GPS: Global Performance Studies is a peer-reviewed, Open Access academic journal. We provide a platform for scholars and artists engaged in a broad range of performance studies, including contemporary performance practices; theory, politics, social and cultural contexts of and as performance; performance and visual arts and media; and practices of resilience and care for everyday life. We emphasize a global perspective on these themes and practices, and aim to support under-represented narratives and epistemologies that trouble and contest the discipline of performance studies.
This immersive soundwalk is comprised of synthesized field recordings from the island of Vallay. It varies in modulation, following a graph for the average pattern of winter tide charts for the island. At high and low tides, new compositions—in the form of music, spoken word, and oral histories—are layered over the field recordings, dislocating them from their site-specific context. The soundwalk responds to Helmut Kaffenberger’s ‘acoustics of profane illumination’, whereby seemingly inconsequential sounds prompts transcendental memory recall. The process of liberating the rumble of wind, roar of ocean, and birdsong from Vallay then rearranging them into new constellations allows for a recontextualization that transforms our sense of the place and its past. The sounds of a specific place become an excavation site, whereby acoustic ruins can be retrieved and reassembled to provide new modes of knowledge and perception.
Copyright (c) 2025 Arun Sood https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
14 Demands Against Artistic Censorship and Genocide of Palestinian Culture; “No more silence, no more fear”: Youth Against Invasion; Kite Making
The Freedom Theatre, based in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the northern part of the West Bank, Palestine, in collaboration with Artists on the Frontline, share previously published multiple contributions: “14 Demands Against Artistic Censorship & Genocide of Palestinian Culture” and “Kite Making” respond directly to artists and activists worldwide asking what can they do. Also included are two short texts, “Freedom Under Siege” by Yahya Marei, and “Maps of Emotion” by Aya Samara, both of whom are Youth Associates and part of Youth Against Invasion project that asked youth from the theatre to reflect through creative writing on the continuous invasions of the Israeli army to the Jenin Refugee Camp since 2023.
Copyright (c) 2025 The Freedom Theatre, Artists on the Frontline https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
How to breathe, a rhythmic dance, Inhale, exhale, find your balance. Three steps reveal, unmask your face, Release the burdens, let your soul breathe. Work, create, and teach, Love amidst sickness, a lesson. Ten ways to converse about shadows in the mind, Navigate the darkness with words so kind. Learn Two new rituals, for the living, for the dead, A sacred dance, Tell a story where memories are bred. Listen. Seven podcasts echo, Join a protest at home, A symphony of voices, where movements spring forth. Creativity blooms in protests, diverse, Bake bread, turn vegan, let your voice traverse. Through the stages of grief Five steps to healing, on sacred ground. Set up a Teams meeting, the digital class, In the virtual realm, where connections amass. Take attendance virtually, a distant gaze, Six ways to engage, And as you breathe, ponder the belief within, What keeps your heart beating? Life's flavours entwine, A symphony of existence, a journey into the divine.
