Backyard [A Field to Search] - The Lecture

Laura Uribe and Sabina Aldana L.A.S. [Laboratory of Sustainable Artists] have been investigating the phenomenon of enforced disappearances in Mexico since 2018. They are developing performative strategies to make the crime visible and take action through art. At the beginning of their research, the official number of disappeared people was around 32,000 - today it is over 130,000. In view of this incessantly escalating violence, the question arises: why art when people disappear? As an answer, the two artists wanted to open a pop-up boutique at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2025. The offer: multifunctional designer clothing for survival in the Global South, tools for searching for bodies and women's underwear against disappearance. For PERFORMING DEMOCRACY, Laura Uribe and Sabina Aldana present their objects for sale in a performative lecture and look back on seven years in which they searched for bodies together with the relatives of the disappeared in self-organized search parties in mountains, in the desert sand and in the undergrowth. They interweave their political research and personal experience with their activist agenda and artistic questions. Backyard uses fiction as a strategy of provocation. The theater becomes a pop-up boutique, a workshop and an archive. What cannot be exhibited is exhibited, what cannot be sold is sold - but what actually seems unendurable is also made tangible.