpectedly, on the social body. Its ef -cacy depends on its ability to provoke recognition and reaction in the here andnow rather than rely on past recollection. It insists on physical presenceonecan only participate by being there. Its only hope for survival, as Dawkins mightput it, is that it catches on; others will take on the practice.

And lastly, these trauma-driven performance protests offer another cautionarynote. With all the emphasis on collective action organized by survivorsAbuelas,Madres, and H.I.J.O.S.they are the rst to remind spectators not to forget theirrole in the drama. Most of us addressed or implicated by these forms of perfor-mance protest are not victims, survivors, or perpetratorsbut that is not to saythat we have no part to play in the global drama of human rights violations. TheDirty War, sponsored by the CIA and School of the Americas and organizedthrough the workings of Plan Condor, was truly hemispheric. Thus, the DNAof performance, like current biological research, might expand, rather than limit,our sense of connectedness: we all share a great deal of genetic, cultural, politicaland socio-economic materials. You Are Here marks not only the performancespace but also the collective environment of trauma that addresses and affectseveryone. We are (all) here.

Notes

1. I have developed this at greater length in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalityin Argentinas Dirty War (1997).

2. For a succinct discussion of DNA see Brian L. Silvers The Ascent of Science (1998), especiallychapter 24, The Gene Machine. Silver notes that:

[Y]our DNA, unless you are an identical twin, is distinct from everyone elses in thewhole Creation, the difference being, as we said, in the order of the bases. [...] DNAcarries all your genetic information, a collection of genes that contain a set of in-structions for building you. (295)

See also Matt Ridleys Genome (1999). Ridley de nes DNA as a lament of information,a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter (13) that includesfour bases: A, T, C, and G. Sections of the lament, known as genes, form units of 120letters that are:

constantly being copied into a short lament of RNA. The copy is known as 5SRNA. It sets up residence with a lump of protein and other RNAs, carefully inter-twined, in a ribosome, a machine whose job it is to translate DNA recipes intoproteins. And it is the proteins that enable DNA to replicate. (16)

In order to be fast and accurate, the genes were clumped into three letter genetic codes,each letter spelling out a particular one of twenty amino acids as part of the recipe for a

DNA of Performance 167

protein (19). Life consists of the interplay of two kinds of chemicals: proteins and DNA(1617). It is interesting to note that Ridleys description stresses the metaphors of languageand writing in explaining the composition and workings of DNA. This supports my ar-gument that epistemic systems need each other in order to make their claims. DNA is nota language, though that word is repeatedly used to describe it, but the relationship is notsimply metaphoric. Both codesDNA and linguisticare interrelated modes of thinkingabout and organizing knowledge.

3. By this insistence on the live, I dont want to lessen the importance of the video andvirtual testimonies that have gained currency in the past decade. The Video Archive forHolocaust Testimonies at Yale and websites such as , http://www.witness.org . or TheVanished Gallery , http://www.yendor.com/vanished.html . , which includes materialsfrom Argentina, are only two of the many virtual initiatives designed to expand our abilityto archive and recapture the act of testifying. They store knowledge and make it availableto a far greater number of people than any live scenario permits. But the re in recaptureis not the reiterative repeat of either trauma or performance but, rather, a transfer into thearchivea different economy of storage and representation. The replay will always be thesame, a record of an earlier moment, an anterior utterance that is frozen for posterior use.I am not suggesting that the transmission of traumatic memory happens only in the liveencounter. But I do want to distinguish between different, though intertwined, systems ofknowledgethe archival and the embodiedthat participate in the transmission and po-liticization of traumatic memory.

4. Dawkins:

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. Wewere built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us willbe forgotten in three generations [...]. But if you contribute to the worlds culture,if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, it maylive on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. (1976:214)

5. One example will have to suf ce: the Mesoamerican goddess Tonanzt i n, the early friarsworried, had disappeared only to reappear in the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Had thepre-Conquest goddess been successfully substituted by the Virgin, or did she in fact live onin the Christian deity? Did the noninterrupted pilgrimage to her shrine signal alliance tothe old or to the new? Further transformations of the Virgin into multiple regionally speci c guresthe Virgen del Camino, Virgen de la Soledad, or the Virgen de Zopopan (Gua-dalajara) that Mary Louise Pratt studieshave, since 1734, multiplied into other mani-festations of the same Virgen to reach her new worshipers. She most recently reappearedin Los Angeles in 1998, as La Viajera (the traveler), in order to be near the Mexicanpopulation that could not safely come to her. This strategy of doubling and staying thesame, of moving and remaining, of multiplying outward in the face of constricting socialand religious policies tells a very speci c story of oppression, migrations, and reinventionthat might be lost if the model of substitution, loss, and narrowing-down were used toexplain the continuities.

6. Through photography, as Allan Sekula argues in his analysis of the 19th-century convergenceof police work and eugenics, the body becomes constructed and contained in the archive(1987).

7. The archive in the body is related to what I have above called the repertoirethe em-bodied images and behaviors that get transmitted through performance. Here, the embodiedperformance consciously displays the archival, both as it promises to preserve materialsand threatens to erase them.

8. Julio Pantoja writes that when Antonio Domingo Bussi, a known torturer during the dic-tatorship, was democratically voted in as Tucumans governor, Pantoja decided he had todo something using his own instrumentphotography:

Durante los cuatro anos que duro el formalmente democratico gobierno de Bussi,me dedique sistematicamente a retratar a los hijos de v i ctimas de la represion enTucuman, que segun los organismos de Derechos Humanos deben ser alrededor demil. Al principio fue tal vez solo un impulso casi ingenuo de resistencia empujadopor la indignacion, pero de a poco fue consolidandose y tomando forma de unatoma de posicion lucida usando mi herramienta: la fotogra a. [During the four yearsthat Bussis government of cially lasted, I dedicated myself to systematically pho-tographing the children of the victims of Tucuman, that according to HumanRights

168 Diana Taylor

organizations number around 1000. At rst, this was maybe only a naive impulse ofresistance motivated by indignation. But little by little, the impulse consolidated andformed into a lucid taking-a-position using my instrument: photography.] (Pantoja2000)

9. While members of H.I.J.O.S. of cially endorse the political activism of their parents, andvow to continue it, most of them have thus far avoided the violent schisms (between Mon-toneros, ERP, and other groups) that characterized their parents movement.

References

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Argentine National Commission of the Disappeared, The1986 Nunca Mas: The Report of the Argentine National Commission of the Disappeared.

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

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Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Caruth, Cathy1995 Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.1996 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

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Silver, Brian L.1998 The Ascent of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Argentina, 19761983. Journal of Psychohistory 18, 4:469505.

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Diana Taylor is Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America(University Press of Kentucky, 1991), which won the Best Book Award given by the NewEngland Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E.Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, and of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles ofGender and Nationalism in Argentinas Dirty War (Duke University Press, 1997).She has edited six volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanishperformance. Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared inTDR, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Re-view, Estreno, Gestos, and other scholarly journals. She has directed and participated instaging Latin American and Latino theatre in Mexico and the United States. She isfounding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, , http://hemi.ps.tsoa.nyu.edu . .