Splatając opowieści, odmieniając dyskursy

Taking as its starting point Sande Cohen’s thesis that historiography is one of many failed discursive project of modernity, the chapter looks at various recent attempts to revisit and reconceptualize practices, discursive forms and representational models of communicating about the past, especially those which offer new ways of problematizing the reductive binaries of fact and fiction, true and false, real and imaginary. Performative arts, theatre included, specialize in interweaving histories of different scales while working across temporal and geographical landscapes. They are, therefore, able to reveal - and materialize in cognitively and affectively effective forms - similarities and epistemic connections that otherwise would be impossible to draw. In order to demonstrate this, the chapter focus on two examples of recent artistic projects: a series of ethnofictional happenings conceived for three spaces within Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia "Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity" by a Bogota-based artistic laboratory Mapa Teatro (2018) and a short video "Astronauts" (2014) by Frances Bodomo, an Afro-American artists and filmmaker. Both are still communicating about the (or a) past but at the same time they try to open it towards a possible future, calling attention to what is politically imperative rather than empirically grounded.