Crisis and Communitas Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics

List of Contributors

Crisis and Communitas. An Introduction: Dorota Sajewska and Małgorzata Sugiera

Part I: Community as Potentiality

Chapter 1: Jeremy Gilbert, An Aesthetics of Solidarity: Collective Becoming After Neoliberalism　

Chapter 2: Małgorzata Sugiera, Speculative Communities:　Designing　Contact Zones　in Times of Eco-Eco-Crisis　

Chapter 3: Tadeusz Koczanowicz, The Emotional Citizenship of Exile

Chapter 4: Katarzyna Bojarska, Past in Common: Departing from History

Part II: Bodies and the Communal Power

Chapter 5: Dorota Sajewska, Affective Communitas. Towards a Performative Theory of Historical Agency

Chapter 6: Dorota Sosnowska, Towards Ephemeral Communities of Care: AIDS, Political Transition, and Crisis

Chapter 7: Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, Inventing Skins. Reinventing Community: Writing, Performance and Theory in Brazil (1960–2020)

Chapter 8: Nina Seiler, Maria Janion’s Frenzy: Transgressing the Crisis of 1968

Part III: Imageries of the Commons

Chapter 9: Paweł Mościcki, Sharing Image, Sharing Time. Dante, Visibility and the Common.

Chapter 10: Fabienne Liptay, Just Numbers: From Extras to Agents of an Uncountable Community

Chapter 11: Mikkel　Bolt Rasmussen, An Avant-Garde　with its Back to the Future: Affirming the Crisis　

Chapter 12: Louise Décaillet, Assembling the Audience: The Spread of the Parliamentary Form in Contemporary Arts

Manifest 1: Marc Streit, On Eating and Being Eaten: Notes on the zürich moves! 2019 research and contextualisation

Manifest 2: Wojtek Ziemilski, What Do We Want? Society! When Do We Want it? Now! "Come Together" and its Discontents

Manifest 3: Ema Hesterová and Peter Sit (APART collective), Torn apartIn a historical perspective. Interview with Susan Buck-Morss

Index

List of Contributors

APART is an artistic collective that has been performing research, artistic-creative, curatorial, publishing, and archiving activities since 2012. It is a meta-participatory platform working on a proto-institutional basis and the principle of shared economies. Today, APART is Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit, Andrej Žabkay, Ema Hesterová, and Chiara Rendeková. APART has exhibited, screened films and executed projects at numerous venues including, Kunsthalle Bratislava; Karlín Studios Prague; Plusmínusnula Gallery Žilina; Work Hard! Play Hard, Minsk; CCA Kronika, Bytom; e-flux Bar Laika, New York; MoMA New York; Prague City Gallery; Easttopics, Budapest; among others. Under the APART LABEL, the collective has published more than twenty publications, including Uhuru by Catarina Simao; Mehraneh Atashi’s Safe Landing; Electronic Dadaist Poetry by Babi Badalov; and the .txt edition (co-published with Display and Kapitál). APART’s latest—and to date the largest—project is its own gallery space, A Promise of Kneropy in Bratislava, with an affiliated reading and study room, which seeks to programmatically present critical contemporary artistic positions.

Katarzyna Bojarska is an assistant professor in the department of Cultural Studies at SWPS University in Warsaw and president of the NGO View. Foundation for Visual Culture where she co-founded and is on the editorial board of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, an international, open access, online academic journal www.pismowidok.org. She has received numerous grants and awards including Fulbright, Horizon2020 (www.repast.eu/), and individual and group grants from the National Centre for Science. Her research interests include cultural memory, gender and memory, trauma and visual culture studies, as well as contemporary arts. Her postdoctoral book, titled Wydarzenia po Wydarzeniu. Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman (Events after the Event. Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman) was published in 2013. Bojarska is the editor of Ernst van Alphen’s Krytyka jako interwencja. Krytyka jako interwencja: sztuka, pamięć, afekt (2019). She has also translated and published several works of other thinkers, including, Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2018), Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2016), Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (2013), as well as works by Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, Lauren Berlant, Kristin Ross, Mignon Nixon, Susan Schuppli, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Bojarska has presented her work at numerous international conferences and taught students in both Europe and the US. She is an active art critic and member of the AICA.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and theorist working on the politics and history of the avant-garde. He is professor of Political Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen and the author of seven books in Danish and six in English—Crisis to Insurrection: Notes on the ongoing collapse (2014), Playmates and Playboys at a Higher Level: J.V. Martin and the Situationist International (2015), Hegel after Occupy (2018; in French 2020), After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (2018; in French 2019; in Italian 2021), Trump’s Counter-Revolution (2018; in French 2019; in Italian 2019 and in Greek 2021) and Late Capitalist Fascism (2021). He has also written numerous articles about the revolutionary tradition and modern art in journals such as Multitudes, New Formations, Oxford Art Journal, Rethinking Marxism, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text. He is the editor of nine books in Danish and three in English, the latter being: Totalitarian Art and Modernity (co-edited with Jacob Wamberg 2010), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (co-edited with Jakob Jakobsen 2011), and Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (co-edited with Jakob Jakobsen 2015). Rasmussen is an occasional cultural producer, with activities including the exhibition This World We Must Leave – An Idea of Revolution at Kunsthal Aarhus Aarhus Kunstbygning in 2010–2011 with Jakob Jakobsen, with a second edition at Kunsthall Oslo 2016; and the play Revolution with Christian Lollike at the Nationaltheatret in Oslo 2017 which then travelled to S/H in Copenhagen 2018.

