Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Episode Three: Julietta Singh
No full textThis episode draws on two different recordings of conversations between Rajni Shah and Julietta Singh, in which they discover and recognise common ground in their lived and embodied experiences while learning to let go of expectations about how the recording process itself might unfold. The structure of this episode is non-linear, inviting the listener on a disorienting and dreamy listening adventure.
The episode consists of three parts. First, there is an opening section in which Rajni and Julietta talk about loss, haunting, and mess, reflecting back on their original conversation, which was lost. This is followed by a series of dreamings: glimpses of the (restored) original conversation, enveloped in a thick soundscape of cicadas, neighbourhood sounds, and cello. In the third and final section, we return to the opening conversation, and hear Rajni and Julietta thinking through what it means to move into a heightened sense of the unknown.
In the accompanying offering to this episode, Julietta shares a reading from her new book, The Breaks.
Click here for full episode and credits
Herbaceous Traces: A History of Agri/cultural Sinuosities
Get PDFIn this piece, I follow the geo-temporal meanderings of native grasses (in particular yam daisy-Microseris lanceolate and native millet-Panicum decompositum) through the Australian colonial record and beyond to reveal co-constitutive entanglements which bear witness to a plurality of agri/cultural narratives. In particular, I draw on the concept of trace as theorised by philosophers Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant to explore and produce aesthetic interventions which reveal, shape, coerce and/or support these grasses’ presence and agency—their voices. Scattered through geo-temporalities and media, these interventions document—trace—native grasses’ historical experiences and the role(s) awarded to them. Their punctual nature accounts/allows for ruptures, disruptions and (dis)continuity: each intervention carries its own rhythms of the collision between past and future in its midst. This fragmentary state also supports the fluid positioning of voices—the crafting of a textual space where poetics become a tool of decoloniality. Such a juxtaposition of perspectives and representational practices aim to generate intertwining accounts of vegetal being-in-the-world. More precisely, it aims to provide new insights into how native grasses have shaped and been shaped by colonial and decolonial practices—to illuminate their sinuous trajectories with(in) the fabric of the land
Algae Sympoiesis in Performance: Rendering-with Nonhuman Ecologies
Get PDFThis article explores an approach to human-nonhuman artistic creation with algae organisms and is structured in four parts. The first part considers ‘rendering’ as a tool for developing an approach to performance making and analysis that departs from the binary opposition of western thinking regarding algae organisms. I draw on Derrida’s (1981) concept of the ‘pharmakon’ to consider the implications for how discourse marks different algae species according to their use-value for humans as either ‘poison’ or ‘remedy’. The second part considers how encounters with cyanobacteria algae, in the form of lichen, demonstrate a mode of relation whereby algae become a form of ‘render’ for bodies and environments. In this section, I draw on an artistic case study by The Harrissons (1971) to illustrate principles of what I regard are examples of ‘algae rendering’. The third part is an analysis of how performance experiments develop the concept of ‘rendering-with algae’ and aim to diffuse binary oppositions through embodied inquiry. The fourth part considers how these encounters, experiments and analysis generate new thinking about human-algae relations through Haraway’s (2016) term ‘sympoiesis’ and the potential of ‘algae rendering’ to transform ecologies of climate change on a wider scale.This article explores an ecodramaturgical approach to performance-making and research with algae. The first part considers the notion of ‘algae rendering’ as a methodological tool for theorising algae ecological relations which highlights links between representations of algae and their material effects. The second part considers how my embodied encounters with cyanobacteria algae, in the form of lichen, inspire new modes of working with algae in creative practice that explore how algae agencies ‘render’ bodies and environments. I also draw on an artistic case study by The Harrissons (1971) to illustrate principles of what I consider examples of ‘algae rendering’ in artistic practice. The third part considers my approach to making-with algae in a series performance experiments that develop the concept of ‘rendering-with algae’ in practice. This work attempts to depart from anthropocentric binaries that mark different algae species according to their use-value for humans as either ‘healthy’ or ‘harmful’ and investigates embodied ways of working with algae as co-creators, inspired by material ecological relations. The fourth part considers how these performance encounters, experiments and analysis together compose an ecodramaturgical framework that generates new thinking about algae-human relationships in performance and in wider ecologies. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of ‘sympoiesis’, I develop the term ‘algae sympoiesis’ to describe my embodied ecodramaturgical approach to rendering-with algae in this research. The concept of algae sympoiesis explores how humans and algae shape matter and meaning together in performance and seeks to invite new ways of thinking about how broader algae-human material ecologies are performative of environmental change
Episode Four: Khairani Barokka
No full textIn the fourth episode of the podcast, Rajni Shah and Kharaini Barokka (Okka) discuss the shifting and intricate relationships between listening, safety, harm, accountability, and trust. These topics are especially poignant because (in contrast to all the other episodes) Okka and Rajni did not know each other before recording this episode of the podcast. Their conversation both comments on and embodies the complexities in inviting trust, and acknowledging our capacities for harm, when navigating conversations with strangers.
