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  • Mourning, Yearning, Cruising Ernesto Pujol’s Memorial Gestures
  • David J. Getsy (bio)

One of the most common forms of collective performance is the “Moment of Silence.” From small-scale enactments by a handful of mourners to coordinated city-wide events, the Moment of Silence establishes a bracketed time in which private emotions appear as performed absence. This act of voicing loss through the cessation of voice itself serves not just as a powerful act for participants but also as a reminder of the resonance of silence as a metaphoric zone in which the personal is made public.

The recent performance work of Ernesto Pujol extends not only the duration but also the transitional space of the Moment of Silence, deploying it as the time in which publics and privates meet. This silence is often ostensibly about mourning and loss, establishing both the public face of his work and the rationale used by institutions to endorse its low-drama, non-narrative form.1 But his public performance itself becomes interrupted or inflected by moments in which other, non-authorized species of the private surface. That is, rather than simply being about mourning, Pujol’s silent walks open up to the larger issues surrounding the performance of the personal in public and the vulnerability of the body through which that performance occurs. This vulnerability of the personal made public is the basic condition of the mourner. It is imminent in the exposure of private loss to the social. This precarious state is also the condition of queer individuals’ entrances into sociality, and I will argue that Pujol’s work effectively imbricates these two vulnerabilities onto each other. The queer individual is compelled to negotiate the moments and the places where the private can become the social—from the intimate coupling to the public declaration. In coping with this ever-present negotiation of exposure, queer socialities have also found silence to be a cover under which outlaw desires can be signaled. Pujol’s works are not singularly about queer experience any more than they are singularly about public mourning. Rather, they address both while using the cover of silence the latter affords to make the former a possibility.

In making this case, my focus is on a recent performance by Pujol that took place over twelve hours in the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Rotunda in the Chicago Cultural Center in October 2007. The work, Memorial Gestures: Mourning and Yearning at the Rotunda, comprised a troupe of performers engaged in a [End Page 11] collaborative and adaptive use of the highly ornate architectural space. This memorial hall, the Rotunda, had been dedicated as a memorial to fallen soldiers within the 1897 building that was once the City of Chicago’s central public library. Explaining his choice to locate his performance there, Pujol wrote in the proposal to the Cultural Center:

Upon visiting the space for the first time, it immediately impressed me as providing a performer with everything, in terms of lighting (nine rectangular floor sources), suggested bodily movement (embedded floor design), and background (theatrical). The Rotunda provides a unique opportunity to reactivate memorial architecture as a contemplative place through metaphor, engaging in ritual gestures of loss, remembrance, and unfulfilled longings.

For the performance, Pujol remained silent and standing on one of nine squares of glass blocks embedded into the floor. These are one of the most notable features of the memorial hall. Their presence was especially dramatic because the light emanating from them provided the main source of illumination in the space. Five of the other eight squares were filled by Pujol’s principal collaborators Maria Gaspar, Trevor Martin, Caleb Rexford, Clover Morell, and Joy Walen as well as a number of additional performers throughout the twelve-hour period. All performers were dressed entirely in white, with Pujol in a long white robe related to the white garments he has used in other recent performances. The white-clad performers in the Chicago work each held one of a small group of pre-determined gestures in silence for a period of fifteen minutes, at the end of which time a bell would be rung to signal them to change their positions with...

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