Susan Buck-Morss　is philosopher, intellectual historian, interdisciplinary thinker, and writer of international reputation. Her most-known book,　Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History　(2009),　offered a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic by linking it to the influence of the Haitian Revolution. Her books　The Origin of Negative Dialectics　(1977) and　The Dialectics of Seeing　(1989) have been translated into several languages and have been called "modern classics in the field." Other publications include　Thinking Past Terror　(2003),　Dreamworld and Catastrophe　(2000),　Revolution Today　(2019), Year 1. A Philosophical Recounting (2021) and numerous articles　(www.susanbuck-morss.info).　Susan Buck-Morss is currently professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and professor emerita at Cornell University’s Department of Government, where she taught from 1978 to 2012.　Buck-Morss was also a member of Cornell’s graduate fields in comparative literature; history of art; German studies; and the School of Architecture, Art,　and Planning. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals and has been invited as a lecturer at dozens of universities worldwide. Her numerous international awards and fellowships include a Getty Scholar grant, Fulbright Award, and Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a PhD in European intellectual history from Georgetown University.

Louise Décaillet is a PhD candidate in cultural analysis at the University of Zurich. Previously, she studied cultural analysis as well as French and German literature in Geneva and Zurich. Since 2018, she has worked as an assistant at the Modern French and General Comparative Literature departments at the University of Zurich and as an independent translator. Since September 2019, she has been part of the SNSF-funded project　Crisis and Communitas. Performative Concepts of Commonality in the Polish Culture since　the Beginning of the 20th Century, writing her PhD thesis on notions of audience and public and their transformation in contemporary performative practices (working title:　Plurales Publikum. Formate des Gemeinschaftlichen zwischen Theater, Performance und Aktivismus). Her research interests include contemporary theatre, visual and performance art, activism, history, theory of twentieth century theatre, spectatorship and participation, institutionalisation of art, and performance studies.　

Jeremy Gilbert is professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London. His most recent publications include Twenty-First-Century Socialism (2020), the translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Experimental Politics (2018), and Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013). His next book, Hegemony Now: Power in the Twenty-First Century, co-authored with Alex Williams, will be published in August 2022. Gilbert is the editor of the journal New Formations and regularly writes for the British press (including　the Guardian,　the　New Statesman,　open Democracy　and　Red Pepper), and for think tanks such as IPPR and Compass. He is routinely engaged in debates and discussions on Labour Party policy and strategy, and has appeared on national television as a spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira is assistant professor in Brazilian Studies (Literature, Culture, Media) at the University of Zurich. He has worked as a researcher at the German Center for Art History (DFK) in Paris and at the Max Planck Institute’s Bibliotheca Herziana in Rome. He develops research in literature, ethnography, and art criticism and theory in Latin America with a focus on Brazil. In addition, he has a special interest in critical theory and French literature, philosophy and visual culture. De Oliveira undertook postdoctoral research at the Centre d’Histoire et de Théorie des Arts (CEHTA) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; and at the Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) at Universidade de Campinas, São Paulo. His published books include, Beschweigen, Bezeichnen: Mira Schendel und die Schrift unmittelbaren Erlebens (2020) and A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (2018). He is one of the editors of the journal Língua-Lugar—the University of Zurich’s Portuguese Studies partnership with the University of Geneva; a regular French to Portuguese translator from authors such as Édouard Glissant, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michel Carrouges and Muriel Pic; and is currently compiling a collection of essays from Brazil entitled Peles Inventadas (Invented Skins). Together with Jean-Luc Nancy and Maria Filomena Molder, he made the film La joie qui vient (2018

); followed by Une joie animale (2020) with Jean-Christophe Bailly and Muriel Pic; and is currently finishing his third film, Joie publique, joie politique (2022), with Suely Rolnik and Georges Didi-Huberman.

