Visualizing the Burden of Silence

Keywords: Creative Methods, Africa, Trauma, Body, Decolonial
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

The research interrogates the intergenerational cost of trauma through time, space, and silence and pushes forward the necessity of integrating community-centric knowledge to challenge and diversify research approaches. I use visual participatory methods to serve as a means of adding representative and contextual value to the research and further the exploration of inclusive and decolonial research methods. In this work, Performance Ethnography is utilized as a method to analyze the embodiment and temporality of trauma. The primary object of analysis is a devised performance that draws directly from research conducted through semi-structured interviews with individuals that survived political violence during the transition from apartheid to democracy (late 1980s-1994), a period that characterized Kwazulu-Natal as “the killing fields” of South Africa. The portrayal of interview material was embodied by 18 young actors who lived in Gauteng under the shadow of a still grossly violent South Africa, 25 years into democracy. This work oscillates between themes of unearthing trauma and using time, distance and external bodies to observe trauma's spatiality. I employ Drama Therapy as a methodological tool to navigate trauma's silence and intergenerational transmission.