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. 

Transnational solidarity movements were fundamental vehicles for global circulation, fraternity and struggle during the Cold War, and determining factors in the shaping of the multicultural and global society, in which we live today. This concept designates a territory that is at the origin of key movements and important platforms for coordinating structural changes regarding organisation and governance as well as the geography of the Cold War. Reactivated in this context, it articulated a new imaginary of the world and of the cooperation between nations and continents. This was reinforced through the decolonising processes that multiplied after the Second World War and that were to form part of what was to become a position(ing) that challenged the Cold War bipolarity.

Hence, under the sign of solidarity, struggles were interconnected and internationalised, while at the same time creating a common imaginary and horizon. The configuration of the league of non-aligned countries made great use of the concept of solidarity between states to articulate a common policy (clearly visible in the foreign policy of the former Yugoslavia); the Tricontinental configured a model of solidarity that integrated the struggle for independence and the emancipation of peoples via defence with attack (through the armed and revolutionary struggle). The coordination of this front for emancipation and social justice prefigured and built at the same time what we call today the Global South.

This model of transnational cooperation and action not only meant effective collaboration between national liberation struggles, revolutionary forces and groups that fought for minorities (such as the Black Panther Party) (and with training, sending of militias, technical support), but also generated a horizon of imagination shared by multiple individuals from all over the planet, in which the visual and the performative acquired a determining role. The visual production (visual arts, graphic production, posters, film and photography, video) was a founding element for coordinating causes, objectives, fuelling the struggle, creating collective imaginations, hopes and desires, dissident genealogies, as well as for transmitting revolutionary memories

While this concept is still in use (though not as Third Worldism, or Tricontinentalism), it has since long been stripped of its revolutionary and emancipatory connotations, being re-appropriated in the name of the human rights and based on concepts closely linked to charity and fraternity (associated with the counter-insurgency movements developed to deactivate the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s). In this framework, in which artistic practices participated in the struggles, the solidarity of the past now seems to gain a prefigurative role in the light of the anti-racist struggles that have shaken the pandemic world. Hence, the neoconservative turn of today’s turbo-capitalism, coupled with the radicalisation of violence, has generated models of anti-racist struggle(s) that reactivate the model of tricontinental solidarity.