Tadeusz Koczanowicz is a PhD candidate in Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich and the University of Warsaw. His interests are concentrated on Edward Abramowski’s nineteenth-century anarchist thoughts in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s contemporary political philosophy. He is a graduate of Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw, during which he spent an academic year at the Freie Universität Berlin where he studied Theatre Studies. From 2015 until 2018 he was an editor at Res Publica Nowa, a journal about culture and politics.

Fabienne Liptay　is a professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. She studied film and theatre studies, as well as English language and literature, at the University of Mainz, where she earned her doctorate in 2002. Between 1999 and 2001, she worked as an assistant editor on the TV programme　3sat Kulturzeit. Liptay is a former lecturer in the department of Film Studies at the University of Mainz (2002–2007) and was assistant professor of film history in the department of Art History at the University of Munich (2007–2013).　She is head of the research project "Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format" (www.exhibitingfilm.ch), for which she was rewarded an excellence grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has published widely on the aesthetics and theory of film, the interrelations between the visual arts and media, as well as concepts and practices of aesthetic production. Her publications include the monograph　Telling Images: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films　(diaphanes, 2016), and the co-edited books　Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media　(Brill, 2015)　and　Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art　(Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023). She is also the co-editor of the quarterly journal　Film-Konzepte.　　

Paweł Mościcki is a philosopher, essayist, translator, and professor at the Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw (Polish Academy of Science). He is on the editorial board of the online academic journal View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture (www.pismowidok.org). Paweł Mościcki is the author of several books (in Polish), including, Politics of Theater. Essays on Engaging Art (2008); Godard. Arcades Project (2010); The Idea of Potentiality. The Possibility of Philosophy According to Giorgio Agamben (2013); We Also Have Our Past. Guy Debord and History as a Battlefield (2015); Photo-constellations. On Marek Piasecki (2016); Snapshots from the Tradition of the Oppressed (2017); Chaplin. The Prevision of the Present (2017); and Lessons of Football (2019), Higher Actuality. Studies on the Contemporaneity of Dante (2022). In 2016, he created an online Refugee Atlas (www.refugeeatlas.com) inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In 2022, he published his debut prose book Asylum. His personal website combined with a blog can be found at www.pawelmoscicki.net.

Dorota Sajewska is a cultural theorist, theatre and performance scholar, as well as a dramaturge for theatre and dance. She　is assistant professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich, and former assistant professor for Theatre and Performance at the University of Warsaw. From 2008 until 2012, she was deputy artistic director of the Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw. Her interests oscillate between cultural and performance studies, body anthropology, material aesthetics, and the decolonisation of knowledge. She is the author of various publications on performance, theatre, and visual art, as well as cultural theory and history (in Polish, German, English, and French). To date, Sajewska has written three monographs:　"Sick plays":　Disease/Identity/ Drama　(2005 in Polish),　Occupied by Media　(2012 in Polish), and　Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstruction of the War Body　(2016 in Polish; 2019 in English). She has edited issues of peer-reviewed journals, most recently Theatre and Communitas (in English, 2021) and co-edited numerous anthologies:　RE//MIX. Performance and Documentation (in Polish, 2014); A Worker. Performances of Memory (in Polish, 2017); and Performances of Memory in Contemporary Arts and Literatures (in Polish, 2021). Currently, she is running an SNSF-funded project Crisis and Communitas (2018–2023, www.crisisandcommunitas.com). From February 2023 she will be a professor of Theatre Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Nina Seiler is a research associate in the department of Performing Arts and Film of Zurich University of the Arts, and in Interart (Eastern Europe) at the Slavic department of the University of Zurich, where she is currently writing a book on Polish culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She is also the chief editor and a board member of the journal FemInfo published by the Swiss Feminist Research Association FemWiss. Nina Seiler obtained her PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Zurich in 2017, and part of her research involved a period in Warsaw as an associate researcher in Literature and Gender at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2015–2016). Her dissertation Privatisierte Weiblichkeit. Genealogien und Einbettungsstrategien feministischer Kritik im postsozialistischen Polen (Privatised Femininity: Genealogies and Strategies of Implementation of Feminist Criticism in Post-Socialist Poland) was published by transcript Verlag (series Gender Studies) in 2018 and is currently being translated into Polish. Nina Seiler is the recipient of several research and travelling grants and was the chief editor of HAZ Magazin between 2018 and 2019.

