18 Trauma as Durational Performance
Pedro Matta, a tall, strong man, walked up to us when we arrived at the unassuming side entrance to Villa Grimaldi, a former torture and extermination camp on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. He is a survivor who, twice a month or so, gives a guided visit to people who want to know about the site. He says hello to Soledad Fallabella and Alejandro Gruman, colleagues of mine in Chile who thought, given my work with human rights groups in Argentina, that I would be interested in meeting Matta.1 He greets me and hands me the English version of a book he has written: A Walk Through a Twentieth-Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi, A Visitor’s Guide. I tell him that I am from Mexico and speak Spanish. “Ah,” he says, his eyes narrow as he scans me, “Taylor, I just assumed…” The four of us walk into the compound. I ask if I can take photographs and record the visit—he says of course. I hold the booklet and my camera—Alejandro holds my digital tape recorder. I’ve come prepared for my “visit.”
The site is expansive. It looks like a ruin or a construction site, there’s some old rubble and signs of new building—a transitional space, part past, part future. In several ways it’s hard to get a sense of where we’re standing. A sign at the entrance, Parque Por la Paz Villa Grimaldi, informs visitors that 4,500 people were tortured here and 226 people were disappeared and killed between 1973 and 1979. I take a photograph of the sign, which points to the multivalence of this place—simultaneously a torture camp, a memory site, and a peace park. Like many memory sites, it reminds us that this tragic history belongs to all of us, asks us to behave respectfully so that it might remain and continue to instruct. Lesson One, clearly, is that this place is “our” responsibility.
“This way, please.” Matta, a formal man, walks us over to the small model of the torture camp to help us visualize the architectural arrangement of a place now gone: Cuartel Terranova (barrack “new land”). The mock-up is laid out, like a coffin, under a plastic, slightly opaque sunshade. As in many historically important sites, the model offers a bird’s-eye view of the entire area. The difference here is that what we see in the model is no longer there. The death space we visit is one that we cannot see and never know except through all manner of mediation. Even though we are there, we will not experience it “in person.” So, one might ask, what is the purpose of the visit? What can we experience by being physically in a death camp once the indicators have disappeared? Does the space itself convey the event? Little beside the sign at the entrance reveals the context. My photographs might illustrate what this place is, not what it was . Still, we are here in person with Matta who takes us through the recorrido (“walk-through”). Matta speaks in Spanish; it makes a difference. He seems to relax a little, though his voice is very strained and he clears his throat often.
The compound, originally a beautiful nineteenth-century villa used for upper-class parties and weekend affairs, was taken over by DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s special forces, to interrogate the people detained by the military during the massive round-ups.2 So many were captured that many civilian spaces were transformed into makeshift concentration centers. Villa Grimaldi was one of the most infamous. In the late 1980s one of the generals sold it to a construction company to tear down and replace with a housing project. Survivors and human rights activists could not stop the demolition, but after much heated contestation they did secure the space as a memory site and peace park in 1995.3 Matta, among others, has spent a great deal of time, money, and energy making sure the space remains a permanent reminder of what the Pinochet government did to its people. Three epochs, with three histories, overlap in this space that even now has multiple functions: evidentiary, commemorative, reconciliatory, and pedagogical.
The miniature extermination camp positions us as spectators. We stand above the model, looking down on its organizational structure. The main entrance to our top left allowed passage for vehicles that delivered the hooded captives to the main building. Matta’s language and our imaginations populate the inert space. He points to the tiny copy of the large main building that served as the center of operations for DINA—here the military planned who they would target and how they evaluated the results of the torture sessions. The officer in charge of Villa Grimaldi and his assistants had offices here, and there was a mess hall for officers. The space housed the archives, and a shortwave radio station kept the military personnel in contact with their counterpoints throughout South America. The small buildings that run along the perimeter to the left where the prisoners were divided up, separated, and blindfolded—men here, women there. Miniature drawings made by survivors line the periphery—hooded prisoners pushed by guards with rifles for their thirty seconds at the latrines; a hall of small locked cells guarded by an armed man; a close-up drawing of the inside of one of the cells in which a half dozen shackled and hooded men are squeezed in tightly; an empty torture chamber with a bare metal bunk bed equipped with leather straps, a chair with straps for arms and feet, a table with instruments. The objects reference behaviors. We know exactly what happened there/here. Matta points to other structures on the model. It is clear that the model gives him a sense of control—he no longer needs to fully relive the image to describe it—he can externalize and point to it. The violence, in part, can be transferred to the archive, materialized in the small evidentiary mock-up. He is explicit about the criminal politics and very clear in his condemnation of the CIA’s role in the Chilean crisis. He looks at me and remembers I am not that audience—an audience but not that audience.