Copyright (c) 2025 Refiloe Lepere https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“It was the slave that actually pushed the sea back”
The audio and accompanying “found poem” text provided come from a workshop series conducted with a group of previously-incarcerated men in which Cape Town’s history was critically engaged with to explore enduring legacies of captivity and racialization. Specifically, they derive from a recorded walking history tour that took place from Church Square through the Castle of Good Hope under the facilitation of Social History Educator at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum, Najumoeniesa “Nadjwa” Damon. This experimental project begins by poetically rendering the two-hour recorded tour into a transcribed ‘found poetry,’ by which the researcher brings out the already-existing poems woven into transcripts as a way to “evocatively explore and convey some of the essences, experiences, and emotions of the… storied lives” (Wells 2004: 8). To conduct the found poetry technique, the project takes inspiration from Douglas Kearney’s ‘performative typography,’ an approach influenced by graffiti’s visual tactics as well as hip hop’s sonic aesthetics and production techniques to create visual layouts that forefront nuanced sonic experiences to written poetry (Kearney 2015). Kearney’s poetry not only takes on visually provocative approaches that are as musical as they are typographical but is often performed using particular techniques akin to sampling and remixing. Thus, the accompanying text, “No Comparison / Just So Small” approaches the found poem analysis through a kind of a sonic sampling that is then captured in the four-minute audio recording. The poem specifically takes shape as a two-pager, each page respectively reflecting discussions that take place by Church Square and within the Castle. Together, the audio and text amplify moments from discussions during the tour that highlight different ways the group grappled with the history and its resonances to their lived experiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Perez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This performance-writing essay borrows the Indian love song titled “When I’m Calling You” to emphasise the great distances that sound can travel when performed. The essay revisits the 2021 performance HARK, delivered in Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa when, over seven summer nights, a letter written to my great-grandmother Stança was read aloud at one of seven houses I have lived in since immigrating to this country. The attending public were part of a unique collision of weather, place, urban ambiance, my posture, gestures, and vocal elocution in relation to intimate correspondence. As sonic migrations across time and space, HARK made public a personal, political, and oral imaginary, a desperate plea to belong to place, here and there, and to people living, and not. This last letter serves to punctuate the event three years later with critical reflection on its autotheoretical personal-as-political dimensions, to extend the performative intimacy of a letter, and to speculate on its potential as a geo-sonic spatial volume.
Copyright (c) 2025 Julieanna Preston https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This sound walk invites participants to listen to a mix of texts, sounds and songs that explore plant-human relationships, while guiding them on a walk through an urban or rural environment of their choice. The walk aims to reveal the ways in which our relationships with plants, in the era of the Plantationocene, are still guided by the logic of the plantation. This is particularly evident in damaged and simplified ecosystems, where human and more than human labour is violently monetised to create ‘cheap nature’ (Moore and Patel 2018) through intensive and monocultural agricultural and horticultural practices (Barua 2023). The walk also prompts participants to seek out plants whose growth is ‘wild’ or ‘out of place’ in that they have not been intentionally planted by humans, or are considered alien or invasive to the place where they are growing. Banu Subramaniam (2014) argues that ‘like human immigrants, alien plant and animals are seen as “other,”’ with ‘colonial and racist narratives of dirt, disease, and hygiene’ present in the ways in which human and plant immigrants are characterised (231). This in turn creates a logic of ‘invasibility’, which is applied to humans and plants and has been used throughout history to separate ‘the human and nonhuman bodies into those that belonged and those that were considered invasive’ (Kirbis 2020, 837). In relation to the plants they encounter, participants are prompted to consider ‘vegetal agency’ in relation to human wants and needs, specifically what labour the plant is doing on whose behalf and under what conditions. The experience reveals damaging colonial legacies that persist for plants, people, and the relations between them through felt, material engagements with vegetal growth. It also offers prompts for forming different relationships with plants, focusing on principles of right relation and reciprocity, practised by Indigenous peoples across the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joanne Scott https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
As an attempt at ‘performing landscape’ by moving through it, I have made some experiments with walking, using a small action camera on my forehead, in contrast to my usual practice of performing for a static camera on tripod. In this video essay I will demonstrate with brief video clips and a voice-over narration the development of a practice, where I insert a walk in one direction into a walk in the other direction. Reflecting on such walking as an embodied exploration of the environment, I propose to consider what purposes it might be used for. Although these experiments were made as sketches for artworks, most of them remain just that, sketches or drafts, experiments in recorded walking.
Copyright (c) 2025 Annette Arlander https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This paper is part of the process of creating a sonic and poetic chants as embodied wanderings translating part of the authors reflections while living in the diaspora. The sonic recordings and short poetry readings in form of chants were done during specific walks of kumema. Kumema, in the Tavara Kore Kore dialect of ChiShona, is a specific sightseeing one does in a leisurely manner yet being analytical. Usually, kumema munda (to take readings from a field) is commonly associated with a farmer taking a walk in a field so that the crops and the field (soil) inform them of their next steps in being a good steward. This process of kumema munda will result in a good harvest; provided the kumema is done well. Data-based decision-making process for optimization. Thus, kumema requires a set of skills and framing out of the realm of mere sightseeing or an afternoon stroll.
