Performing Ruins

Abstract

Accompany me to the ruins. Over here, the glorious ruins, such as Templo Mayor buried under modern day Mexico City, ancient scenes of power. And over here, the dark ruins, the rubble of recently destroyed and abandoned torture centers like Villa Grimaldi in Santiago de Chile, where military regimes tortured and murdered members of their populations. And these over here, a third kind, I will call renovation ruins, many of which exist only as traces. The large Millennium Park in down-town Bogotá covers what used to be 15 square blocks of a community known as El Cartucho, a “blighted” neighborhood erased in an urban renovation project. I know this site through the work of the Colombian art lab Mapa Teatro, which worked with members of the condemned community for four years and developed a performance, Testigo de las ruinas, that takes us through the process of demolition. Ruins, past and present, are bracketed from everyday life, as if from another era that only incidentally touches our own; nonetheless, they are bound up with nationalist discourses of power, identity, and memory. Not just “proof” of human existence and past practices, the crushed rocks become the measure of who “we” are now. But how? What do ruins ask of us as we walk through as tourists, visitors, or witnesses? Does the materiality of the places transmit the knowledge of past lives, or does it affect only those who already know what happened there?