Looking down at the model, I see we are standing on the site of the main building, usurping the military’s place. Looking offers me the strange fantasy of seeing or grasping the “whole,” the fiction that I can understand systemic criminal violence even as we position ourselves simultaneously in and above the fray. We are permitted to identify without identifying. This happened there, back then, to them, by them… The encounter, at this point, is about representation and explication of the facts. The model, made by survivors, stages the evidence. The mock-up or “fake” gives others at least a glimpse of the “truth” of Terranova. I take photographs, wondering how the tenuous “evidentiary” power of the photo might extend the evidentiary claim of the model camp. We know what happened at Villa Grimaldi, of course, but is there anything that Matta (or I, with my camera) can do to make visible the criminal violence? The “other” violence, the economic policies that justified and enabled the breaking of bodies, remains safely outside the frame.
We look up and around at the place itself—emptied though not empty—empty of something palpable in its absence. The remains of a few original structures and replicas of isolation cells and a tower dot the compound. With the camp demolished, Matta informs and points out, but he does not seem to connect personally or emotionally to what he describes. The objects have been reconstructed and placed to support the narration—this happened here. I imagine some visitors must actually try to squeeze themselves in those tiny, upright cells. They might even allow someone to close the door. Does simulation allow people to feel or experience the camp more fully than walking through it? Possibly. Rites involving sensory deprivation prepare members of communities to undertake difficult or sacred transitions by inducing different mental states. The basic idea—that people learn, experience, and come to terms with past/future behaviors by physically doing them, trying them on, acting them through, and acting them out—is the underlying theory of ritual, older than Aristotle’s theory of mimesis and as new as theories of mirror neurons that explore how empathy and understandings of human relationality and intersubjectivity are vital for human survival.4 But these reconstructed cells have a fun-fair quality to them for me, and I stay away. Following Matta from place to place, it becomes clear that these props don’t help me relate. Rather the opposite: the less I actually see intensifies what I imagine happened here. My mind’s eye—my very own staging area—internalizes the violence, fills the gaps between Matta’s formal matter-of-fact rendition and the terrifying things he relates.
Matta walks us toward the original entryway—the massive iron gate now permanently sealed as if to shut out the possibility of further violence. From this vantage point it is clear that another layer has been added to the space. A wash of decorative tiles, chips of the original ceramic found at the site, form a huge arrowlike shape on the ground pointing away from the gate toward the new “peace fountain” (“symbol of life and hope,” according to Matta’s booklet) and a large performance pavilion. The architecture participates in the rehabilitation of the site. The cross-shaped layout moves us from criminal past to redemptive future. Matta ignores that for the moment—he is not in the peace park. This is not the time for reconciliation. His traumatic story, like his past, weighs down all possibility of future. He continues his recorrido through the torture camp.5
Matta speaks impersonally, in the third person, about the role of torture in Chile—one half million people tortured and five thousand killed out of a population of eight million. I do the math. There were far more tortures and fewer murders in Chile than Argentina. One in sixteen. He speaks about the development of torture as a tool of the state from its early experimental phase to the highly precise and tested practice it became. Pinochet chose to break rather than eliminate his “enemies”—the population of ghosts or individuals destroyed by torture, thrown back into society, would be a warning for others. Matta’s tone is controlled and reserved. He is giving archival information, not personal testimony, as he outlines the daily workings of the camp, the transformation of language as words were outlawed. Crimenes, desaparecidos, and dictadura (crimes, disappeared, and dictatorship) were replaced by excesos, presuntos, and go-bierno militar (excesses, presumed, military government).
