Sign in or register
for additional privileges

Hemispheric Digital Constellations

Performing in the Americas

Marcela Fuentes, Author

This page was created by Craig Dietrich.  The last update was by Marcela Fuentes.

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

Performances Take Place

Contemporary artists and activists perform online and offline to bring attention to critical situations that affect people throughout the Americas and the world. Protestors and critical commentators take advantage of spaces and technologies that are constitutive of global dominant power and reinstate them as new sites of performance. By appropriating the channels through which assets, labor, and spectacles circulate transnationally, contemporary performances invite a reconsideration of the relationship between cultural productions and contemporary politics. Using different media and versions of corporeality, artists and activists confront the performances of global powers, articulating new modes of subjectivity and collectivity that prove instrumental in addressing national and transnational issues to remote audiences and potential participants.

"Performing online" not only involves diminishing territorial borders in order to address transnational labor issues to global audiences, as in the case of Coco Fusco's Dolores from 10 to 10, but it also entails the appropriation of the Internet as a site for the collective repudiation of unfair banking practices, as in the case of the Debtor's Revolt Campaign against Bank of America initiated by Ann Minch of Red Bluff, California, in YouTube.

On the other hand, "performing offline," as in the example of the Wakstein family who disrupted the operations of an HSBC bank branch in Buenos Aires may appear as a radical statement of bodily presence that underscores the value of face-to-face interactions, but this action in physical space also brings attention to the tangible workings of economic systems based on digital capital and electronic transfers.

Through a tactical use of embodiment in physical and digital space, artists, collectives, and ordinary individuals draw the connections that link different histories, locations, and spheres of action.
Comment on this page
 

Discussion of "Performances Take Place"

Add your voice to this discussion.

Checking your signed in status ...

Previous page on path Hemispheric Digital Constellations, page 2 of 5 Next page on path