Addressing Residues and Relics

Abstract

On 24 November 2017, less than two months after Maria, a category 4 hurricane devastated the island of Puerto Rico, performance artists Isil Sol Vil x Marina Barsy Janer enacted in the town of San Germán a communal piece in which debris from the storm was visited, gathered and regrouped as a nest on an empty urban lot. Performers and public breathed around the broken trees and sections of destroyed houses, they felt them.

This instance serves as a springboard for an exploration of animism in relation to residues, ruins, and the discarded in the context of Puerto Rican economical precariousness and political disfranchisement, of the colony in ruins. Examples from my theatrical and installation practice in recent years, carried together with the Casa Cruz de la Luna group, as well as the description of performative exercises guide my discourse.

Animism is posed as the materialization of rare, unforeseen, dissonant connections that disrupt given orders, often playing with our understanding of a diversity of disciplines -- the biological, the religious, the aesthetic, the typographical – in the performative encounter. The task of theatre makers is proposed as the design of, and incorporation of themselves into, live structures (stagings, actions/perceptions, installations) that allow us to question boundaries between selves’ and others’ insides and outsides. The actants encompass persons, but also other organisms, things, technologies, surroundings, language (in its material aspect). Integrating fragments of houses (ruins), memory-laden objects (relics), infinitely repeating phrases (mantras), humans, animals, plants (also relics) into these plays foregrounds the nature of residual materials and their coming together (clashes, hybridity) as sites of resistance to imperatives of progress carried by capitalism, imperialism and modernity. Points of connection in the discussion embrace: Tadeusz Kantor's notion of “reality of the lowest rank”, Anne Bogart's Viewpoint Theory, and various philosophical and anthropological references.

Notes

1 Composed of Puerto Rican artist Marina Sol Vil and Barcelonan artist Isil Sol Vil, the collective takes the name ‘Isil Sol Vil x Marina Barsy Janer’, the ‘x’ denoting togetherness and interaction in performances that they characterize as ‘extreme affects’. The order of the names is alternated.

2 In her essay ‘Religious Objects: Uncomfortable relations and an ontological turn to things’ (2018), Amy Whitehead discusses the unease associated in Western thought when the materiality of an object (its original materials, its shape, its paraphernalia) becomes part of the web of practices of adoration, negotiation and kinship established with it. Related to the notion of the fetish, this stance opposes, for instance, official Catholic representational postures on religious objects that suggest that the object itself is not what is worshipped but stands for that which is.