As we walk, he describes what happened where, and I notice that he keeps his eyes on the ground, a habit born of peering down from under the blindfold he was forced to wear. The shift is gradual—he begins to reenact ever so subtly as he retells. I feel compelled to register the moment—I take a photograph as if I could capture the move inward, into the dark space in which we stand but cannot see. He moves deeper into the death camp—here, pointing at an empty spot: “Usually unconscious, the victim was taken off the parrilla (metal bed frame), and if male, dragged here.”6 Maybe the lens will grasp what I cannot grasp. Looking down, I see the colored shards of ceramic tiles and stones that now mark the places where buildings once stood and the paths where victims were pushed to the torture chambers. As we follow, we too know our way by keeping our eyes on the ground: “Sala de tortura. Celdas para mujeres detenidas.”
I follow his movements but also his voice that draws me in. Gradually, his pronouns change—they tortured them becomes they tortured us . He brings us in closer. His performance animates the space and keeps it alive. His body connects me to what Pinochet wanted to disappear, not just the place but the trauma. Matta’s presence performs the claim, embodies it, le da cuerpo. He has survived to tell. Being in place with him communicates a very different sense of the crimes than looking down on the model. Walking through Villa Grimaldi with Matta brings the past up close, past as actually not past. Now. Here. And in many parts of the world, as we speak. I can’t think past that, rooted as I am to place suddenly restored as practice. I too am part of this scenario now; I don’t need to lock myself up in the cell to be doing . I have accompanied him here. My “unarmed” eyes, to adopt Walter Benjamin’s phrase, look straight down, mimetically rather than reflectively, through his down-turned eyes.7 I do not see really; I imagine. I presenciar ; I presence (as active verb). Embodied cognition, neuroscientists call this, but we in theater have always understood it as mimesis and empathy—we learn and absorb by mirroring other people. I participate not in the events but in his transmission of the affect emanating from the events. My presencing offers me no sense of control, no fiction of understanding. He walks, he sits, he tells. When he gets to the memorial wall, marked with the names of the dead (built twenty years after the violent events), he breaks down and cries. He cries for those who died, but also for those that survived. “Torture,” he says, “destroys the human being. And I am no exception. I was destroyed through torture.” This is the climax of the tour. The past and the present come together in this admission. Torture works into the future; it forecloses the very possibility of future. The torture site is transitional, but torture itself is transformative—it turns societies into terrifying places and people into zombies.8
When Matta leaves the memorial wall his tone shifts again. He has moved out of the death space. Now he is more personal and informal in his interaction with us. We talk about how other survivors have dealt with trauma, about similarities and differences with other torture centers and concentration camps. He says he needs to come back. The walk-through reconnects him with his friends who were disappeared. Whenever he visits with a group who is interested in the subject, he feels he is doing what he wishes one of his friends had done for him had he been the one disappeared. Afterward he goes home physically and emotionally drained, he says, and drinks a liter of fruit juice and goes to sleep—he doesn’t get up until the following morning. We continue to walk, past the replica of the water tower where the high-value prisoners were isolated, past the sala de la memoria (memory room)—one of the few remaining original buildings that served as the photo and silkscreen rooms. At the pool, also original, he shares one of the most chilling accounts told to him by a collaborator. At the memory tree he touches the names of the dead that hang from the branches like leaves. Different commemorative art pieces remind us that “El olvido esta lleno de memoria” (forgetting is full of memory). And, of course, the ever hopeful “Nunca Más.” He barely notices the fountain—the Christian overlay of redemption was the government’s idea, clearly.
