Chapter 5, “Raw and Rotten,” analyzes four performances by contemporary Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo: The Emancipatory Kiss, Slapping Power, The Unnamable, and Demagogue. It argues that, in them, Castillo does not stage a form of resistance to the state’s spectral power by engaging in acts of nostalgia, reappropriation, or resignification that modify the haunting presence of the hypermasculine military hero without letting go of it or seeing beyond it. Her reckoning with the specter occurs through the access she gives herself and her audience to the “workshop of history” and to the “making of” of the idol. Through them, the specter becomes material, malleable, and dead. As such, her work invites us to think of the future as an unshaped potentiality, and to activate a collective agency that only exists in the hands of the present and that is grounded in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and disloyal relationship with the past.
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