CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ECOLOGY * ARCHIVE, FATIGUE, AND PRESENCE POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY SCENE

The dense archival catalogue presented in the Escenas 2020–2022 roster problematizes the assumption that sheer accumulation of experiences equates to an expansive, non-hierarchical field of contemporary performance. Rather than producing democratic or post-dramatic terrains, this catalogue reveals an ecology of exhaustion in which the sheer volume of events, gestures, and encounters neutralizes critique by reducing it to presence. From the vantage of Contemporary Performance Ecology, the archive’s proliferation does not democratize meaning; it manufactures a regime of visibility that privileges constant circulation over critical depth. What appears as a flattened continuum—“lo consumido, lo visto, lo hecho”—operates less as an open field and more as a saturation point where attention is absorbed without transformation. The implicit thesis of the source suggests a landscape unencumbered by drama; this essay contends that such saturation is itself a form of structural tension, a political economy of presence that displaces conflict into the interstices of institutionalized circulation.