I argue that, from the performer’s perspective, there are significant differences between analogue and digital instruments. The unique nature of the relationship with digital instruments transforms the performer’s practice in ways that aesthetic discourse has yet to fully address. From a post-phenomenological perspective, I will demonstrate how this relationship differs from that with analogue instruments, prioritizing reading over bodily sensations. In contrast to post-phenomenological accounts, however, I will also argue that the concept of digital instruments as extensions of the human body remains ambiguous and is even further removed from traditional notions of skill and virtuosity. Although this analysis focuses on musical instruments, I emphasize that the argument applies to all artistic practices that engage with digital tools. In this respect, the article will be of interest to theorists of digital media, digital art practitioners, historians, and philosophers of technology.

Through a decolonial feminist lens this paper unpacks the artistic project Sangre de mi sangre (“blood of my blood”). understood as an art protest by the feminist Mexican art collective Colectiva Hilos (“threads collective”). This work situates Sangre de mi sangre in the history of feminist textile artistic interventions, and specifically within those interventions that aim to take the public space in the context of gender violence. The work of Colectiva Hilos is also socio-politically situated in the history of Latin American political artistic interventions in the context of extreme forms of violence such as feminicide (killing of women because of their gender) and forced disappearance, and forms part of a plural and vibrant feminist movement present across the region. The members of the collective seek to repair the social fabric through collective weaving while using this long red textile to make visible the absences of those who have been victims of disappearance and feminicide in Mexico. Violence is an experience that has meant a fracture of our relations. This is also a painful experience. Where there is pain, there is loss and the need for grieving. This work considers decolonial thinker Rolando Vázquez’s (2018) ideas on healing and grieving to unpack the power of repair in the work of Colectiva Hilos.

In this time of political uncertainty, many of us are striving to create ways of being that will generate more care, compassion and equity in the collective. However, it can be hard to sustain this work when we are weighed down by untended grief. In the West, numbing or distracting ourselves when we feel discomfort or grief is very common. How can we reclaim our ability to be with grief, as part of the rhythm of our lives? I sense that we must re-learn to identify where our bodies are holding grief, to make space to be with it, when this feels supportive for us. Once we can notice where grief is sitting within our bodies, we can choose how to respond. This is a practice, not a one-time event. Grief is not limited to the death of a loved one; we can grieve the loss of our homelands, the loss of former versions of ourselves or the pain of war and state violence. Untended grief can linger, smothering our creative capacity and ability to vision, until we give it space to be acknowledged. This exercise may support you to touch into grief that might be present in your body. After the practice, you can decide how you want to be in relationship to what arises.

In this piece, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca offers two stories that approach the experience of grief and loss from an interspecies perspective with a particular focus on whales. Whilst much mainstream debate and academic literature continues to frame grief as exclusively human, or to position human grief as the standard for grieving per se, Cull Ó Maoilearca follows the work of anthropologist Barbara King (2013) amongst others to attend to whales as both the subjects and objects of grief. Mapping entanglements of oppressions stemming from speciesism, colonialism, capitalism and racism, the first story mourns the loss of animals including two beluga whales in the 1865 fire at P. T. Barnum's American Museum. The second story attends to the specific case of Tahlequah: the orca who in 2018 pushed the body of her newborn, which died shortly after birth, with her snout for 17 days, in what whale biologists called ‘a show of grief’.

What happens when exhaustion becomes not defeat but necessity? This article explores exhaustion as both existential condition and methodological proposition—a way to sidestep the human(ist) problem of solutionism. Through the sculptural works of Berlinde De Bruyckere, where organic and synthetic matters merge in states of suspension, we witness exhaustion’s capacity to reshape relations between bodies, forms, and forces. What emerges when we stay with overwhelming complexity as less defined, less Self? Following theoretical threads from Deleuze to Barad, from crip theory to affect studies, this piece traces how exhaustion operates as both performative principle and performable potential. Its double movement—simultaneously giving in and giving out—creates possibilities for thinking and feeling otherwise. De Bruyckere’s headless forms, rendered through wax, animal hide, cloth, and metal, materialize exhaustion through specific formal choices: suspension, fragmentation, drooping, wounding. Their plastic techniques translate into corporeal masses of alternative enfleshments that resist both completion and categorization. Here exhaustion becomes a disabling condition of human morphologies and mythologies. What deformations of the human become possible in this suspense? How might “crip sustainability” transform praxis so the impossible can be reabsorbed in the real? Through close attention to matter’s micropolitical attunements—barely perceptible shifts in how things move and hold still—we learn to notice what trembles at attention’s edge. This article proposes exhaustion as radical accessibility: a way of relating otherwise that holds space for all forms of access, all modes of being and unbecoming, all ways matter finds to persist beyond prescribed understanding.

