Three violences, a thousand absences

Abstract

In Three violences, a thousand absenses, Francisco Viveros maps disappearance as a phenomenon that knows not one geography but three: Colombia during its armed conflict, the banks of the Cali River, and Chile under dictatorship. The title is no hyperbole: each named violence multiplies into countless absences.

The work moves in three parts: Desaparecidos unfolds a choral monologue of seven voices, building a polyphonic testimony in which the final poetry (Cañas, Arango) turns pain into a call to action; Río Turbio hybridizes theatrical language with audiovisual elements: two people under a bridge, a floating torso, and a popular song danced with a dead man. Violence happens in the present tense, and the final truck that takes the protagonists away is more terrifying than any explanation; Lo que no alcancé a hablar con mi tío introduces autofiction: a poet reads in public the real poem that Viveros dedicated to his uncle, a Chilean political prisoner, and dies in an accident that folds into an oneiric reunion. Disappearance becomes a loop.

Theatre, poetry, music, monologue, audiovisual hybridity and choreography coexist in this compilation without hierarchies. The footnotes document its genesis in workshops and community performances, anchoring fiction in real processes of memory. Tres violencias, mil ausencias does not ask for tears: it asks not to remain silent.

Keywords: Dramaturgy, Postdramatic theatre, Violence, Colombian armed conflict, Autofiction