Diana Taylor, opening of the Public Programs of documenta 14 at Parko Eleftherias, photo: Stathis Mamalakis
Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile’s notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance? To accompany the survivors? To incorporate and translate their words? What are the survivors doing there? What was Taylor doing there? Is this an example of death tourism or does the camp perform a vital strategy against forgetting? This talk uses visual and audio material to recall her four visits to Villa Grimaldi.
Diana Taylor is professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. Originally from Mexico, she was trained in Mexico, France, and the United States. Her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture the following year. She is the author of the award-winning Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997) and editor and co-editor of a dozen books, including Dancing with the Zapatistas (with Laurie Novak, 2016) and Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991). Taylor is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a network of scholars, artists, and activists throughout the Americas who work for social justice.
