No abstract

In the midst of the activism outburst after the Ayotzinapa crisis, the Mexican collective ‘Rexiste’ wrote the phrase ‘It was the state’ in Mexico City’s main square. I define such action as an embodied practice of memory, which re configurates Mexico’s history of violence. Based on an affective approach, I delve into the kinaesthetic of the performance to show how the action is summoning archived repertoires of Mexican activism post-1968. I first refer to the foundation of human rights committees in the late 70s and their main repertoire of action, hunger strikes, to then consider the funeral re-enactments of the late 1990s after the Aguas Blancas and Acteal massacres. Through this unarchiving I want to analyse how the unresolved past re-emerges in the creation of a non-teleological temporality of state-fostered violence.