After we leave the site, we invite Matta to lunch at a nearby restaurant he recommends. He tells us about his arrest in 1975 for being a student activist, his time as a political prisoner in Villa Grimaldi, his exile to the U.S. in 1976, and his work as a private detective in San Francisco until he returned to Chile in 1991. He used his investigative skills to gather as much information as possible about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, to identify the prisoners who passed through, and name the torturers stationed there. One day, he says, he was having lunch in this same restaurant after one of the visits to Villa Grimaldi when an ex-torturer walked in and sat at a nearby table with his family. They were having such a good time. They looked at each other and Matta got up and walked out.
Later Soledad tells me that Matta does the visit the same way every time—stands in the same spot, recounts the same events, cries at the Memorial Wall. Some commentators find this odd, as if the routine makes the emotion suspect. Are the tears for real? Every time? Is there something fake about the performance? Is Matta a professional trauma survivor? Am I his witness? His audience? A voyeur of trauma tourism? What kind of scenario is this? Is trauma, like performance, known by the nature of its repeats: “never for the first time”? For me, what’s interesting is the way that Matta’s performance of trauma is itself part of a much larger evidentiary and commemorative project—one that he fully imagines will exceed and outlast him.
The Parque de la Paz, I have suggested, is a highly practiced place. The violently contested history of spatial practices continues to return and disturb the present. On the evidentiary level, Villa Grimaldi demonstrates the centrality of site in individual and collective memory. What happens to that space is tantamount to what happens to Chileans’ understanding of the dictatorship: will people repress, remember, transcend, or forget? The warring mandates about the space rehearse the more salient public options: tear it down to bury the violence; build a commemorative park so that people will know what happened; let’s get beyond violence by hosting cultural events in the pavilion; forget about this desolate place, forget about this sorry past. Nowhere is there talk of justice or retribution.
Matta, of course, has been instrumental in building the evidence—he has investigated and helped collect the information of what happened at Villa Grimaldi; he worked to preserve the space as a memorial site. He helped construct the model; he wrote and published the booklet. He has actively participated in creating the external material markers that designate this a “dark site.” He has even prepared for a visit without him present—again, investing in the archival and historical aspects of preservation. The book maps out every move; the brutal images in the margins make visible every practice: “Here the torture began.” The book, given the nature of print media, tells the same story the same way every time. It outlines the path and numbers the stops—here people were tortured with electricity. The numbers in the book—like a tour guide—align with the map. Actually, it’s a double map—one layer shows the torture camp, while a semitransparent layer of onion paper outlines the Peace Park, with the pavilion, the fountain, and the numbered places of interest: “storage of confiscated goods” and “sites for hanging.” A red dotted line outlines the recorrido exactly as Matta conducts it. This, then, is the trauma in the archive, envisioned by Matta to outlast him and transmit meaning to those who come after to visit the space. It is not an exaggeration to state that future knowledge of this site will only be available through archival practice—the annotated tour, the replicas, the memorial wall, the art pieces. Like my photos, these archival objects might well spark an affective reaction in some visitors. But it’s hard for me to imagine that these objects will move someone who has not been involved in the practice, who has never been to the site, or who has no connection to what happened there. The punctum, or the trigger, has to come from someplace in the viewer. Trauma lives in the body, not in the archive.
Being in the site with Matta, however, is a powerful experience—one of a kind for me even if it’s a repeat performance for him. But even the nature of the repeats is important in Matta’s performance. He returns again to recount the events that took place there, to instruct, to remember those who died, and perhaps even to externalize the pain associated with place. Although different in kind, these various acts all serve to externalize the trauma—put it out there, point to it, and demand recognition. Trauma blurs the lines between inside/outside, past/present, personal/collective. The “never for the first time” of performance mirrors/enacts the “never for the first time” of trauma.9 We speak of trauma only when the event cannot be processed and produces the characteristic aftershocks. Trauma, like performance, is always experienced in the present. Here. Now.
