Feminist Performance Forensics

Teresa Margolles exhibits death certificates. These official reports transform the white cube gallery into investigative scenes owing to violent deaths of women in Mexico-US border towns that remain unsolved, uninvestigated, and unaccounted for by authorities.

Tania El Khoury collects oral histories of hidden burials. To listen to the accounts of the dead, spectators must dig through the piled earth of a sound installation that evidences the voices of murdered activists and protestors in Syria buried in secret by grieving family members.

Claudia Bernal places over three hundred urns bearing the names of the missing and murdered women of Ciudad Juárez in a circular configuration in a public square. Onlookers place photographs, shoes, pieces of clothing, and candles next to the urns turning the performance action into an ofrenda or offering.

In Tramaluna Theatre’s Antígonas Tribunal de Mujeres, the women present objects that belonged to their missing and murdered family members – a favourite shirt, a photograph, a cassette tape, a shoe – to an audience-turned-tribunal that bears witness to the evidence of both the missing people’s existence and absence.

We begin with a constellation of performance actions that exemplify what we call a feminist performance forensics: the use of performance installations to produce bodies of evidence in the face of systemic government denial of its fiduciary duties, making visible those rendered invisible by state violence and neglect. A feminist performance forensics works alongside families, friends, and community activists, undertaking a form of grass-roots jurisprudence with the recognition that placing redressive action solely in the hands of state institutions risks perpetuating state hegemonic power. Mobilizing the political potential of performance as a form that harnesses the etymological connotations of ‘forensics’ – from the Latin forēnsis, ‘in open court, public’ or ‘place of assembly’ – a feminist performance forensics uses the performance space as a site that ‘makes public’ the evidence necessary to hold governments to account. The feminist politics of this practice exposes the wider sociopolitical structures that permit and sustain gender-based violence beyond the material site and specificity of any one body. The artists examined in this article demonstrate that forensics is not defined by the accumulation of evidence alone, but by practices of ‘forensic persuasion’. These are strategies that include the explicit and durational use of the survivors’, artists’, and spectators’ own bodies to make the case against the abuses of the state.