I will be presenting a paper/reading at a forthcoming symposium,
Critical Engagements with Engagement on Friday 26th July, 10am – 4pm at the Bloc gallery, Sheffield.
The symposium will focus on the discussions and debates that surround public
and artistic engagement. Drawing
on my own practice-based involvement in various participatory research projects
(specifically the performance collaborations Open City and Performing the
City), my presentation gathers together prose extracts and photographic
visuals gleaned from my ongoing research enquiry, Performing Communities. Performing
Communities interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions
in the public realm can help support the emergence of critical – and
potentially resistant – models of subjectivity and collectivity, specifically
those forms of ‘temporary invented community’ (Miwon Kwon) created in and
through the act of participation itself. Within
this enquiry I investigate how participatory performance practice might
intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated,
through its capacity for producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for
rehearsing and testing alternative forms of individual and collective
subjectivity.