I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
Un/settling scores: Actions for Torture Justice
101. Forget to die. Repeat and live forever.
— Lucky Pierre, Actions for Chicago Torture Justice
Another potential use of the score which I’m increasingly interested in is in the realm of political activism. How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?1
One recent example of new thinking along this continuum uses the instruction-art model to propose actions that range from the more conventionally confrontational political activism to ‘symbolic’ art-actions to the seemingly impossible/ ‘imaginational’2 / ‘unthinkable.’