Dancing in the Mexican Sun: Attention Work as Postmemorial Re-timing

Abstract

This article analyses Dancing in the Mexican Sun, a live performance and subsequent single-channel video presented in the exhibition 30,000 Shots: Gestures from the 1976 Argentinian Dictatorship (18 March – 23 August 2020). The research draws on documentation from my creative practice and my own experience of inherited memory to open out Marianne Hirsch’s account of ‘postmemory’, a structure of transmission through which traumatic memory is ‘inherited’ intergenerationally. I argue that Dancing in the Mexican Sun mobilises the unique capacities of performance—to sustain multiple subjectivities, temporalities, and localities in co-presence—to bring forward the complexities of intergenerational memory transference, and the multiple subjectivities and positionalities this dislocation of memory produces. I show how the choreographic ‘working-through’ that Dancing in the Mexican Sun facilitates, produces a postmemorial re-timing, where the traces of inherited memory both shape the performance action and are concurrently refigured. I further argue that the effort of ‘memory work’ in performance is developed in Dancing in the Mexican Sun through video techniques that exploit the dynamics of slow motion, split-screen display, and repetition, in ways that emphasise the postmemorial subject’s attempt to ‘re-member’ that which can never be reembodied as memory, given its inherited acquisition.