Performance and dictatorship: Paradoxes of the relationships between art and activism

Abstract

We propose to reconstruct some performative experiences and theatrical events performed by the TIT (Taller de Investigación Teatral) during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, and thereafter, to reflect on the modes of construction of subjectivities, the relationship between art and politics, and art and activism in a context not only of repression but also disinformation and isolation. This work is part of a collective project that aims to complicate the analytical perspectives through which the artistic and cultural productions developed during the last military dictatorship in Argentina have been studied. Those studies considered the practices “of resistance" to the system (counter-demonstrations or alternative) and practices "accomplices" or inclined to accept the hegemony (embedded in the culture industry, mass media or official cultural institutions) dichotomously. We are interested in exploring in the "between", in the imprecision of these limits: in exploring how they intersect and redefine, how they overlap and become contaminated, how the dominant logics of territory impose one on the other. The TIT was a performance collective comprised of adolescents who developed an experimental art and had membership in the PTS (Socialist Workers Party), Trotskyist orientation, during the dictatorship. The members of the TIT and related cultural groups conceived the encounter between artistic and political avant-garde art as a program. They tried to interbreed experimentalism and Trotskyism. The permanent research and experimentation were in the center of their performance practices. These young Trotskyists took the option of political activism during the dictatorship. The concept of activism in this context –and, indeed, a cultural-political militancy- claims its historicization and analysis. The relations of the party (who was in hiding) with the militants that carried out artistic endeavors were variable, tense and complex. We intend to penetrate the interstices between the dominant logic and this type of political-cultural facts, whose definition as "resistance" is simplistic. We will research the density, the paradoxes and fissures of these relationships.