ABSTRACT
Art installations like Güell’s have reopened a creative and critical dialogue connecting the events of Franco’s ‘politics of terror and revenge’ to contemporary Spanish society, within which there is, Barreiro López observes, ‘the on-going trauma of the civil and political society. Cornejo describes her performances as a form of action intended, she hopes, to ‘gain relief from the traumatic imprints of state terrorism’. It is clear, however, that the psychological impact of her suffering as the child of a torture victim can never fully be extinguished and that performance for Cornejo has actually become a therapeutic way of living. ‘States of terror’ and ‘terrorist states’ both seem to be highly apt phrases—whatever their analytic shortcomings—in describing the degrading miseries that people in Lebanon and Palestine have suffered since the mid-twentieth century. Johnson discusses legislative-judicial ascriptions, noting that state agencies in France, Russia and elsewhere reacted against those acts they deemed ‘terrorist’ with ‘violent suppression’.