Dorota Sosnowska is assistant professor at the Institute of Polish Culture (department of Theatre and Anthropology of Performance) at the University of Warsaw. She is a member of the editorial board for View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal and a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research Historiography Working Group. Her research focuses on the theoretical and methodological issues in theatre and performance historiography. She is mostly concerned with questions of archiving, documentation, and the tension between the acting body and forms of its recording in art and science. She has published papers in international scientific journals, including Performance Research, Maska, and Theatralia and in the edited volume The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson (2019). She is currently the principal investigator of the project Odmieńcy. Performances of Otherness in Polish Transition Culture, which is concerned with post-communist culture and emancipation, as well as co-investigator of the project Epidemics and Communities in Critical Theories, Artistic Practices and Speculative Fabulations of the Last Decades.

Marc Streit is a cultural worker, facilitator, artistic advisor, and organiser for several institutions and organisations in researching and realising artistic projects. He is the founder and artistic director of zürich moves! festival for contemporary artistic practice in performing arts　(www.zurichmoves.com) and Imbricated Real (together with Simone Aughterlony). His projects are situated at the intersection of art and life. He likes to challenge himself by dealing with discourse in ways that destabilise normative modes of thinking. With his initiatives he wants to move people closer together and promote real encounters. Marc Streit realises projects locally, nationally, and internationally and creates collective experiences that free things from their invisibility in order to facilitate agency and recognition. Since 2011, he has been part of the team at Tanzhaus Zürich, where he served as deputy artistic director from 2014 until September 2019. From October 2019 until June 2022, he coordinated the dramaturgy pool at Tanzhaus Zürich. From September 2020 until June 2022, he was a guest curator at Gessnerallee Zürich. Marc Streit completed his studies in Management before earning his MA in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts. He is a guest lecturer at several universities in Theatre, Choreography and Curatorial Studies.

Małgorzata Sugiera is a professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; DAAD; Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the American Andrew Mellon Foundation; and the IRC, Interweaving Performance Cultures, at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, and environmental and decolonial studies. She has published twelve single-authored books, most recently Nieludzie. Donosy ze sztucznych natur (Non-humans. Reports from Artificial Natures, 2015) and, together with Mateusz Borowski, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts, 2016). She has co-edited several books in English and German, most recently Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts (2019). In addition, she translates scholarly books and theatre plays from English, German and French. Currently, she is carrying out a three-year international research project titled Epidemics and Communities in Critical Theories, Artistic Practices and Speculative Fabulations of the Last Decades funded by the National Science Centre (NCN).

Wojtek Ziemilski is a theatre director and visual artist based in Warsaw, Poland. He works across art forms, exploring the diversity of performing arts. Since 2009, when he premiered the autobiographical lecture performance Small Narration, Ziemilski has been creating art which investigates different facets of theatrical situations, negotiating the ways in which a performance can present, provoke or resist difference. Prolog (Warsaw, 2012) created social choreography using the audience, while Come Together (Warsaw, 2017) asked the audience to treat an explicitly participatory show as a traditional, non-interactive piece. One Gesture (Warsaw, 2016) explored Deaf culture through the richness and diversity of sign languages. It was shown in over twenty venues around the world and won, among others, the Main Award at Theaterspektakel Festival in Zürich. Ziemilski went back to work with Deaf performers: In Translation (Wrocław, 2021), Language Games (Trondheim, 2017), Signes Comuns (Montreal, 2022). He is a lecturer at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, and a guest lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and DAMU, Prague. He is currently studying for a PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Biography

Dorota Sajewska is a cultural theorist, theatre, and performance scholar, as well as dramaturge for theatre and dance. She is an assistant professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich, and former assistant professor for Theatre and Performance at the University of Warsaw. From February 2023 she will be a full professor of Theatre Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Małgorzata Sugiera is a cultural theorist whose research concentrates on performativity theories, and environmental and decolonial studies. She is a professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; DAAD; the American Andrew Mellon Foundation; and the IRC, Interweaving Performance Cultures, at the Freie Universität Berlin.