Haunting Spectres and Spectating Ghosts

This article presents a conversation about the performance and research project Necropolis (2018–ongoing), which is based on the document compiled by UNITED for Intercultural Action, a network of anti-racist organisations across Europe, with information on people who lost their lives on migratory routes to Europe, and whose death is mostly unacknowledged. The artistic and activist project aims to locate graves and, where possible, find missing information about the deceased. In the theatre, the city of the dead is mapped on a screen, and the audience is guided through it by a voiceover and two performers on stage. At the end of this journey, the performers simulate a forensic ritual with sculptures resembling human remains. They assemble a body made of bodies, and the audience sees a ghost rise and gaze at them. Conjuring both the cadaver and the spectre, this figure becomes the starting point of a dialogue between the artist, Arkadi Zaides, and the audience member, Livia Andrea Piazza. They discuss the conditions under which haunting might occur in theatre, the differences between spectating a body of data and encountering it viscerally, and the kind of spectrality performed by this figure as an indiscernible composite of fact and affect.