In the accompanying offering, Okka shares some of her daily wellbeing practices.
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Altering Bodies: Thinking of intervention through impersonation
Get PDFThis essay stages a philosophical dialogue between one of Plato’s earliest and shortest works, Ion, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s deconstructive reflections on Diderot’s paradox of the actor. It takes the rhapsodic practice of the ancient figure of Ion as a reference point for thinking about the performer’s intoxicating nature and investigates its philosophical, bodily and psychological implications as well as its critical potential. It will proceed in three stages. The first part takes a detailed look at the absolute focal point of Ion, namely the analogy between the rhapsode’s intoxication and the Heraclean lodestone. The second part addresses the ‘logic’ of the magnet specifically from Ion’s point of view, which entails a critique of Socrates’ assumption of Ion being ‘out of his wits’ when he performs. The final part shows, with the help of Lacoue-Labarthe’s radicalization of Diderot’s paradox – the actor is nothing and everything at the same time – how Ion’s intoxicating impersonations can be considered an imperative for catharsis and critical intervention
Toxic Climates: Earth, people, movement, media
Get PDFPlanet Earth is toxic. Its atmosphere unbreathable. Its environments deadly intoxicated by the dehumanizing forces of xenophobia, environmental degradation and violence. As its peoples are increasingly on the move to make a worthy living, exclusion, borders and conflict are normal occurrences rather than exceptions in daily life. And, as toxic substances dissipate and spread through representations circulating through the media they cloud the sight of the human beings in front of us. In the face of the intoxicating and dehumanizing forces at play, we need remedies for sobering up rather than intoxicating ourselves further. Remedies for living with contamination and hybridity rather than altering these state. Conceiving of citizenship as a right that has to be performed, enacted and claimed and recognizing how contemporary states of crisis (in the paper referred to as ‘the triple mobility crisis’) intensifies and radicalizes disputes over spatial rights and their representation in current media ecologies this video paper explores the potentiality of merging the positions of academics and media activists. Drawing on Anna Tsing\u27s call for “contamination” as a catalyst from which future “world-making projects, mutual projects and new directions – may emerge” (2015, 27), we ultimately propose a radical humanizing intervention in and beyond institutions. We take off from a conception of practice as an activity that “interrupts all ordering activities and is interrupted by them” (Arendt 1971, 197). The video paper is created through a cooperation between academic performance researchers (Haldrup, Samson) and media activist collective Other Story (McGowan), and it seeks ways of addressing, expressing and enacting citizenships by repositioning academic lecturing in ‘other’ settings. The settings chosen for this intervention are, respectively, the streets at Nørrebro station (a central mobility hub in Copenhagen\u27s most multi-ethnic neighborhoods) and Sjælsmark (a deportation center for rejected asylum seekers in Denmark). Both places epitomize the issues addressed in academic discourses on mobility, spatial rights and citizenship.In line with the work of Other Story, and partly inspired by Levinas and his ethics of the “nakedness of a face, the absolute defenseless face, without covering, clothing or mask” (1998, 21), we aim to actualize the emergence of shared sensibilities affecting our own embodied citizenships in the encounter with others. In doing this, we may view the video paper as an audio-visual gesture that brings together discursive propositions and situated spaces together. Situated in two sites relating to the themes “toxic climates” and “acts of citizenship,” the video paper seeks to address its themes through embodied thought. By doing so we, experiment with how speech acts relate to the world, but also deal with what we see as an inherent paradox in academic discourse: the paradox between, on the one hand, wanting to reach out to change the toxic climates of today, and, on the other hand, being trapped in language and specific academic ways of engaging with the world. While the video paper does not claim to deliver a coherent solution or solve this paradox, it does nonetheless reframe the role of thinking into a situated position from where ethical relations might emerge by questioning how we approach and transform toxic climates today, and to what extent media, performance and language can change the toxic world we live in
Intervention as Intoxication!
