Ramírez-Figueroa approaches political history through the sideways door of myth, play, and embodied ritual. His work understands that trauma often resists direct representation: it either becomes spectacle or becomes mute. Instead, he builds fictions—costumes, props, sets that look hand-made, almost childlike—where historical violence can be re-entered without being re-enacted as pornographic suffering. The softness of materials is strategic. Foam, papier-mâché, pigments: the vocabulary of school theatre becomes a critical tool, making room for tenderness inside brutal histories. The body is central—not as expressive virtuosity, but as carrier of memory, displacement, and inherited fear. Performative gestures appear awkward, masked, partially transformed: bodies learning to speak through detour. Humor is present, but not as relief; it is camouflage, a way to approach what would otherwise immobilize. Embodied fictions are, in this sense, survival technologies. They allow a community of viewers to inhabit uncertainty: to recognize that the archive is incomplete, that testimony is fractured, that national narratives are often built on erasure. Ramírez-Figueroa doesn’t “heal” history; he makes its wounds legible as structures that persist in the present. His art is political precisely because it refuses simplification: it gives violence a strange, invented stage where it can be seen, felt, and re-imagined—without granting it the last word.
