Burial Sites. Do Ideologies Ever Rest in Peace? Performance and Democratic Citizenship in Marina Abramović, Leda Papakonstantinou and Teatr Zar

On the threshold of the new millennium, violent political incidents and natural phenomena have triggered a reconsideration of the theater and performance representation of death and burial sites. My present intention is to discuss recent aesthetically and ideologically unconventional representations of burial sites through the examination of the work produced by Teatr Zar, Marina Abramović and Leda Papakonstantinou so as to show that burial sites still form the symbolic sub-terra of the contemporary Agora as they did in classical democratic Athens. Burial sites are seen as places of contest that can be transformed into public spaces of democratic deliberation and reconciliation in our contemporary condition of increasing precarity. Such performances are discussed as forms of embodied and plural performativity, as unconventional gatherings of precarious bodies, dead and alive, indigenous and foreign, in the public democratic sphere, which are both aesthetically and politically significant events. As all the performing bodies are female, I also propose that they offer through their own work unconventional renderings of burial sites by refusing, among other things, an uncritical performance of the tropes of the Monstrous Mother and/or Mater Dolorosa (Pietá)