This paper will offer critical reflections on 'The Impossible Scene', a performance intervention in the ESMA Memory Site Museum in Buenos Aires in November 2019. This example of practice-as-research was an output of the AHRC funded project 'Staging Difficult Pasts: Of Narratives, Objects and Public Memory'. The project analyses how theatre makers have innovated narrative forms and reframed theatrical and artefactual objects, while museums have increasingly privileged the "staging" of historical narratives over the display of objects, producing performative encounters as their primary object. Our research team collaborated with museum director Alejandra Naftal and her curatorial team to commission Polish theatre-maker and visual artist Wojtek Ziemilski to hold an artist residency at the ESMA Memory Site Museum to address the complexity of a perpetrator's domestic space within a site for the commemoration of victims of Argentina's military dictatorship. In this presentation, I will consider the opportunities and limitations of a theatrical response to this site, which I will differentiate from what we might understand as the theatricality of spectatorial positionality, and a transnational collaboration that differently understands and articulates 'perpetrator'. The performance brought together multiple frameworks for interpretation: screen, actor, text, audience, and site in an effort to ask new questions of perpetrator legacies in collective memory. Ultimately, I will argue that 'The Impossible Scene' repositioned the question of audience response and the performative register of commemoration. The performance – the first of its kind in the museum – is thus a significant example of institutional change.
