Materiality as performance

Abstract

This is a dual paper in which I will introduce the notion of 'materiality as performance'. Materiality as performance is a dialectical approach to urban space. It seeks to interrogate the interplay between the imagined and the material, and this way provide a powerful lens through which city residents can view their city and collectively envision, negotiate and articulate alternatives to present conditions. Urban inhabitants tend to be placed in passive roles as consumers rather than active citizens, framing the politics of the city as concerned with developing capitalist accumulation rather than human potential. Imagination is socially placed within the domains of non-authority such as the childish, placing the loci of authority in the marketplace, the state or the university – places that deal with the 'real' world. Seeing materiality as performance is an attempt to subvert this distinction between the 'real' and the imaginary by refusing to accept what is presented to us as given. The example of the socially engaged artistic project, Montopia, will be used to illustrate how 'materiality as performance' can be applied as a method that offers a way of stepping back from the real without losing sight of it and hence imagining alternatives that are rooted in, but not limited to, the present. The two parts of this paper are in dialogue with each other, elucidating how materiality is destabilized through practice and representation.

Notes

1 zURBS is an urban research and art collective, working with a participatory approach in which a wide range of participants are invited to take part in workshops, exhibitions, model-making, treasure hunts, games, seminars, expeditions and walks in order to experiment with different approaches to how we can reimagine the urban through imaginative and creative processes that question what urban space means and is. zURBS is a collaboration between Sabeth Tödtli, Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Nina Lund Westerdahl.

2 This ‘obsession’ was critiqued for framing the social as a finished and accomplished set of social relations (e.g. capitalism, gender, class) that went around constructing things. This was seen as problematic as society should not be regarded as a thing that was simply there ready to construct things, but rather as a process – if it could be seen as present at all (see e.g. Latour 2005).