Get PDFThis guest edited journal issue follows on from the Performance Philosophy Biennial 2019 in Amsterdam. Featuring a wide range of research and contribution styles, reworked and elaborated further for this issue, contributors consider alternative ways of ‘intervening’. The central suggestion to rethink ‘intervention as intoxication’ resonates throughout all articles, highlighting the embodied, entangled, and aesthetic dimensions of intervention. Some of the contributors go on to consider intervention as subversion of institutions beyond the well-known discourse on institutional critique. In this editorial, in addition to introducing the authors, the editors and Biennial organizers characterize alternative ways of intervening in this issue as a search for humble ways of responding to socio-political issues and as a positioning of new knowledge(s). By way of opening, the editors recommend to consider listening as intervention, along the lines of Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s notion of ‘apprentices of listening’(1990, 57)
An-aesthetic: Performed philosophies of sensation, confusion, and intoxication
Get PDFIn Michel Serres’ The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, he establishes an opposition between two mouths: the anaesthetising, speaking mouth of discourse and analysis and the aesthetic, tasting mouth of sensation. This article uses Serres’ model of the two mouths to think about the performance of knowledge and philosophy in a sensory performance event and the potential of intoxication to unveil or reveal through a process of ‘making strange’. The article begins with an outline and reading of Serres, considering his writing on the two mouths and their indicative models of knowledge, before moving to think about philosophies of confluence or confusion; the pouring or flowing together of different forms of knowing. This is coupled with outlining two modes of intoxication (losing oneself into the status quo and a process of estrangement) to think about the politics of aesthetic sensory experience in the age of commodification of live(d) experience. The second half of the article turns to a dining-performance event by Kaye Winwood entitled After Dark (2016). The event is used as a basis for more personal reflections, considering the ways intoxication makes strange and enters into performance as a revelatory experience. The article proposes a number of interconnected arguments: that sensory experience and embodiment offer a mode of knowledge; that intoxication as ‘making strange’ has potential as a philosophical gesture; and that in that estrangement, there is potential to resist the coopting of live(d) or sensory experience in an economy of commodification
From the Opium of the People to Acid Communism: On the dialectics of critique and intoxication
Get PDFThere seems to be an inherent tension between intoxication and critique. We tend to associate intoxication with immersion, participation, and proximity, while critique is usually connected to the distance, separation, and an outsider-perspective. In this article I want to analyze this tension, but I also want to explore the possibilities, with the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin as my guide, of a critical intoxication and/or intoxicated critique. What would be the social, political and aesthetic implications for such juxtaposition for both of these categories
Rooted Hauntology Lab: Attempts at vegetal curation
Get PDFIn this paper I share my personal attempt of co-working with plants as ghosts and how this has started to shape a curatorial practice that tries to resist extractivism. I wanted to rethink my own practice as a curatorand investigate how to shape relations and ethics differently. For this work I turned towards plants and ghosts as my teachers and allies. They pointed me towards strategies of being-with, generosity and sympoiesis, which I am trying totranspose into a (life-)practice. Rooted Hauntology Lab as an artistic-curatorial project is both the result and ongoing practical playground for this experimentation