The Minefield of Memory: Materiality and Performance in Lola Arias’ Campo minado (2016)

• In Event: Crossing Politics and Identities in Latin American Performance Histories

Abstract

Described as an ‘extraordinary exercise in the mining of memory and the staging of history’ (Tripney, 2016), Lola Arias’ play Campo minado brings together six British and Argentine veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas war to share personal memories of the conflict. In this reading of the play, I contend that the material on-stage presence of old photographs, hand-written letters and pieces of uniform enables the director to present the archive of cultural memory not as ‘a stable repository’ (Borggreen & Gade, 2013) but as ‘a dynamic and generative tool’ (Osthoff, 2009). In this sense, the paper argues that the play’s tactile, material interactions between actors and objects thus emphasizes memory’s ‘eventhood’ (Borggreen & Gade, 2013), in which new relationships to the trauma of the conflict are played out on stage at both the individual and collective level. As such, through a theoretical engagement with recent work on concepts of materiality in documentary theatre (Martin, 2009, 2010; Reinelt, 2009), this paper ultimately claims that the performative emphasis on the materiality of the document in Campo minado represents a means of overcoming the ‘repetición maníaco-obsesiva del recuerdo’ (Richard, 1998) and of eluding dominant, politicized discourses for a more reflective account of the conflict’s legacy in contemporary Argentina.

Author

• Geoffrey W Maguire, University of Cambridge