Attuning to Sites of Violence: Performing Spectral Relationality Across North America

Attuning to Sites of Violence: Performing Spectral Relationality Across North America foregrounds the agentic liveliness of disappearance and focuses on often unseen elements as active collaborators in non-forgetting. This dissertation argues that disappearance itself can perform and reveal significant insights if attuned to. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this research navigates theatre and performance studies, contemporary visual art, embodied practice, and critical memory studies. Methodologically, it includes conversational interviews with artists and community activists, personal observations, archival research, and site visit analyses. The dissertation emphasizes a relational and intuitive method, drawing on associative poetic reflections and speculative knowledge sharing, alongside an auto-theoretical approach that intertwines personal narrative with critical analysis. The writing adopts a curatorial perspective, combining case studies and ideas that might not otherwise converge, creating connections and interactions that provide new insights.

By attuning to site as performer, the dissertation expands ideas of site specificity. It weaves together artistic practices and theoretical frameworks to reveal how disappearances, erasures, and sites of violence communicate and relate across space and time. This work underscores the importance of attuning to the spectral and relational dimensions of violence and ecological kinship, advocating for a more just and interconnected world. Attuning to Sites of Violence acknowledges the persistent presence of past violence, engaging with the traces left by historical and ongoing acts of violence and disappearance, and explores the complex ways these forces shape our understanding of the present. Instead of mapping or directly connecting the disparate case studies, it examines the shared relationalities touched by absence, and the complex ecologies of violence operating through space and time. The project explores broader social processes that enable, conceal, and frame our thinking about disappearances and other violent forces that occur out of sight. By examining what these artistic case studies reveal about specific sites of nonappearance, the dissertation focuses on cultivating practices of attunement with the more-than-human world, embodied care, grief, and spectral relationality through deep time. Here, the elemental traces of violent disappearances and erasures persist, continuously haunting the present, and compelling us to take action.