Suchergebnisse

In 2013, Erdum Gunduz's passive "standing man" performance in Istanbul spontaneously attracted thousands of participants, online followers and copyists in public acts of dissent. But exactly what form of new social relations, or more precisely, what kind of collective emancipatory political engagement did this facilitate? This paper examines the consequentialities of performative modes of "being public" through addressing the shift from "being singular" to "being plural" or, more pertinently, "being-in-common" (Nancy 2000). Reflecting on the historical activities of the Dutch Provo, which briefly enacted mayhem in public in the mid-1960s through a set of performative strategies, it considers a disparate set of situated but transitory "improvisational forms of public assembly" (Butler 2015, 22) from passive acts of togetherness to collective viral performative utterances (e.g., We are Charlie 2015; Oh Jeremy Corbyn! 2017). Informed by Lauren Berlant's (2016) troubling of the ambiguous and contingent nature of collective encounters of "becoming common," this paper acknowledges there is a preponderance of positivist political fantasizing associated with "being in proximity." That said, it concludes that public participative modes of performance that embrace spatial proxemics facilitate the development of alternative subjectivities through affective bodily encounters between strangers. These collective encounters of incipient "commoning" (Stavrides 2016) resonate with what Jeremy Gilbert refers to as the boundlessness, the "infinite relationality" (Gilbert 2014) of the human condition. While collective acts of political performativity may be fugitive in their convergent emancipatory politics, they engender a provisional unity toward being-in-common, a foundational ontological state to which individuals are already predisposed.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Body, Space and Technology and the definitive published version is available at http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol15/ ; This paper builds on Isabelle Stengers' suggestion that we need to reclaim magic, sorcery and witchcraft as a means of refuting the stable rational subject. Working with current philosophical and critical ideas around 'new materialisms', it emerges from a longstanding set of research preoccupations related to the affective, disruptive and provocative properties of things. The episodic text ruminates on these ideas through a series of 'site-written' narratives on the traces of sorcery and radical political histories in the villes and forests of Limousin, France, intercepted by passages of analysis of the author's involvement (2009 - 2015) in the live art multimedia performance group, Alchemy/Schmalchemy. Adding the pre-fix 'schm' to alchemy, the group conjures an intentionally disruptive and mischievous performance space of oscillation, characteristically presenting a hotch-potch of erudition, quackery and avante-gardeist trappings. Simultaneously adhering to and repudiating conventional ambitions of performance, it purposively produces an uncomfortable but potentially creative tension. In its most recent live art 'manifestation' (Manchester, 2015), the group worked with a collection of found objects, exploring their potential for distributed agency with participants. In the process, it engaged in a form of practice-based enquiry that has wider ontological, epistemological, aesthetic and political implications. (Alongside the written paper, excerpts from video and text-based items used in live performances - or 'manifestations' - are provided, as well as photographic and video documentation of selected performances)

This paper builds on Isabelle Stengers' suggestion that we need to reclaim magic, sorcery and witchcraft as a means of refuting the stable rational subject. Working with current philosophical and critical ideas around 'new materialisms', it emerges from a longstanding set of research preoccupations related to the affective, disruptive and provocative properties of things. The episodic text ruminates on these ideas through a series of 'site-written' narratives on the traces of sorcery and radical political histories in the villes and forests of Limousin, France, intercepted by passages of analysis of the author's involvement (2009 – 2015) in the live art multimedia performance group, Alchemy/Schmalchemy. Adding the pre-fix 'schm' to alchemy, the group conjures an intentionally disruptive and mischievous performance space of oscillation, characteristically presenting a hotch-potch of erudition, quackery and avante-gardeist trappings. Simultaneously adhering to and repudiating conventional ambitions of performance, it purposively produces an uncomfortable but potentially creative tension. In its most recent live art 'manifestation' (Manchester, 2015), the group worked with a collection of found objects, exploring their potential for distributed agency with participants. In the process, it engaged in a form of practice-based enquiry that has wider ontological, epistemological, aesthetic and political implications.(Alongside the written paper, excerpts from video and text-based items used in live performances – or 'manifestations' – are provided, as well as photographic and video documentation of selected performances).

This is a book chapter published in Bull, J. (ed.) British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream 1965-1979. The final version can be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/british-theatre-companies-1965-1979-9781408175439/ ; This peer-reviewed essay on the work of Welfare State International (WSI) was commissioned by Professor John Bull (University of Reading) to carry out new primary research for a case-study published as part of a three-volume re-evaluation of alternative/experimental theatre companies, British Theatre Companies: from Fringe to Mainstream. The three-volume study brings together new scholarly research on key influential British theatre companies (for many of which there are few published sources) and is expected to become the essential resource in this field for other scholars and researchers. My chapter, based on extensive archive research and interviews with former participants, situates the company's forty years' history within the context of recent communitarian, collaborative and participative discourses, which have emerged as key critical debates since the 1990s. I was approached as an expert in the field and commissioned due to my standing and previous work on the company which includes various conference papers and published essays. Utilising primary source, public and private archive/papers (eg extensive WSI papers and John Fox/Sue Gill archive at Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, Arts Council archive papers etc) interviews and communications with WSI founders, members and participants, it builds on previous extensive research and curatorial projects on WSI, eg I curated a research-based retrospective exhibition in 2007 at MidPennine Gallery Burnley (supported by Henry Moore Foundation funds) and have presented material related to WSI in papers at various conferences, eg Portsmouth Visual Culture conference 2009 and College Art Association, Chicago 2010 and have published a book chapter on WSI, radical politics and New Age culture in a book on 1970s culture.

Introduction : art, culture and violence / Ruth Kinna and Gillian Whiteley -- From Watts to Wall Street : a situationist analysis of political violence / Martin Lang -- Protest art and public space : Oleg Kulik and the strategies of Moscow Actionism / Marina Maximova -- Project sigma : the temporality of activism / Vlad Morariu and Jaakko Karhunen -- Challenging state-led political violence with art-activism : focus on borders / Amy Corcoran -- Power v. violence : how can contemporary art create a 'space of appearance' and generate social change? / Jessica Holtaway.