Abstract
In 2002, Emilio García Wehbi’s multi-site performance artwork, Proyecto Filoctetes: Lemnos en Buenos Aires saw the dissemination of 23 lifelike human puppets across Argentina’s capital, each with a gesture and position intended to intimate a state of unconsciousness or death. Participant-observers of the artwork recorded reactions to the puppets using written fieldnotes, video and photography – objects which now describe the performance in posterity through a digitized archive. This article focuses on the project’s transformation – its distorting and refracting – of a real-world social relation, arguing that its effects work to implicate the spectatorial gaze, producing a state of perceptual responsibility as a fantasy of solidarity and potentiality. The multiple layers of knowledge which make up shared social realities are examined through de Sousa Santos’s term ‘abyssal thinking’ (2007) as grounds for understanding relations between subjects and political conditions of modern State formations.
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