Silence in Flesh and Curdled Blood. Stage Preservation and Death Drives in El orgullo de la nada, by Angélica Liddell

Abstract

The article examines Angélica Liddell’s El orgullo de la nada (2016) as a stage arrangement that turns silence into an active principle of attention and knowledge. The piece unfolds along three vectors: the museum-imposed displaced object, emblematic of conservation logics; the speech embodied by Victoria Aime and the reading of passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses before Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, interrupted by an aria by Henry Purcell; and the projection of Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). Methodologically, the essay combines performance and image theory with the reflections of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and George Steiner, and pays special attention to the dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975): the mirror’s function as a threshold between memory and presence, and the use of Purcell’s aria as a suspension of speech, guide the reading of the displacement of perception. A twofold hypothesis is confirmed: first, that the collision between conservation and destruction is not resolved dialectically but densifies perceptual experience; second, that the performance finds its full meaning within the cycle Objets déplacés by advancing a proposal that displaces not only objects but perception itself. Far from absence, silence operates as a technique of attention that corrects defective language, substitutes rhetoric with material presence, and turns the stage into a mirror where the wordless image summons a shared mortality.