Speaker at the 5th Performance Philosophy Biennial

  • Nik Wakefield (Speaker)

    Activity: Talk or presentation typesInvited talk

    Description of Activity

    Speaker on 'Unnamed Autofictions: Dissonant Co-labouring.'

    A Key Group formed by Nik Wakefield, Daniela Perazzo Domm and Diana Damian

    Collaborators of the Working Group in Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy of the Theatre and Performance Research Association proposes to engage with collaboration itself as a problem.

    While collaboration has become ubiquitous in today’s cultural economy, its ‘social halo’ often prevents us from considering co-labouring, or the actuality of the everyday compromise with structures and scales beyond the control of the individual. Collaboration has come to stand for generous, consensual, humane working practices of genuine experimentation, sharing and discovery; yet, its critical potential as a modality that decentres the idea of authorship and dissolves the boundaries between artistic disciplines and professional roles is diluted by its comforting allure. In dialogue with Bojana Kunst’s critique of collaboration as a guarantee of visibility and ‘one of the most fetishized fields of the present day’ (Kunst 2015: 78), with Claire Bishop’s exposure of collaboration’s implicit association with ‘dematerialised, antimarket, politically engaged projects’ (Bishop 2006: 178), with Julietta Singh’s (2018) critical and decolonial undoing of the notion of mastery and with Roberto Esposito’s (2010) understanding of community as a duty towards the other that strips each member of their individuality, our group will testify to and confess of the crimes of collaboration. Can collaboration ever fully account for plural and heterogeneous positions, overcoming the partiality that the idea of working with those who already have something in common necessarily implies? In drawing attention to the implicated stickiness of inevitable consequences, known and unknown, that occur in collaboration, and attend to the politics of co-labouring, we propose to engage with different adjacencies and with the potential of dissonance (Moten and Harney 2013) within collaboration.

    As co-conveners and collaborators of a working group, our work mostly consists of arranging moments for other speakers to share research. Collaborators of the working group will contribute partly fictionalised problems of collaboration. The presentation will theorise alongside these autofictions. We will use a method of collaborative presentation that disrupts the regime of authorial visibility. Our approach will avoid the imperative for possessive authorship by anonymising and fictionalising particular examples of working together. Stripping labour of its named owners/authors de-instrumentalises collaboration by altering the terms of visibility. This is an attempt at destabilising what is possible in performance philosophy scholarship by encouraging both disavowal and creativity as critical possibilities.
    Period18 Jun 2022
    Event title5th Performance Philosophy Biennial: Problems: How Does Performance Philosophy Collaborate?
    Event typeConference
    LocationHelsinki, FinlandShow on map