ABSTRACT
Assembly has played multiple key roles in Argentine performance communities of the last 40 years. This chapter reviews three significant moments in Buenos Aires’s recent performance history (1981, 2001–2002, and 2016, respectively) to consider how local Artists' notions of assembly have been performatively transformed. In each, assembly appears to have functioned less as a Butlerian defence of individual liberty and much more within the agonistic political mode proposed by Chantal Mouffe. The three analysed moments of assembly – under military dictatorship, in the midst of socio-economic crisis, and during civil and human rights protests – productively explore the potential of community, and performance itself, when engaging with the political real.