Copyright (c) 2025 Traver Mudzonga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
"Improvised Access: Listening for African Migrants’ Journeys through an Abu Dhabi Public Park" is a sonic manifestation of how African migrants in Abu Dhabi renegotiate their place in a segregated economy in search of upward social mobility and agency. The research emerges from the ongoing project “Abu Dhabi’s Public Spaces” sponsored by NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arts and Humanities Division, and explores African migrants’ creative use of an open public space in the city to forge connections, seek opportunities, and ultimately create their own sense of belonging. The soundscape seeks to amplify the tactics of improvisational urbanism that African migrants bring from their home countries while navigating between “productive visibility” and “hypervisibility.” In so doing, their improvised access to the park becomes a gateway to access social and job networks and, ultimately, the city itself. This project collects student ethnographic research in a soundwalk that relates physical environments with audio clips and images in order to create a “hybrid” spatial experience and offer “an alternative way of creating, representing, and producing meaning in relation to place” (Talianni and Charitos 2013), ultimately offering new approaches to the “representation of space” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991). In a city where the African migrant community operates on the peripheries, a digital soundwalk project provides an avenue to center their voices and make their presence and struggles more resonant with academics, policy makers, and the general public.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nurhidayat et al. (Abu Dhabi Public Spaces Collective) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Deliberate Starvation: Hunger Artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship
How can a negative action, the decision to abstain from food, be enacted on stage? Examining hunger as a conscious choice to avoid food for spectacle rather than an unwanted need arising from lack of basic nourishment, this article illustrates several ways to make hunger visible in performance. Through the critical lens of actor-network theory (ANT), hunger’s apparently scarce dramatic action is shown to be framed by and networked with the performance of several other human and non-human actors. Case studies chart a process of “translation” of the typical hunger artist performance from its historical examples to its contemporary theatre-within-the-theatre adaptations. In the West, self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment more distinctly in the late nineteenth century, when living skeletons and hunger artists were shown at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks, and produced income for themselves and their impresarios. Franz Kafka’s short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist,” 1922) looked back at the history of the profession, identifying the main components of the spectacle of hunger. Polish playwright Tadeusz Różewicz turned the short story into a play, Odejście głodomora (The Hunger Artist Departs, 1977), exploring the potential for dialogic interactions at the textual level and developing side-characters only implied by Kafka. By contrast, the contemporary NYC-based company Sinking Ship created A Hunger Artist (2017), an adaptation that expanded the short story’s theatricality around a single performer who plays multiple characters with the aid of all the resources of theatre, from puppets to audience members “enrolled” in the show.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Boselli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines
This essay documents and reflects on a complex of social practice art actions addressing hunger that the authors, who work under the name Spatula&Barcode, undertook in the Philippines in 2022 in collaboration with Jazmin Llana. The article gives background on Spatula&Barcode’s prior work with food, art, and performance and their prior engagement with hunger as a theme, then describes several exploratory actions and two larger-scale community-based projects. The theoretical section takes up themes of agency, sovereignty, and hospitality as ethical concerns in both hunger action more broadly and in the possible role of artists in enhancing that work. The essay concludes with a discussion of the “lagniappe”—something extra, above and beyond the necessary—and the symbolism of the ampersand in the artists’ thinking about their work.
