Lee 1 Julia Lee SCA 532: Latinx Art/Performance Macarena Gomez-Barris December 2014 Decolonial/DeSpectacle: Framing Feminicide through Regina José Galindo’s Caminos The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. 1 In 1967, Guy Debord lamented the loss of lived reality. Specifically, he wrote that industrial modes of production organize the social around an illusion, a heavily mediated unreality that numbs the social body into mistaking consumption for authentic experience. It is this visually- anesthetized social body that he calls the Society of Spectacle, and it is in this framework that I would like to place the work of Regina José Galindo. Galindo often invites spectacle to de- naturalize the pervasion of gendered violence in Guatemala, sometimes embodying the violence through deeply empathetic self-injury, other times embedding the violence in metonym, and asking spectators to recover and reckon with layers of victimization. Using Fregoso’s definition of feminicide, as the culmination of many violences born from the State-sponsored subalternization of women, I offer Galindo’s work as a means to recover the public from their numbness to spectacularized violence, specifically within the urban context. This paper focuses on Caminos (2013), a public performance in which the artist reconfigures the touristic city of Antigua Guatemala as an archive of violence, and its inhabitants as active witnesses. I compare Galindo’s activation of the city to the Situationist dérive, and frame the artist’s trace as a counter-memory to the hegemonic script of the city. I do so under the assumption that spectacle is not insurmountable. Galindo’s work not only makes visible the horrific injustices that women face in her native country, but it also reorganizes the social possibilities for collectively processing and recovering from violence. I argue that Galindo neuters the spectacle of gendered violence by locating it in time and place, playing against a dense urban imaginary to transgress the colonial matrix. Caminos 1 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print