posthumanist performance art manual
INTRODUCTION
My artistic research Becom(th)ings: Posthumanism, Subjectivity, Performance Art looks at the entangled and fluid relations of human and more-than-human processual becomings in a contingent spatio-temporal environment. The Posthumanist Performance Art Manual illustrates a lexicon for conceptual and practical approaches to working with everyday inorganic and organic objects. The methods have been applied in my graduation work Roo(u)ting, a participatory performance installation comprising of beetroots and everyday inorganic objects composed in an assemblage of live action, video installation, audio and participatory interventions in space and time. It proposes a material-semiotic way of working with matter where bodies and subjectivities in the assemblage are rooted but flowing—fixed and contingent.
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The figuration (embodied concepts) of Roo(u)ting offers a way to include past becomings (personal/cultural) and potentials of new becomings with objects by per/forming different routes or paths of relations within flows of an assemblage. The practice is interested in making malleable discrete and dominant notions of subjectivity, through ethics of care with objects. The aim of the method is to create a performance ecology that fosters the emergence of the figuration I propose—multitudinous body. A body composed of many an array of bodies that create affects and shifts to give space for changing subjectivity/ies (singular-plural). The implications of such ethics are transferable to relations with objects, other human bodies and the self, by cultivating a fluid sensibility and sensuality.
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Extracting from posthumanist theorists, namely, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Astrida Neimanis and Deleuze and Guattari, and practices of artists, namely, Charlotte Grum, Annette Arlander and Monali Meher, I devised methods with and through insights of the aforementioned interlocutors. I conducted performance experiments over the two years of research, exploring different aspects of embodied materiality, such as, intra-action, relations, agency, affect, material porosity, exchange, subjectivity, and Becomings with objects. My practice focusses on everyday inorganic and organic objects and our intimate relations through everyday actions or rituals of daily life. By working with bodies of objects through the body I inhabit, I learned about processes of desire and captivation, dynamic attunement, nature of relations amidst bodies, and invisible objects of space, time and flows within which bodies of the world co-habituate.
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I present my lexicon and methods for a posthumanist performance art practice as an approach which is one among many potential ways of working with objects. Through this manual, I offer a guide to performance making with objects based on three key conceptual notions of my practice: Becoming with (Deleuze), wet relations (Neimanis) in a multisensorial and multimodal assemblage (Deleuze). The method offers a postanthropocenic posthumanist technique of communication. Roo(u)ting, a manifestation of this technique, will be used as a reference point for examples throughout this manual. The performance can be watched through the link provided below. Please note that the examples that run through the manual are only indications of how it can be done. Different objects have different agencies thus there can be no standard formula of operation. Though what it does offer is a way to think and practice through this lens. The manual instructs an interconnected conceptual-practical performance-making method to prepare the performers body, to build relations with matter and for compositional-conceptual processes for working with matter. There is no fixed way of doing or practicing, but this manual can be treated as a guide for posthumanist performance-making or as a starting point for further explorations with bodies in and of the world.