Performance, spectrality and ritual: ANTIVISITA as a scenic device for the representation of radical absence

Abstract

This article analyses the performance ANTIVISITA. Formas de entrar y salir de la ESMA, by Mariana Eva Perez and Laura Kalauz, premiered in Buenos Aires in 2022. The play is presented as an experimental guided tour of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, which takes place outside that physical space of the current Museo Sitio de Memoria. It takes the family history of the authors, cousins and child victims of state terrorism, as its leitmotif. Two absent female figures are invoked: one of the pregnant detainees-disappeared of the ESMA prisoners and her spiritualist grandmother. The subjective journey highlights the State-sponsored obstetric violence deployed in this concentration camp, but thanks to the intervention of a “context witness” on the subject of spiritualism, the performance opens up to a non-testimonial instance of theoretical and phenomenological enquiry involving all those present (and absent). In this article, we will focus on this particular ‘session’ that takes place within the performance in order to describe how the play introduces the question of communication with the dead as a politics of memory. In order to do this, we will develop the historical-spectral perspective that the play adopts, conceptualise the ideas of performance that underpin it, and analyse the elements of popular religiosity that are brought into the play and that give it a ritual character.