Hunger, hunger action, spatula&barcode, PSi, Philippines, social practice art, ethics, food
Copyright (c) 2024 Laurie Beth Clark, Michael Peterson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Microbial Theatricality: Selfmade, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger
In 2013, Christina Agapakis, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, swabbed celebrities' armpits, belly buttons, and feet for microbial samples to make cheese. The “human-made” cheese resulted in the art exhibition Selfmade, a sensory installation inviting audience members to confront intimate and smelly relationships between humans and microbes, all through fermented edible matter. Artist Olafur Eliasson, food journalist Michael Pollan, and baker and writer Ruby Tandoh all offered their bodies as cultivators for cheese production. The prominent figures, and their companion bacteria, validate and complicate the relations that Selfmade claims to produce. At first glance, the installation invites a sensory entanglement with nonhuman matter. There is, of course, more than meets the eye. Hunger, eating, and even cooking are not exclusive to humans but perhaps intrinsic to planetary life. Human, celebrity, and microbial actors blur across the many mediums materialized in the food performance. As much as Selfmade is a nonhuman performance, it is also because of its very humanness, celebrity, and theatricality that we find an essential entanglement in food and performance studies: a nearly imperceptible (or non-sensible) proximity of human and nonhuman, at the microscopic scale.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth McQueen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Music and the Gaza Genocide: Palestinian Resistance and Sumud in the face of Zionist Liquidationism
This essay builds on a lecture and discussion at the “Palestinian Performing Arts and the Creation of Post-memory” symposium hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh on May 13th, 2024. It surveys and analyses the role of music during the Israeli genocide and Palestinian resistance in Gaza from October 7th, 2023. Developing this theme to reflect discussions at the conference, and in light of events since, this contribution expands on themes of sumud, or steadfastness, on violent colonialist attempts to liquidate the resistance, and on the musico-cultural effects of this confrontation. I argue that the musical activities of those attached to both the Palestinian liberationist camp and the Zionist occupation are revealing of what is at stake in a civilisational confrontation. The paper draws on the work of Marxist leader and novelist Ghassan Kanafani, where he identifies the collective, popular and historically conscious nature of Palestinian music, its entwinement with popular history, and its “lovers” (‘ashiqeen), as hinting at the vanguard role of the colonised and oppressed in battles for the future of humanity. The concluding reflections were written in the context of Zionist attempts to decapitate the resistance through the killings of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Yahya Sinwar—both also literary figures—and other important leaders and former political prisoners, through commentary on their roles in the generation of popular collective imagination.
Copyright (c) 2025 Louis Brehony https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Refusing Silence: Mapping Cultural Resistance to Genocide
Copyright (c) 2025 Chandra N. Frank, Nesreen N. Hussein, Farah Saleh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Uhambo: Translating Embodied Wanderings into Performance Practices and Epistemologies through Audio/Multimedia Walks
Copyright (c) 2025 Neka Da Costa, Kamogelo Molobye https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self
In my performances, installations, and writing at the nexus of social justice and stories of marginalized and minoritized identities, I contemplate the psychophysical implications of lack of fundamental necessities caused by withholding of company, sleep, letting go, food, water, movement, and agency. Whether such lack is imposed on bodyminds by torture, protest due to oppression, or experimentation, it creates deprivation and hunger for breath, rest, nutrition, contact—nourishment and healing not just for the physical body but for the entire self. The effects of such physiological lack is always social, emotional, and mental. The mark of such hunger remains on the mind even when the body heals. Like air, shelter, and water, food is a fundamental human right—and it has been widely evidenced that the planet has enough resources for all. However, states and institutions use slow violence of hunger to perform power and practice control over others, often minoritized, impoverished communities of color or disadvantaged countries. In this article, I discuss how educator activists in hunger strike, fighting for their right to make a living, subvert the dynamics of control hunger provides by claiming agency of their own bodies, in Turkey. I trace hunger as a performative in the silent and still protest of these university and college teachers whose careers were ended due to political retaliation by the state and discuss how performing hunger serves as a disidentification strategy for the already starved minoritized groups. I also engage with the connection between corporeal and metaphorical agency of the body/self as I also claim that these protests of what I call necroresistance do not belong within traditions of nonviolent protest.
