OPEN CALL - Performance Art and Public Sphere

[Erin Hurley, Prof.]

Dear colleagues,
I'm forwarding this CFP on behalf of Ana Pais, a performance studies scholar in Lisbon.
Regards,
Erin Hurley
McGill University
www.mcgill.ca/english/staff/erin-hurley
________________________________
From: Ana Pais [anapais2011 at gmail.com]
Sent: November 10, 2015 7:38 PM
Subject: OPEN CALL - Performance Art and Public Sphere


OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS to book:
Performance Art and the Public Sphere
(working title)


Invitation to artists and researchers to send artistic proposals or essays about the theme Performance Art and the Public Sphere to be published (in PT and in ENG) in 2017 by Orfeu Negro (http://www.orfeunegro.org).




Can Performance Art assemble, recreate and participate in the public sphere? How can Performance Art gesture towards rethinking and reclaiming other ways of being with the other? What are the implications of the process of institutionalization that Performance Art has been going through? How can worlds generated by Performance Art reconfigure the political, aesthetic, ethical possibilities of encounters with the other, of acting upon the world? These are crucial issues of this book.

                        “Performance Art” refers to the artistic genre born in the beginning of the 20th century with Italian Futurism (Goldberg), The development of Performance Art intensified in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in the US.  Characterized by a set of predominantly self-reflexive aesthetic strategies, Performance Art challenges the relation of the work to the spectator, the parameters of artistic objects and the very concept of being an artist, pushing the Modernist premise of fusing art and life to its limit. Performance Art served a provocative function in several fields but this function faded and Performance Art became an established genre in the 1980s/90s (Féral). Currently, new relations between institutions and the ephemeral arts are expanding (Lepecki, Heathfield). Performance Art is being curated and purchased by museum collections, practices of reenactments are being encouraged as well as working spaces and processes are being redesigned into public spectacles. Post-dramatic (Lehmann) generations have digested and reinvented Performance Art aesthetic strategies, and countries like Portugal, where Performance Art has manifested in a fragmented way. Thinking about contemporary Performance Art demands, therefore, listening to the echoes of those strategies in traditional artistic genres. Perhaps they actualize and redefine what Performance Art means today.

This volume seeks to explore the connections and disconnections between artistic and political Performance Art strategies in regard to the historically and culturally situated public sphere in which it intervenes. By public sphere we mean a discursive space where ideological, affective, political and ethical forces flow in and mediate the relation between private and public. More than the possibility of reaching a consensus (Habermas), we would like to consider the agonic practices that constitute public spheres in order to rethink the modes of participation of Performance Art takes on in political, ethical and affective life. In tandem, we are interested in how the public sphere is shaped and constituted as performance (Cvejic). Performance Art creates worlds that have interrogated, disturbed and complicated the public sphere in particular moments throughout history. On the one hand, Performance Art is conditioned by discourses and ideologies that cut across the public sphere and, on the other hand, it constitutes a forceful action that impacts that same sphere.

The centenary of the Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti took place in 2009 and, in the wake of this event, there had been a proliferation of peripheral and deviated histories of Performance Art In Portugal, Performance Art emerges around distinct configurations of change: Republic proclamation (1910s), the Carnation Revolution (1974), and joining the European Community (1986). This history has been written according to a narrative of intermission, where the various moments of its manifestation in different artistic fields (poetry, music, visual arts, dance, theatre) are considered incidental. This enables us to, on the one hand, consider the mobilizing force of Performance Art in the public sphere at the different moments of emergence and, on the other hand, examine how each artistic field activates a specific participation. In this sense, this volume seeks to contribute to the creative project of Portuguese experimentalist poet E. Melo e Castro: to write, “the impossible book that ideologies and history are unable to give us.”

This volume aims at offering a wide range of international theoretical and artistic perspectives about the relation between Performance Art and the public sphere. It invites contributions that critically examine contemporary performance and that retrospectively look back at Portuguese Performance Art, with the centenary of Almada Negreiros’s Futurist conference serving as the first reference point in a possible genealogy.

We invite researchers and artists from performance studies, performing arts, history, visual arts, literature, music, affect theory, new materialisms, political theory, cultural studies, feminist studies, and gender and queer studies to send texts or artistic proposals that approach one or more aspects of the relation between Performance Art and public sphere. Contributions can include essays and artistic projects that explore contemporary Portuguese contemporary performing practices or topics that are relevant to them. Themes that are highly relevant to Performance Art such as participation, institutionalization, performativity, ideology, art and politics, activism, historicity, public affect, encounter and experience shall be considered. Some examples of possible topics:



•      public affect and the public sphere (conditioning and potentiating affect as political gesture)

•      power and performativity in critical reception

•      performativity (of affect, of bodies, of objects or of space in tension with public sphere)

•      art and politics, Performance Art and activism

•      forms of institutionalization of Performance Art and its contribution to new ways of thinking the institution

•      discourses and practices of reenactments, recreations, reperformances

•      Performance Art and the museum (art collections, curating, the spectacle of creative processes, (re)production and documentation)

•      analysis of artistic performances or the work of artists (music, poetry, visual arts, performing arts) with an emphasis on possible articulations with the public sphere

•      avant-garde experiments in Portugal (engagement with international movements: influences, alignments, isolation, deviations, synchronies)

•      the influence of other artists or modes of intervention in the public sphere

•      Examination, reassessment, and repositioning of Portuguese Performance Art in history


Details of submission:
Essays: 4,000 - 6,000 words (25,000 - 30.000 characters with spaces), in Portuguese and English (texts will be published with 2 images max)
Documents: Send information with regard to copyright of documents
Artists pages: max. 2 images, b&w, 300 dpi, book size 12,3 x 18 cm


Send us an abstract that does not exceed 1200 words (7500 characters) by 31st December 2015.



Editor:
Ana Pais is a researcher, dramaturge and curator in performing arts. She is a FCT Postdoc Fellow at CET - Universidade de Lisboa / McGill University, with the project “Practices of Feeling”.

This publication comes out of a larger curatorial project – Projecto P! – Performance art today, coordinated by Ana Pais, Catarina Saraiva and Levina Valentim, in collaboration with music curator Pedro Rocha. For this reason, the selection will be discussed collectively.

Schedule:
Proposals: 31st December 2015
Texts: 1st May 2016
Publication date: April 2017


All proposals, submissions and enquiries should be sent directly to performativa2017 at gmail.com<mailto:performativa2017 at gmail.com>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20151114/3288ecf1/attachment.html>