Publication details
Fragmented Subjectivity: Environment as a Performer
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | How can we conceptualize subjectivity and authorship in performing arts in the light of accelerating technological development, environmental crisis and global pandemic? In my contribution, I would like to capture the ways in which the environment or even the planet itself can be understood as a performer. To illuminate the performative potential of the Earth, we need to abandon the idea of the planet as a blue-green sphere serving humans and other species as a temporary residence and a resource, but instead to try to perceive the Earth as complex networks of relationships between organisms and their environment, static elements and their variables as well as physical forces, evolutionary development, and the potentialities of other forms that the planet can acquire over a wide temporal horizon. Concepts and ideas of posthuman thinking may help understand how we can perceive nature’s processes, animal behavior and relations within the environment as a form of artistic practice, even though humans remain to be limited by their own definition of art and the aesthetic. On the case studies of Pierre Huyghe’s performative environments, I will showcase ways of rethinking the anthropocentric ideals of the human genius, the dominant position of the author and prejudicial concepts inherited from Wester art canon. In this line of thinking, art can then serve as a utopian space or a laboratory, in which we can act out and test alternative modes of being, and inhabit the planet in ways beneficial to all species, plants, minerals, water streams and other Earth’s agents. |
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