Trespassing borders: encounters and collaborations in performance art (EASA 2016, P092) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Moving Bodies: An Anthropological Approach to Performance Art (Contents and Introduction)
Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.
Introduction: Ethnography, Performance and Imagination
2018
Abstract:This introduction to the thematic section entitled "Ethnography, Performance and Imagination" explores performance as "imaginative ethnography" (Elliott and Culhane 2017), a transdisciplinary, collaborative, embodied, critical and engaged research practice that draws from anthropology and the creative arts. In particular, it focuses on the performativity of performance (an event intentionally staged for an audience) employed as both an ethnographic process (fieldwork) and a mode of ethnographic representation. It asks: can performance help us research and better understand imaginative lifeworlds as they unfold in the present moment? Can performance potentially assist us in re-envisioning what an anthropology of imagination might look like? It also inquires whether working at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, performance and imagination could transform how we attend to ethnographic processes and products, questions of reflexivity and represe...
In my talk, I would primarily like to propose two reflections: First, that we can see art (both art theory and art practice), but especially art institutions and organisations, as prisms for understanding wider aspects of society today. Art institutions, organisations, but also art networks never exist in a vacuum: they organise labour, they issue contracts – they receive funding and distribute it – and they are embedded in local as well as wider political structures. In short, art institutions refract different social dynamics. The second reflection I would like to dwell on concerns the practice of observation -, in particular the observation of art. More specifically, I would like to reflect on the growing interest among artists in ethnographic methods and in the integration of external observers into their practices. What I would like to think about today is the role of anthropological observation as a specific genre of observation and its potential political value for artistic productions.
About looking and looking away: Performance art, visuality and the vision of excess
Despite the centrality of looking to the experience of performance art, relatively little has been published on the visual as a condition of the production of meaning in this particular art form. Tracing the theoretical roots of performance art's vocabulary to linguistics, anthropology and theories of poststructuralism, it comes as no surprise that the concepts of 'theatricality' and 'performativity' have increasingly gained ground in the history of performance art. However, the act of looking, or looking away, should also be accounted for through an understanding of 'visuality', a third term that highlights the contingency of meaning making. For this, this essay affirms the anthropological paradigm, by focusing on situations of visual extremity in both ritual contexts and performance art, as a series of instances where the problems of vision are thrown into particular relief. However, it shall also strive to underline the differences between the two, just as Bataille has, especially on the ground of the creation and undermining of social orders.
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2011
Helsinki. This third episode Converging Perspectives – Writings on Performance Art consists of essays, writings and reviews by MA students of Live Art and performance studies (2009-2011): Suvadeep Das, Christina Georgiou, Sari Kivinen, Katariina Mylläri, Ilka Theurich and Tuuli Tubin. The book includes texts on artistic research by doctoral students of performance art and theory Pilvi Porkola and Tero Nauha and an essay by a guest, Lisa Erdman. The anthology is compiled with an introduction by Professor Annette Arlander. Converging Perspectives
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Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2021
There has been, in the past two decades, more scholarly attention for how rights-holders understand human rights norms, and how these understandings interact with pre-existing notions of (social) justice. This attention for rights-holders’ lived experiences can be linked to the growing influence of socio-legal and legal anthropological perspectives, as well as to that of emancipatory research methods, such as participatory action research. What these perspectives and methods have in common is their interest in how people experience and express their rights in practice, and how they give meaning to them. Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to the question of how we try to understand this process of meaning-making. The dominant modes of engagement tend to (a) emphasize the spoken or written word, and (b) presume—the possibility of—an accessible verbal narrative. The shortcomings of engaging exclusively on the basis of verbal language becomes clear when considering the ...
On the ‘State’ Of Performance Art and What It Is
To look at Performance art privileging an anthropoetic approach means also to focus on what is the actual evidence contained in the term ‘performance art’. Instead of hazarding poignant definitions that, thus seductive, as a pure product of the mind, in many cases they end to be just sentences and definitions per se, to continue considering this practice ‘open’ as much as possible, as all art ought to be, is what counts the most. As a matter of fact, definitions are always perilous somehow, as they may confine and devaluate in a square grid a practice (here specifically the practice of Performance art), which instead is in constant evolution and permutation, often enigmatic, which today is clearly contaminated by interdisciplinary modes, multiplicity of strategies, tactics, and a large variety of techniques.