Remains of Psyche. Trauma, inscription and archiv in Ronald Kay´s Tentativa Artaud

Abstract

In October of 1974 the “first phase” of Tentativa Artaud by Ronald Kay was executed. In principle, it could be said that the work traces spaces of corporal resistance against the discipline imposed by the dictatorship. More deeply, however, the work will complicate that enclave through a stratified “archeology of memory”. Indeed, all that “first execution” is recorded by various technical devices, forming a “micro-file” that will be exposed in a deferred way (2008) in the mnba  converted into macro-archive. Tentative Artaud, therefore, is neither easily dateable nor comfortably locatable −since it incorporates virtually all the sites with which it has been related. Through this generalized commotion, Tentativa Artaud questions the criteriologies of the vernacular art theory and, at the same time that it determines as “fundamentally unstable” any historical record, problematizes the technical foundation of the mnemic inscription.