Memory, we know, is linked to place—one clear reason why that place needs not only to exist but to be marked. For any guide, routine serves a mnemonic function—people can remember certain events by associating them with place.10 But for a survivor of torture, going back to the site, the recorrido is a memory path—through the act of walking, the body remembers. Memory always entails reenactment, even in our mind’s eye. The book too is organized as a “walk.” Neuroscientists suggest that these paths are physiological as well as material, fixed in the brain as a specifically patterned circuit of neurons. Being in a situation can automatically provoke certain behaviors unless other memory tracks are laid down to replace them.11 A change in Matta’s routine might well change the affect. But routine also protects against unexpected affect—survivors can often recall some aspects of their torment and not others—there are some places (literally and physiologically) where no one dares to go.
For Matta, both victim and witness, trauma is a durational performance. His experience does not last two hours—it has lasted years, since he was disappeared by the armed forces. His reiterated acts of leading people down the paths characterize trauma and the trauma-driven actions to channel and alleviate it. As for the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the ritualized tour offers him both personal consolation and revenge. Memory is a tool and a political project—an honoring of those who are gone and a reminder to those who will listen that the victimizers have gotten away with murder. His tour, like the Mothers’ march, bears witness to what gets spectacularized—a society in which judicial systems cannot bring perpetrators to justice—and what gets invisibilized—rapacious economic systems that disappear certain populations. Yet the walk-through, like the march, also makes visible the memory paths that maintain another topography of place and practice, not of terror but of resistance—the will not only to live but also to keep memory alive.
What does Matta’s performance want of me as audience or as witness? What does it mean about witnessing and the quality of being in place? He needs others (in this case me) to acknowledge what happened there and thus complete the task of witness. To witness, a transitive verb, defines both the act and the person carrying it out; the verb precedes the noun—it is through the act of witnessing that we become a witness. Identity relies on the action. We are both the subject and the product of our acts. Matta is the witness for those who are no longer alive to tell; he is the witness to himself as he tells of his own ordeal; he is a witness in the juridical sense—having brought charges against the Pinochet dictatorship. He is also the object of my witnessing—he needs me to acknowledge what he and others went through in Villa Grimaldi. The transitivity of “witness” ties us together—that’s one reason he’s keen to gauge the nature of his audience.
Torture, of course, produces the opposite of witnessing—it breaks personal and social bonds and guts all sense of community and responsibility. Torture isolates and paralyzes both victims and bystanders who are tempted to look away. Percepticide I’ve called this elsewhere. This is why they continue to practice torture even though they know that they receive no “actionable” information. It’s inaction they seek. My job, as I understand it, is to keep those memory paths fresh and do something—acknowledge the violence generated by our governments or write about the place or donate money or bring other people. Trauma-driven activism (like trauma itself) cannot simply be told or known; it needs to be enacted, repeated, and externalized through embodied practice.
I can understand what Matta is doing here better than I can understand what I am doing here. I wonder about aura and worry about voyeurism and (dark) tourism. Is Matta my close-up—bringing unspeakable violence up as close as possible? If so, to what end? This too is multilayered in the ways that the personal, interpersonal, social, and political come together. Walking through Villa Grimaldi with Matta, the oversize issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity—too large and general on one level—take on an immediate and embodied form. In our everyday lives we have no way of dealing with violent acts that shatter the limits of our understanding. We all live in proximity to criminal violence—and, though some have felt it more personally than others, this violence is never just personal. If we focus only on the trauma we risk evacuating the politics. Standing there, together, bringing the buildings and routines back to life, we bear witness not just to the personal loss, but to a system of power relations, hierarchies, and values that not only allowed but required the destruction of others.