EN: Lagunaries arises as a practice in common from an online virtuality imposed in the context of isolation by the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking possible affections, bodies, knowledge and genealogies as repertoires, we look for altered ways to make the word act [to speak out], breaking the hegemonic device of knowledge transmission, of being together, hacking its binary logic. This group laboratory made up of dancers, performers, educators, researchers, filmmakers and archivists, takes the construction of collective knowledge and the potential of the virtual body as its nodal axis of research. We perform theories, we investigate modes of escaping the lineal narrativity, using polyphonic and choral forms of thinking / moving / saying / existing. We inhabit the irony of a virtuality that imposes a distance on us and at the same time it hacks all geographical borders. A practice that does not yet have a name, a performance that is always provisional, weaving voices and actions through listening and activating our own and other people’s writings. We ask ourselves: What is knowing/knowledge? What/where is its archive? How is collective knowledge built? What do we need to know about the other to build a common doing, an affection? What can a collective body do? What can a virtual/digital encounter achieve? ESP: Lagunaries surge como práctica común desde una virtualidad impuesta por el contexto de aislamiento por el Covid-19. Tomando como repertorios posibles afectos, cuerpxs, saberes y genealogías, buscamos formas alteradas para hacer acto la palabra, rompiendo el dispositivo hegemónico de transmisión del saber, del estar juntxs, hackeando su lógica binaria. Este laboratorio grupal compuesto por bailarinxs, performers, investigadorxs, cineastes, docentes, archivistas, toma como eje nodal de investigación la construcción del saber y el rol del cuerpo. Performeamos teorías, investigamos modos de fuga de la narratividad lineal, formas polifónicas, corales de pensar/mover/decir/existir. Habitamos la ironía de una virtualidad que nos impone distancia a la vez que hackea las fronteras geográficas. Una práctica que aún no tiene nombre, un hacer performático que siempre es provisorio, y entrama voces y acciones desde la escucha a partir de escritos propios y ajenos. Nos preguntamos ¿Qué es saber? ¿Cuál es su archivo? ¿Cómo se construye saber colectivo? ¿Qué necesitamos saber del otre para construir un hacer común, un afecto? ¿Qué puede un cuerpo colectivo? ¿Qué puede la presencia virtual?

This article explores the profound themes and conceptual framework of the performance installation, "7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through" which merges sounds, texts, images, and movement to engage the audience in an imaginative exploration of the unborn. The work delves into the realms of mortality, wandering souls, and regimes of invisibility. It delves into an unacknowledged past, embodying a ghostly memory that represents a forbidden, mutilated, and foreign existence.The project is framed within an anti-colonial context, emphasizing a choreography of the struggling body as it seeks escape from hazardous environments and transcends borders. It embraces the choreography of contamination, celebrating fugitivity and displacement as transformative actions. With a transdisciplinary approach, the work aims to materialize and give shape to nonhegemonic voices and existences. It encourages the exploration of impossible choreographies and envisions alternative cosmological futures that address social, gender, and racial inequalities. This pursuit of a radical aesthetic shift fosters collaborative efforts to challenge prevailing power structures.

This is the editorial for Performance Philosophy 7(2) (2022)

This text aims to explore some of the philosophical inquiries that arise from experimental music, focusing on the following question: How is music, without words, capable of producing and enacting political thought? Focusing on John Cage's art an exploration of the performativity of music is proposed, understanding performativity both as the effects that music has on its audience, and its “theatrical” quality. Cage’s work is especially well suited for this objective, inasmuch as it is based upon both an explicit desire to modify the perception of its audience, and an interest in developing an art form that is closer to “theatre” (in a broad sense). As Alejandro L. Madrid has suggested, using performativity as a lens of analysis to study music shifts the question “What is music?” to “What does music do?” and “What does it allow people to do?” Through a revision and discussion of Cage’s art pieces, the author of this text argues that Cage’s work supposes a destabilization of traditional notions and roles, allowing people to listen to their surroundings with greater attention and pleasure (thus questioning Eurocentric and anthropocentric conceptual and sensorial frameworks inherited from the past), and to perform atypical social relations of an anarchist nature.

Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre.