HISTORY AS A MASS GRAVE. IMAGES OF THE BODY IN MATEI VIȘNIEC’S THEATRE
HISTORY AS A MASS GRAVE. IMAGES OF THE BODY IN MATEI VIȘNIEC’S THEATRE

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between space and corporeality in the dramaturgy of Matei Vișniec. Conceiving theatre as both a form of interpellation of political power and an archive of recent historical trauma, Vișniec constructs in his plays a complex imagery of the body ‒ wounded by war, dictatorship, and displacement. Over time, the metaphor of the mass grave has become a central symbolic figure in his writing, articulating the violence of history, the systemic abuse of the human subject, and the condition of deferred or impossible mourning. While in The Word Progress On My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True, mass graves and the ossuary evoke the specters of war and genocide, in plays such as Migraaaannts! There’s Too Many on This Damn Boat the unmarked cemeteries along the shores of the Mediterranean represent contemporary mass graves ‒ those of drowned migrants and refugees. Within Vișniec’s theatrical universe, mass graves and the pathological body function as heterotopic structures: spatial dislocations and symbolic extensions of traumatic memory. These sites operate as liminal zones ‒ both mental and material ‒ where the boundaries of the human are dissolved and reconfigured.

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