170739 UE Mourning Practices in Contemporary Performance Art (2023S)

“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.” These words were expressed by Saidiya Hartman and directs us toward 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 focus on transgenerational trauma as explored through embodiment practices in contemporary performance art practices in non-European contexts. We will focus on specific examples of contemporary artists from Africa and Latin America, such as Doris Salcedo, Faustin Linyekula, Gabriele Goliath and others.

We will research performativity in its double meaning connecting its political and aesthetic aspects. 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 that deal with memories stored in bodies and intergenerational memories, especially artists that are actively working in their artistic practice to enable a space of mourning for the historical trauma and past violence. Integrating performance theory, postmemory trauma as well as current debates on identity politics, this course will focus on how artistic explorations inform remembrance from a post- and counter-memory stance.

Students will regularly read excerpts, summarize, and comment on theoretical texts dealing with historiography, performativity and historical trauma. Students will analyze artistic works collectively during the class sessions. Students’ participation in these discussions will be crucial and evaluated. As part of the course activities, students will be expected to thoroughly present an artistic work of their choice. The artistic work will need to deal with the opening or questioning of a space for historical mourning. Students will be expected to write a mid-term essay. The final essay should expand on the reviews and comments of the mid-term essay, together with the reflections that were held during the course.