Lezing 'Meet the Jury - The Archive as an Open Wound'

How does the body itself become an archive—open, porous, and continuously re-inscribed by time, trauma, and transformation?

In this performance lecture, Torres Machado brings the myth of Filoctetes into the flesh, merging his personal history and the materiality of his wounded body with the wounded hero abandoned on the shores of Lemnos. Filoctetes’ body is marked by the absence of movement, by a scar that does not close, by pain that persists beyond the limits of performance. Vinicius, too, archives this wound. A tumour and a nerve removed, a body that learns to move differently, and yet never fully heals.

This performance lecture explores the intangible as that which resists closure: the persistent wound, the fragile body, and the air thick with the residues of history. This interplay of personal and collective trauma—whether in the scars of a body, the wounds of a nation, or the blackened skies of a burning rainforest- explores how bodies registers, negotiates and transmits history.