Copyright (c) 2024 Serap Erincin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This work calls into question the ableist underpinnings behind the history of walking research and Western beliefs surrounding wandering. Consisting of an audio walk and corresponding interpretive maps, Stoner creates a guide to walking and moving through urban areas from the chronically ill perspective. The work asks, “who is able to wander?” by placing the listener into her thought processes as a chronically ill individual. Stoner explores and criticizes the Western history of walking and wandering research, beginning with Thoreau and discussing the Situationists, the flâneur, environmentalism, and finally 21st century ideals surrounding walking. This work is made available to the public through QR codes engraved on maps placed in a guerrilla manner into the micro areas which they depict.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anne E. Stoner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A playful and speculative drafting of a reflection on a walking as a practice by two practitioners who work with walking as a part of a trans disciplinary set of tactics and methods. Myer Taub is a theatre maker engaged in questions of digital theatre making, ecological research and performance outside the theatre, such as an ongoing treasure hunt series, that metaphorphoses according to site and situation, as does all of Taub's performance, staged in local bars to parking lots to the woolworths grocery store. Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist whose work looks for new archival vocabularies to rethink the densities of historical material, carrying out a series of gestures in their films and sound works that attempt to embody counterpoint voices. For both artists, the multiplicity of their practice methodologies is an attempt to respond to a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions, a time of crisis. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the artists began to take a series of intentional walks along Johannesburg's urban / natural edges, a continuation of walks Malcomess undertook in the co-authored book Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (2013) and Taub's everyday practice of walking as a choice and as an excercise in embodied motion through the city. These walks led to an understanding of the city through it's hidden waterways and green belts, hidden within what Malcomess calls the city's 'uitvalgrond' (surplus ground). To encounter this hidden city meant getting dirty, and so the walks coalesced into the curated walking project, Dirty Walks. These curated walks involved setting up a client who expressed a wish to Malcomess, who curated the walks from a studio in Grant Avenue, Norwood, essentially a suburban high street. Taub would then meet the client, with Malcomess playing fixer or broker for the 'price' of the walk. This model of exchange, desire, dirt was complemented by an archiving of the walk in a drawer in the studio. Thus the project presented here is the repository of the dirty walks, including various walks done over the years between the artists and between the artists and their clients. The repository is organised as a series of images as evidence, a series of links to cogent research and most importantly a conversation between Taub and Malcomess that was staged for a video piece inside a theatre. The sound of this conversation is presented here without the mis-en-scene of the stage, where documentation of a dirty walk was projected while the authors continually repositioned themselved and changed seats, and lighting. The original video is available as a vimeo link held on the Dirty Walks Dischord Server, where evidence of former and new walks continues to multiply. This multiple staging of liveness and the digital on several platforms is an intentional mirroring of the multiplicty of pathways necessary for a walking methodology. The invitation to the reader to move between this site and the Dirty Walks dischord server reflects the complexity of an attempt to walk a city in crisis into being, an ecology of ruptures and fragmentation of the enmeshment of the natural borders and the human-made world, of failing infrastructure as metaphor and fact. This multi-scalar and multi-modal journal entry attempts to embody this fragmentation and invite thinking within the movement and crisis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bettina Malcomess, Myer Taub https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret
Ola Hassanain’s current project, Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret (2023-) is an ongoing visual research project, which explores intimate and familiar “‘sites of catastrophe”’. In this project, Hassanain turns to her grandmother’s house, located in Sudan’s Gezira Scheme, a network of irrigation canals and slopes, as a “‘site of catastrophe”’. The imperial Gezira Scheme was initiated by the British while the region was governed as part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In conversation with Co-editor Chandra Frank, Hassanain unpacks the spatial implications of catastrophe: Each iteration of the project reflects a specific cycle of catastrophe. By working with three scripts: Whispers, Watching, and Arrivals, Hassanain shares how water and clay, in the context of her grandmother’s house, manifest as cracks which tell us something about the durational and temporal implications of catastrophe. Hassanain’s work requires us to critically contemplate the connections between genocide, climates of waiting, and Black geographies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ola Hassanain https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
