170542 UE Mourning Practices in Contemporary Performance Art (2025S)

“The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.” Saidiya Hartman expressed these words and direct us towards the issue that we will engage with in this course: the need for mourning processes and practices that have not been allowed, acknowledged or enacted. There is an imminent question of violent erasures of history in many regions of the world. Many communities have suffered extreme and long-durational violent processes, such as colonization, slavery, dictatorships, war, and socio-economic violent structures, many of which are left without a detailed historiographical trace. This course will explore transgenerational trauma through embodiment practices in contemporary performance art practices in non-European contexts. We will focus on specific examples of contemporary artists from South Africa and Latin America, such as Doris Salcedo, Tracey Rose, Gabriele Golliath and others.

We will research performativity in its double meaning, connecting its political and aesthetic aspects. We will examine art practices of embodiment, identification with, and processing of historical events through performative acts. We will pay attention to traumatic legacies of past experiences that cannot be represented as information or contained in archives or documents, as explored by Marianne Hirsch but are understood as durational performances - a concept developed by Diana Taylor. We look at artists who deal with memories stored in bodies and intergenerational memories, especially artists who are actively working in their artistic practice to enable a space of mourning for historical trauma and past violence. Integrating performance theory, postmemory trauma, and current debates on identity politics, this course will focus on how artistic explorations inform and produce notions of temporality and remembrance from a post- and counter-memory stance.