How can we think with and through deeply political artistic and visual practices that have been deployed to make absence present in contexts of political violence? By extension, how can we identify the role these practices play in the constitution, reconfiguration and transformation of political and social imaginaries that are in some way linked to the Cold War, its reorganisation of transnational forms of resistance and its legacy? The concept of corporeal evidence(s) draws attention to the centrality of the body in artistic and visual practices – practices developed by artists and collectives deeply involved in the social movements that contested the strategies of enforced disappearance in the wave of dictatorships that swept the Southern Cone of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s – which created new visual languages to signal forms of bodily absence intended to make visible the unseen and the unspoken.

The concept emphasises the centrality of the body and its visual representation in artistic practices that have sought to undo absence, attempting to transform it into presence. On the one hand, it focuses our gaze on the probationary potential of the body (Maguire and Rao, 2018) and its capacity to traverse, inhabit, or even constitute multiple contexts and knowledges. It unravels “what a body can” (Expósito, 2009), that is, the representational, material and symbolic possibilities that the human form offers when it is activated to make visible violence and the power structures that support it.

Bodily evidence(s) also helps to trace the circulation of these practices beyond geopolitical boundaries, pointing to what Diana Taylor describes as a “repertoire” of performative actions in which images – family photographs, silhouettes, cropped snapshots – are activated to make visible the absence provoked by enforced disappearance. At the same time, it considers the movement of these practices through multiple temporalities, as well as demonstrating how the “forensic” image has been used in contemporary contexts to document and narrate the recovery of the bodies that the disappearance left behind and that were exhumed from mass graves. In this context, the concept helps to understand visual practices linked to the reappearance of the victims’ bodies as “counter-forensic” practices, where “the adoption of forensic techniques (are) a ‘political manoeuvre’, as a tactical operation in a collective struggle, a rebellious and resistant gallery for documenting the microphysics of barbarism” (Keenan 2014). That said, this concept also emphasises how counter-forensic images activate and operationalise the evidential mechanics, traditionally employed via state structures, to create new ‘bodies of evidence’, new corporeal evidence(s) that illuminate not only the mechanics of state violence, but also other horizons for narrating, when thinking and producing other knowledge and knowledges about the past.

This constellation of approaches – the image as a device that oscillates between the probative and the affective, between truth and memory; and the counter-forensic as an aesthetic that evidences but also narrates in order to undo the structures that allowed disappearance – brings us back to observe the creation of new languages used to make present what is not there from another point of view. 

Although authors such as Descartes, Kant and Freud, among others, made fundamental contributions to the elaboration of a philosophy of the subject, it actually was from the 1960s onwards that a theoretical production around this notion intensified. On the one hand, some of the most interesting intellectual disputes that took place within (post)structuralism were related to the frameworks that condition the subject’s capacity for action (Althusser, Foucault). On the other hand, theorisations of new feminist (Lonzi) and anti-colonial (Fanon) subjectivities capable of questioning the centrality of white males as hegemonic subjects of Western modernity were emerging in those same years.

This growing interest in the subject in the field of thought had its artistic correlate in the emergence of body art – art corporel, body works – and performance during the 1960s and 1970s. Many artists (Acconci, Journiac, Piper, Pane, etc.) began to work with and on their own bodies as a way of problematising the construction of the self, originating from new intersubjective experiences and exploring new identity possibilities.

Since the 1980s, the concept of subjectivity has been transformed to incorporate new queer and postcolonial perspectives (Butler, Spivak), while performative practices have mutated at great speed in dialogue with these agendas. The tensions that converge around the subject can be traced, problematised and resized in the unpredictable advancements of performance: the S/M elements and the radical exploration of the body proposed by Ron Athey; the critique of Santiago Sierra’s work; the denunciation of political violence, as put forward by Regina José Galindo.

There is now a widespread awareness that the subject is constructed through very complex processes. Decades of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and queer theory have contributed to contesting the very possibility of an essential, unified, natural, biological subject. From this awareness, it is inevitable to ask ourselves about the possible conditions of subjectivities in the artistic space outlined by certain performative practices. Paradoxically, performance, integrated into the international artistic canon, has today also become the dominant practice and concept in the world of work and economic management (profitability, self-promotion, precariousness, etc.) and the driving force of neoliberal subjectivation, the reason that determines the destiny of homo economicus. And yet, its potential as a field of experimentation of new subjectivities for performers, artists and audiences cannot be hastily disregarded.