This presentation takes Regina Jose Galindo’s performance Quien Puede Borrar las Huellas, 2003 — in which she walks from the Constitutional Court to the National Palace of Guatemala leaving a trail of bloody footprints in memory of the victims of Guatemala’s civil war and rejection of the presidential candidacy of General Efrian Rios Montt — as the starting point from which to explore how structures of spectatorship configure the relationship between protest, performance, death, spectacle and the city. The presentation will focus on the use by artists and activists of civic sites as scenography for the enactment of protests against the state and the commemorations of its victims. The May ’68 slogan sous les pavés la plage (the beach beneath the street) invoked a parallel dimension of beauty and recreation that could be activated through the imagination. Here I will investigate the dark double of this idea: The city as the symbolic manifestation of an amnesiac state, built at the expense of those who, sometimes by their mere existence, have challenged its legitimacy and a result have been treated as expendable and forgettable.

Case studies of works by artists and events include:

Regina Jose Galindo, Quien Puede Borrar las Huellas, 2003
St Paul’s Occupation, October 2011
Black Peoples Day of Action, March 2, 1981
Choi Byung-soo, Funeral procession for Lee Han-ryul, 1987
Anti-capitalist Mostration at 3rd Alytus Art Strike Biennale, August 28, 2011
Annibal Lopez, June 30, 2000

This Paper was Presented at the Symposium Margins: Walking Between Worlds at First Site, Colchester, organised by First Site and the University of Essex