Between ruins and remembrance: Performance, memory and the refusal of erasure

For this new issue of Performing Ethos , we have gathered a constellation of practices, asking each contributing author what persists when bodies, archives, homes, histories and cultural institutions face violence, erasure or silencing. The issue moves from Samuel Kolodezh and Bryan Reynolds’s exploration of the ethics of allorealism to Said Al-Siyabi and Yazan Kamal Al Bader’s rethinking of Artaud’s Les Cenci , and Riham Isaac’s bringing to life Palestinian archives, tracing performance as an embodied labour of carrying. The Special Section ‘Performance as Witness, Memory and Resistance in Times of War’ is dedicated solely to ASHTAR Theatre’s New Gaza Monologues , which places this labour under the most acute pressure possible, calling on readers not merely to encounter testimony as a site of cultural production but to allow themselves to be implicated. The two concluding contributions, Helen Cole’s curatorial testimony, written in exquisite prose, and Andrea Pagnes’s conversation with Petra Kuppers, problematize and expand this issue to consider ecological, disability-centred and more-than-human ways of caring, so that remembrance appears as an active, ethically urgent and necessary act and spectatorship becomes implication. Ultimately, throughout the contributions of this issue, vulnerability emerges not as a flaw but as a relational opportunity to claim futurities that may still be imagined and sustained.