New Musics of Mourning, Solidarity, and Hope from South Africa and Bangladesh to Palestine
This article examines improvised musical performances of mourning and solidarity in South Africa and Bangladesh during moments of political upheaval and global crisis. Drawing on ethnographic research, participant observation, and secondary sources, the article explores how jam sessions, protest music, and collective rituals of grief not only express sorrow at state violence and betrayal, but also prefigure possibilities for more just futures. In South Africa, jazz jams and solidarity performances in 2024 drew on the country’s anti-apartheid cultural traditions to voice grief at the failures of the African National Congress while articulating connections to Palestinian liberation. In Bangladesh, music during and after the July 2024 uprisings mobilized grief for slain students and protestors, while hip hop cyphers, protest songs, and activist jams carved out sonic spaces for hope amidst violence and uncertainty. In both cases, improvised performances embodied what scholars term “prefigurative politics”: enacting freedom, care, and solidarity in the present, even as they mourn the past and confront the brutality of the present. Yet these spaces were also shaped by exclusions, particularly along gendered, racial, and queer lines, raising questions about whose grief is witnessed and whose futures are imagined. By comparing musical practices across two distinct yet interconnected political contexts, the author argues that improvised sounds of mourning and resistance illuminate both the potential and the limits of solidarity. These sonic performances demonstrate how music can animate grief, sustain movements, and gesture toward emancipatory horizons, while also revealing the tensions that structure collective life under global racial capitalism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maya Bhardwaj https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh’s live art project, The Palestinian Hosting Society, invites participants to engage with traditional Palestinian foods that are on the verge of disappearing due to displacement and trauma. By orchestrating dinners, talks, and walks, Bamieh gathers fragments of these dishes and finds “ways to return them to the table, to the senses, to life”. Bamieh, in conversation with co-editor Chandra Frank, shares her most recent practice centred on grief and preservation of Palestinian food in exile, in addition to her Palestine Hosting Society work, through which disappearing Palestinian dishes are reexperienced through the “body, story and substance”.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mirna Bamieh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Bint Mbareh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Palestinian poet and playwright Dalia Taha shares her reflections on writing during genocide in Ramallah, Palestine, in addition to some of her most recent poems in English. Translated from Arabic by Mariam Hijjawi.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dalia Taha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
لا تبكي على غزة … إبكي على نفسك: "إقامة فنية" في غزة / Don’t cry for Gaza… Cry for yourself: An “artistic residency” in Gaza
Palestinian painter and educator Basel El Maqosui shares a series of images and texts in response to experiences of displacement, or what he calls “artistic residencies” in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. On recent Instagram posts from August 2025 featuring his paintings, El Maqosui writes, “I do not paint a picture of war—journalists can capture that with their cameras. My paintings are a longing for a kiss and an embrace. They are light that fills our hearts. They are testament to a genocide. They are our concerns during displacement and the anxiety of moving it from one place to another, and the fear of it, as if it were a family member”. The “artist residencies” organized by El Maqosui, can also be seen as an important emergent form of artistic and performance-based work.
Copyright (c) 2025 باسل المقوسي Basel El Maqosui https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Transforming Food into a Political Device: A Biopolitical Reading of the Olla Común and the Fight against Hunger in Chile
This paper explores the transformative role of the Chilean olla común (common pot) as a political device in the fight against hunger, framed within a biopolitical context. The olla común, a traditional form of community meal preparation by volunteers using donated or collected food, has historically emerged during crises such as earthquakes, political upheavals, and health emergencies. By providing nourishment and fostering social cohesion, the olla común transcends its immediate practical function to become a site of political and cultural significance. We analyze the olla común through the lens of biopolitics, considering how these communal meals operate as tools of resistance and empowerment in times of crisis. The concept of performativity is employed to understand the olla común both “in” performance—where it is represented in a theatrical or stylized manner—and “as” performance—highlighting the everyday theatricality and transformative actions inherent in these communal practices. Post-dictatorship Chilean theatre and art often depict the olla común, emphasizing its role in redefining social norms and identities