Tentativa Artaud and Its Double: Performing Surveillance, Dividing Time

The legacy of dictatorial violence in Latin America has called into question the possibility of linear histories, instead demanding a focus on the way the past continues to surface in the present. Yet, as one Chilean performance and its archives reveal, thinking about history spatially as opposed to temporally reveals the way that the future can also inflect meaning in the present. This article traces the history of a building in Santiago that first served as the stage for an anti-dictatorship performance by students at the University of Chile, and was then subsequently taken over as a center for surveillance by Augusto Pinochet’s secret police. Led by philosopher Ronald Kay, this art action, called Tentativa Artaud, emerged from a seminar including artists such as Raúl Zurita, Catalina Parra and Diamela Eltit, who would explore similar performance tactics in their later work. What began as a secretive performance about sound and language in Antonin Artaud’s writing gained subsequent meaning when the same building became the site of violent espionage. This performance, as I will argue, confuses the temporality of past and future by demonstrating that in the context of surveillance, spaces can be charged with meaning that resonates across time.