To the South: the body – writing and performance in Pedro Lemebel

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between body, writing, and memory in the work of Chilean artist and writer Pedro Lemebel, with particular focus on the performances and texts produced during Chile’s democratic transition from 1988 onward. The concept of “word as gesture” is adopted as a lens to understand Lemebel’s writing as an embodied performance, in which language and body together inscribe experiences of political. The analysis centers on the performance La Conquista de América and the text El Informe Rettig, whose strategies resist the conciliatory frameworks promoted by institutional discourses of memory. Although situated in Chile’s democratic transition, Lemebel’s work resonates in the present, illuminating structural and authoritarian violences that persist and resurface in the contemporary Latin American context, where massacres, erasures, and states of exception impose themselves anew. Art is discussed as a practice of ex/position, situated between archive and testimony, capable of destabilizing the boundaries between representation and presence. By challenging the ways of narrating the past, Lemebel’s work proposes a historiography that operates against a politics of pacification.