The questions posed by these dark sites extend far beyond the fences built around them. The small model near the entrance is to Villa Grimaldi what Villa Grimaldi is to Chile and what Chile is to the rest of the Americas: a miniature rendition of a much larger project. There were eight hundred torture centers in Chile under Pinochet. If so many civic and public places like villas and gyms and department stores and schools were used for criminal violence, how do we know that the whole city did not function as a clandestine torture center? The scale of the violations is stunning. The ubiquity of the practice spills over and contaminates social life. The guided tour through Villa Grimaldi gives us a condensed experience within the compound walls. But here, within the camp, we know that the violence only appears isolated and bracketed from everything that surrounds it, accentuating the knowledge that criminal violence has spread so uncontrollably that no walls can contain it and no guide can explain it. We might control a site and put a fence around it, but the city, the country, the southern cone, the hemisphere has been networked for violence—and beyond, too, of course, and not just because the U.S. openly outsourced torture. Is the dark site sickening because it situates us physically in such proximity to atrocity made visible and externalized in this small place? Or because, by participating, we internalize the violence? And how can we not participate when we recognize that the ubiquitous practice of torture situates all of us in constant proximity to criminal politics? As I follow Matta deeper down the paths, his experience resonates with me in part because I actually do always know what happened here/there and accept that this, like many other sites, is my responsibility. I do participate in a political project that depends on making certain populations disappear. I am constantly warned to keep vigil, to “say something” if I “see something.” Though I shirked responsibility when I first met Matta—the Mexican government had nothing to do with the Chilean coup—there is another layer. After years of my own self-blinding, I realize that the Mexican government under then President Luis Echeverria disappeared thousands of young people about the same age as I was then. Now that I live and work in the U.S., I know my tax dollars pay for Gitmo. For me, the emotional charge of the visit comes from the friction of place and practice—inseparable, though at times disavowed. Something has been restored through the tour that brings several of my worlds into direct contact. As the multitiered space itself invites, I recognize the layers and layers of political and corporeal practices that have created these places, the histories I bring to them, the transparent and flimsy dividers that differentiate them, and the emotions that get triggered as we walk through them in our own ways. I experience the tour as performance, and as trauma, and I know it’s never for the first, or last, time.
Matta, the booklet tells us, “feels a strong desire to transform history into memory.” He makes the past alive through the performance of his recorrido. Yet trauma keeps the past alive in Matta as well—the future is not an option for him as long as Terranova grips him in that place. The “future” in fact might be a very different project. In the best of all possible worlds, the future would mean turning this memory into history, the testimonial walk-through into archival evidence, Matta’s personal admonition into legally binding indictments against perpetrators, and visitors into witnesses, human rights activists, and voters. Someone else, maybe someone who has never been tortured, would lead the tour, with or without Matta’s guide. But that future is predicated on a past in which trauma has been transcended or resolved. That future is nowhere in sight, even though the arrow points us toward the fountain symbolizing “life and hope.” The tour does not offer us the end of trauma or the end of performance. Looking downward, we follow Matta as he negotiates this transitional space between remembrance and future project.
Notes
1. The research that came out of that project was published (in part) in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
2. DINA stands for Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Directorate).
3. Teresa Meade, in “Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile’s ‘Sitios de Memoria’ and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death,” writes that Villa Grimaldi was the “only ‘memorial’ of torture in Latin America” when it was built in 1995. Now “Parque de la Memoria” and ESMA in Buenos Aires also function as memorials. Radical History Review, 79 (2001): 123–139, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v079/79.1meade.html (accessed October 24, 2008).
4. See Vittorio Gallese, “The “Shared Manifold” Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, no. 5–7 (2001): 33–50, http://www.imprint-academic.com/jcs.
5. See Michael J. Lazzara, Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), for an excellent analysis of Pedro Matta’s tour and Villa Grimaldi.
6. Pedro Alejandro Matta, Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile: A Visitor’ s Guide (Self-published), 13.
7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 223.
8. Marcial Godoy-Anativia, “The Body as Sanctuary Space: Towards a Somatic Topography of Torture” (unpublished manuscript, 1997).
9. Diana Taylor, “Trauma Driven Performance,” 21, no. 5 (2006): 1674–1677.
10. See Thomas A. Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
11. See Vittorio Gallese, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in Interpersonal Relations,” http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/pdffiles/Gallese/Gallese-Eagle-Migone%202007.pdf (accessed October 25, 2008).