Iury Salustiano Trojaborg

Ancestral Dramaturgies

This doctoral research develops Ancestral Dramaturgies, a decolonial, practice-based methodology for investigating how personal, collective, and more-than-human histories can be activated, encountered, and transformed through dramaturgical and performative practice. The research emerges from my situated trajectory as a diasporic, Queer, non-binary artist and researcher of colour engaging with migration, displacement, ancestry, memory, belonging, and the conditions through which knowledge is produced and legitimized in artistic research.

Rather than applying a pre-existing methodology, Ancestral Dramaturgies emerged progressively through an iterative process of artistic experimentation, critical reflection, and qualitative inquiry. Autoethnography, multi-sited ethnography, participant observation, interviewing, epistolary practice, collaborative witnessing, Deep Listening, Situated Knowledge, and Practice-as-Research were brought into relation through a series of artistic experiments, including correspondence, ancestral and genealogical investigation, sonic and performative composition, site-specific practice, and collective processes understood as pedagogical spaces of encounter, listening, and knowledge exchange. These methods became integrated into a dramaturgical framework in which artistic practice functions simultaneously as inquiry, knowledge production, and transformation.

Two principles—encruzilhada (crossroads), drawing on Luiz Rufino’s (2019) conception of the crossroads as a pedagogical and epistemological space of encounter, and spiral time, informed by Leda Maria Martins’ (2021) understanding of time as non-linear, cyclical, and continually transforming—provide dramaturgical and performative structures for engaging these relations across space and time.

The research contributes to decolonial artistic research by proposing dramaturgy as more than a means of organizing theatrical structures. It articulates dramaturgy as an epistemological and relational practice through which bodies, memories, histories, territories, materials, and forms of knowledge can enter into dialogue. Emerging from a singular artistic trajectory, Ancestral Dramaturgies proposes transferable principles rather than a universal method, offering ways for artistic researchers and practitioners to investigate ancestry, belonging, migration, and collective memory through situated and embodied practice.

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