Manifesto: A Gambiarra for Performance

Abstract

This manifesto proposes gambiarra as a framework to approach, both, Performance Studies in Brazil and the constitutive complexities of performance by implementing a local perspective and epistemology. The term gambiarra has an unclear etymology and its most popular meaning refers to the makeshift assemblage of tools and utensils. In Brazil, PS manifests through the entanglement of the colonisation of desire, the colonial wound (Mignolo), and the quest for decolonisation. The idea of anthropophagy (de Andrade) has long been implemented as a strategy to disengage Brazilian art forms and culture from colonial paradigms without, however, rejecting them—but rather ingesting them. Thus, this manifesto attempts to assemble a gambiarra for performance—also via its writing—, without negating the Anglo-(North) American PS paradigm, to relocate PS at the crossroads: where precarity and provisionality are performed. It argues that gambiarra offers decolonial potential, since it defies linear discourses and means of production as it reframes peripheric modes of performance. Gambiarra attends to and features the many instabilities that make performance. Therefore, the manifesto engages with the complexities of Brazilian PS, strictly linked to the country’s geopolitical context, in order to accentuate performance’s constitutive open-endness.