Imagine walking into a shop where the mannequins wear survival gear designed not for wilderness expeditions or bunker fantasies, but for mothers searching the Mexican desert for the bones of their children. The price tags list not euros but years of grief, hectares of scrubland combed on hands and knees, bodies counted and uncounted. This is the conceit at the heart of Backyard [A Field to Search], and it is precisely the kind of fiction that makes certain truths speakable.

On 23 April 2026, Studio Я at the Maxim Gorki Theater hosts the lecture-performance iteration of this project by Laura Uribe and Sabina Aldana. For years, they have been investigating enforced disappearances in Mexico — a crisis whose scale defies comprehension. The official count of disappeared persons in Mexico now exceeds 100,000, with many sources citing figures above 110,000 or even 130,000. The numbers keep climbing, at a rate that renders each individual case statistically invisible even as the human weight of each one remains absolute.

The format they have chosen — a speculative pop-up boutique — is both absurd and lethally precise. Backyard presents itself as a retail space selling "multifunctional designer clothing for survival in the Global South," along with technologies for physical protection and, as the project describes it, the "preservation of life." The retail framework is a Trojan horse. Consumerism is the language much of the world speaks most fluently, and Uribe and Aldana weaponise it, forcing the audience into the discomfort of browsing products whose existence indicts the conditions that necessitate them. Think of Santiago Sierra hiring workers to perform degrading labour for minimum wage inside galleries — art that appropriates commercial or bureaucratic structures not to celebrate them but to make their violence legible. But where Sierra keeps his distance, observing exploitation from the position of the one who commissions it, Uribe and Aldana have spent years physically embedded in the search. They have joined self-organised search brigades — citizens, mostly women, mostly relatives of the disappeared — working through landscapes the state has abandoned.

The lecture-performance navigates a double movement. Fiction as provocation: the theatre becomes a shop, the shop becomes an archive, the archive becomes a space where what "cannot be exhibited" is exhibited and what "must not be sold" is sold. And simultaneously, a firsthand account of years moving through landscapes of state-sanctioned erasure. Coverage of this project outside of German-language theatre programming is sparse, limited primarily to the Gorki's own materials and event listings. What I can trace suggests that the lecture iteration distils an earlier, more spatially expansive version of the project — a hybrid of pop-up store, workshop, and archive — into the concentrated format of spoken address and demonstration.

Studio Я is a fitting container. The Gorki's experimental wing has, under the artistic directorship of Şermin Langhoff since 2013, become one of Berlin's most committed spaces for what the theatre calls post-migrant narratives — work that takes seriously the perspectives of those whose stories European institutions have historically told about rather than with. The building itself has been claimed, repurposed, and re-narrated by successive powers: built in 1827 as a concert hall for the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, confiscated by Soviet occupying forces after the Second World War, renamed after Maxim Gorky as a socialist model theatre, and reinvented once more after reunification. A building whose identity has been repeatedly overwritten is not a neutral backdrop for a project about people whom the state has made to vanish.

The piece is delivered in Spanish with English surtitles — a choice that keeps the work anchored in its linguistic origin rather than smoothing it into the frictionless English of international art speak. The format borrows the trappings of the lecture — slides, perhaps objects from the boutique's inventory, the cadences of explanation and address — and deploys them against themselves, interrupted by testimony, by image, by the sheer accumulation of numbers that refuse to stay abstract.

What Backyard does with the format of retail is not unlike what Forensic Architecture does with the courtroom exhibit, or what Milo Rau does with the tribunal — it borrows a structure whose authority people already accept, then fills it with content that structure was never designed to hold. The difference is that Uribe and Aldana's borrowed structure is not the law or journalism but commerce. And commerce, unlike the law, does not pretend to care about justice. It pretends to care about you — the consumer, the individual with desires. So when the boutique offers you a garment designed to help a body survive, or to help a body be found, it asks: what kind of market is this? Who is the customer? Who set the conditions under which such products become necessary? Mexico's crisis of disappearance — comparable in numerical scale to Argentina's Dirty War multiplied several times over — has received a fraction of the consolidated international attention. The Argentine desaparecidos are commonly cited at 30,000; Mexico's figures dwarf this, yet the crisis has generated far less of the symbolic infrastructure (trials, memorials, cultural reckoning) that Argentina eventually built. The boutique makes that disparity tangible: this is a crisis large enough to sustain an entire retail concept, and the world is still mostly browsing.

There is something important about this work appearing in Berlin rather than Mexico City. Not because European audiences need to be educated — that framing is patronising to everyone involved — but because the global supply chains of violence are not contained by borders, and the mechanisms of disappearance (corruption, narco-state entanglement, institutional indifference) are enabled by international economic structures in which European nations are participants, not bystanders. The boutique metaphor sharpens this: if you can browse the survival gear, you are already implicated in the economy that makes it necessary.

I cannot tell you what it feels like to sit in Studio Я and hear these accounts delivered live. I can tell you that the architecture of this project — the collision of retail fantasy and forensic reality, the use of fiction not as escape but as confrontation — represents a mode of performance practice that European institutions are increasingly programming, particularly at venues like the Gorki, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and Kampnagel, where Latin American artists addressing state violence have found a recurring platform. What I can also tell you is that the disappeared numbered in the tens of thousands when this project began, and they number in the hundreds of thousands now, and the project is still running, and the boutique is still open, and the bodies are still in the ground.