Impersonation is a practice of masquerading that troubles the boundaries between performance and the law. In 2013, The Yes Men, Diana Taylor, and Jesusa Rodríguez engaged in a digital impersonation of the agrochemical and biotechnology giant Monsanto in Chiapas, Mexico. This action led to debates about when impersonation qualifies as performance and when it counts as fraud, which raised questions of academic freedom, codes of ethics, and conflicts of interest.

An archive is a place, a thing/object, and a practice. But can “things” be archived at all, or do they rather belong to a world of endless transformation? Do “things” have a life of their own that exceeds the limits of the archive? A massive immersive performance, Bom Retiro 958 metros by Brazil’s theatre company Teatro da Vertigem, suggests that matter, although martyred by constant change and transformation, resists disappearance and calls into question what we presume remains, and what we assume disappears, from culture.

The fiesta celebrated annually in TepoztlÁn, Mexico, repeatedly enacts a history—one that affirms a sense of identity and agency quite different from the one found in history books, allowing for the massive performance-of-communal-self year after year. Through this astonishing act, performed history trumps official written history and communal organizations stymie governmental structures.

Among the mothers and the children of the “disappeared” in Argentina, performance of various kinds is a way of marking, accusing, and remembering. How can performance transmit traumatic memory? How do those of us who have not suffered the violence come to understand it? And how do we participate, in our own ways, in further transmitting it?

One of Brazil's few solo performance artists, Stoklos combines political clowning/commentary, mime, androgyny, magic, and Brechtian gestus as she explores “the ways in which gender, sexuality, power, and familial bonds pull and push in a woman's flesh.”

“What's Diana to me, that I should weep for her?” How and why does Princess Di's ghost haunt our memories as well as the latest political crisis?