within a liminal space that challenges conventional structures. The liminal dimension of the olla común allows it to transcend typical social boundaries, fostering solidarity and mutual support. This paper examines how these communal meals facilitate shifts in individual and collective identities, challenging established social hierarchies and promoting new forms of community connection. The ritualistic aspects of the olla común, with shared practices and symbols, further unite communities, serving as expressions of resistance and sources of healing. Ultimately, this study positions the olla común as a powerful biopolitical device, transforming food into a medium of social transformation and political action. By analyzing the olla común through the frameworks of biopolitics and gastropolitics proposed by Appadurai, Montecino and Foerster, and Escobar, we highlight its significance in addressing hunger and fostering resilience in Chilean communities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paulina Bronfman, Pamela Soto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“It’s nourishment we need, not just food”: Contrasting Experiences in South and North America to Alleviate Systemic and Emergent Hunger during COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has reflected our failures and successes as global society in responding to crises, particularly regarding food insecurity. Responses varied greatly around the world. Here, we aimed to identify and compare the government and civil society’s responses to food insecurity and hunger during the pandemic in Montevideo, Uruguay and Wisconsin, USA. We analysed official data on hunger and hunger alleviation strategies and conducted a series of interviews with several Uruguayan and American stakeholders, from NGOs, grassroot organizations, and governmental officers, among other social actors. We also conducted online surveys addressed to Uruguayan consumers and farmers which were answered by over 750 people in the first months of the pandemic. Our analysis and narrative therefore builds on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data. We enriched our analysis with a series of lived experiences that provided better insights into the feelings, actions and perceptions recorded in the interviews and surveys. We highlight different response strategies (largely top-down in Wisconsin, and a mix of top-down and bottom-up in Montevideo), discuss some of their successes and failures, compare official and popular narratives, and reflect on potential changes to be made to help shape more resilient local food systems but also to enhance the resilience and dignity of communities facing hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alvaro Adib Barreiro, Nithya Attipetty, Geraldine Garcia-Matas, Belén Banegas, Silvana Juri, Mariana Meerhoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Creative Interventions In Global Performance Studies Insatiabilities An online exhibition by Ariel Smith, Rima Najdi, Maria Kulikovska, Xena Ni, and Mollie Ruskin Curated by Aniko Szucs and Dominika Laster Hunger and Resilience: Collective agricultural and artistic practices in an area impacted by environmental disaster Shuntaro Yoshida peach grove em irvin Foraging as an Aesthetic Response to Hunger Natalie Doonan Microbial Theatricality: Self-made, celebrity, and scales of hunger Elizabeth Shiffler Performing Hunger in Taiwan: Images, objects and reflections Lily Wei In Performance Research ¿Qué vamos a comer? Colombia's mojojoy! Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa Nostalgic Hunger in Zhu Yu’s Eating People Darja Filippova La Merda: On what you might need to do to be permitted to sit at the “winners’ table”. In conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano Vanja Baltić Finally, the largest cluster of essays explore how artists use various forms of hunger in their creative work, perhaps answering the question of whether hunger can be represented by saying that it can be engaged or deployed. Using a range of media, and writing about their own work or that of other artists, these projects from across the world showcase a range of strategies that artists have undertaken in concert with various kinds of hunger. The multimedia platform of Global Performance Studies provides an opportunity to showcase an online exhibition from the 2022 conference for which Szucs and Laster brought together five artists with feminist approaches who explore the material practices, embodied experiences, socio-economic conditions as well as the psychosomatic and affective modalities of hunger. Natalie Doonan takes us on a series of public walking events along the St Lawrence River in Montreal to consider the aesthetics of care necessary to alleviate pain and suffering that are inevitable consequences of eating. Artist pages by Em Irvin document an installation that draws attention to productively unproductive labour of the hungry worker with no prospect for future sustenance. Shuntaro Yoshida writes about the artist Min Tanaka who tells the story of the physical and psychological hunger he experienced following the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that caused radioactive rain to contaminate the soil of his “half farm/half art”. Elizabeth Shiffler reports on a sensory art experience created by Christina Agapakis that foregrounds the microbes in our “hungry guts”. Shiffler describes how in this multi-species performance, cheeses cultured from human bacteria transforms the anthropogenic concept of theatricality to produce microbial theatricality and draws attention to the emergent celebrity of microbes in academia and in food media. Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa write about a multi-media happening by a Colombian artistic collective in Lenguajes Gastronómicos's Obsoleta. The collective deploys an Amazonian larva as a source of decolonial knowledge, as an indigenous food source and as a disruptor of contemporary agribusinesses as a force of decolonization against industrialized food, economic injustice and extractivism. Darja Filippova takes up a provocative and notorious performance of eating a foetus, which is most often interpreted as a critique of the Chinese state abuse of human rights and the one-child policy. In this article, Filippova argues that this reading reproduces Western liberal values and suggests that instead the work illustrates a deep complicity between the Chinese (post-)socialism and global neoliberal capitalism. Writing in conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano, Vanja Baltić explores the artisanal and philosophical aspects of their work, La Merda, in which a character demonstrates a Rabelaisian hunger. Finally, Lily Wei discusses performances created by her students at Chung Yuan Christian University who created online performances during the pandemic about hunger, food insecurity and food waste. Wei's essay considers the efficacy of performance as a tool for pedagogy about perceptions and representations of hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Representing Hunger In Global Performance Studies Deliberate Starvation: Hunger artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship Stefano Boselli A Comparative Study of Hunger and Satiation of Hunger in the Literary Works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Perumal Murugan Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna Internal Workshop: The Third Theatre Methodology of Embodying Hunger Sandip Debnath In Performance Research A Different Hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2363651 As discussed in the opening section, the putative unrepresentability of hunger, like the putative unrepresentability of pain, is a point that is affirmed and/or contested by our contributors. Looking at works for the stage and the page, our writers consider cases in Asia, Europe and North America that have tried to (re)present hunger for their audiences. Through the examination of two stage adaptations of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist”, Boselli demonstrates that hunger can become a performance, even in a fundamentally static situation, because of the power differential between the starving artists themselves and the well-fed spectators. Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna explore the representation of memories of hunger among the rural agrarian communities in India and the role that mothers play in mitigating hunger and creating a feeling of illusory self-sufficiency (of food) among children. Using the works of three Indian authors, they argue that memories of hunger and dearth are forged not just by the physical lack of food but by the experiences of lack of social security and the denial of identity. Sandip Debnath builds on his experiences with Third Theatre to suggest that a strategy for representing hunger is not to enact but to react. This gives Third Theatre activists an avenue for communicating hunger while remaining critically and politically aware of the acuteness of the absence. Such representations, he contends, do not generate reactions of pity and fear but rather of resistance. Adrian Kear suggests that a racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. Kear asks, how can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation that it supports and sustains? And he asks us to move from Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” towards enacting Jenny Edkins’ “slow justice”.
Self-Starvation In Performance Research Becoming Anorexia: The pathologization of “self-harm” in performance Adriana Disman Political Paradigms of Hunger: Force-feeding and the choreography of carceral power Patrick Anderson Lady Tyger: A legacy starved into existence Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox In Global Performance Studies Silver Tableaux: Memoir vivant Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self Serap Erincin This section includes writing on both hunger strikes and anorexia. While one may be tempted to think of anorexia as pathological and hunger strikes as volitional, all four of our authors articulate mechanisms of agency and control at work in the denial of sustenance. Adriana Disman draws our attention to the dangers of pathologizing and thereby censoring performances of self-wounding on the part of both social media and academic scholarship. Similarly, Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter condemns the social media platforms that monetize anorectic behavior, arguing that the “recovery construct” often neglects joy, desire and pleasure of the anorectic individual. Patrick Anderson’s essay revisits his earlier work on self-starvation to consider the state’s monopoly on hunger through both force feeding, as well as considering philanthropy as a form of policing. In their essay about “Lady Tyger”, Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox consider the ways that the boxing champion’s hunger strike performed “intersectional activism” while Serap Erincin demonstrates how educators in Turkey used their hunger strike to subvert the dynamics of state-controlled hunger.