ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to critically examine the impotential role/place of performance practice in the current neoliberal socio-political landscape. Questioning the ongoing recuperation of “participation” and operations of the “social and political turn” within dominant art institutions in conditions of precarity, I will theorise on functional and potential resonances between performance practice and social movements in times and sites of crisis. Specifically, I will draw on diverse forms of practice that cultural workers in Athens instituted during the last seven years – ranging from occupations to interventions and actions – in order to analyse how performance might function as a mode of social improvisation, as a model for organisational formations and unlearnings that move beyond the existences of current crises. I will argue that modes of performance that experiment with organisational formations critically unsettle spatial powers within a specific “here and now” and bear the potential to generate what Lauren Berlant calls ‘infrastructures for transitional times’ or ‘transformational infrastructures’ (2016: 393). By generating forms from ‘within brokenness’ (2016: 393), ephemeral infrastructures might offer ways to practically rethink pre-given political imaginaries and produce destitute strategies of instituting otherwise.