1st Edition

Contemporary Performance and Political Economy Oikonomia as a New Ethico-Political Paradigm

By Katerina Paramana Copyright 2025
218 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

218 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

218 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Contemporary Performance and Political Economy examines haunting concepts, relations, and artworks that demand our attention. Under capitalism, political and ethical considerations are subordinated to economic ones, and this subordination creates ghost worlds. Performance works, however, can offer insights into alternative politico-economic models. In this major contribution to the fields of... Read more

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction: Oikonomia as a New Ethico-Political Paradigm

 

Chapter 1

Constructing Spaces of Decision, Affect, and Creative Possibility: Jérôme Bel’s Economies and Encounters

 

Chapter 2

Failing Resistances and Neoliberal Subjects: Individual and Collective Experiments Towards Alternative Politico-Economic Models in Tino Sehgal’s These Associations

 

Chapter 3

The Animation of Contemporary Subjectivity: Imagining a World Beyond the Present with Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee

 

Chapter 4

Capitalist and Ethical Critiques: Santiago Sierra’s Ghosts and Relentless Mirror

 

Chapter 5

The Oscillation of Contemporary Bodies Between Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Tania Bruguera’s Wrestling with Power Structures for the Creation of Alternative Futures

 

Chapter 6

Replacing Experiments, Re-Writing Fictions: Closing Thoughts

 

Bibliography

 

Index

Biography

Katerina Paramana is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Theatre and Performance at Brunel University of London, UK. She is co-editor of Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World and of Art and Dance in Dialogue, founding book series co-editor of Dance in Dialogue, and founding editor of the "Political Economy and the Arts" Section at Lateral, the Cultural Studies Association Journal.

‘In this inspiring and timely book, Katerina Paramana attunes readers to the globe as a haunted house of capitalism. To illustrate how we might live differently with the ghosts produced therein, she examines performances to rehearse and reimagine relationships between economy, politics, and ethics that might invigorate social transformation’. 

Professor Sean MetzgerHead of Theatre and Performance Studies, UCLA

‘A much-needed conceptualisation of the changing world of performance, viewed through the lens of oikonomia (originally an ancient Greek term for household management), now brilliantly reconceptualised by Katerina Paramana as a new ethico-political paradigm that pushes the concept of performance and oikonomia to new limits in order to analyse and critique the capitalist political economy’.

Professor Marina GržinićPhilosopher, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna