At the 2025 Memory Studies Association conference, held at Nottingham Trent University under the theme “Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization,” Dr. Cristina Pividori (UAB) and Dr Andrea Bellot (URV) presented the paper “Ruined Bodies and Landscapes: Theatre, Postmemory, and the Entangled Legacies of Rape and Ecocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” In this joint work, they examine Lynn Nottage’s Ruined and Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World as theatrical responses to the intertwined legacies of sexual violence and ecological destruction in the DRC. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s theories of “embodied performance,” Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence,” and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality” they argue that these texts transform trauma—both personal and global—into a postmemorial archive inscribed in female bodies and devastated landscapes. Theatre here becomes a space of witnessing, where audiences are called to respond ethically to what continues to unfold beyond the stage.
The conference offered an exceptionally rich forum for dialogue, with an excellent keynote lecture by Ann Rigney on memory and resistance and roundtables that set the tone for rigorous and generative debate. Their reflections on mediation, affect, and the future of memory studies are of crucial importance to the work of the POSTLIT project. We were grateful for the opportunity to engage with such an active scholarly community and to contribute to ongoing conversations on the material, embodied, and ecological dimensions of memory.
