A Trilogy of Getting Stuck

Abstract

Getting stuck separates a person or a group of people from the rest of the world and isolates them in an impossible situation. In the struggle to free oneself from being stuck, one needs to start (un)knowing the possibilities, improvising other ways of moving and surviving in space. In this text, I situate the discussion of getting stuck in a context in which the individualistic culture developed under neoliberal world views has left in its wake unsupported individuals who are expected to survive and who are, at the same time, blamed for failing to do so.

To get closer to such challenging situations and the vulnerable bodies that are stuck in them, I study such situations through the lens of ‘spatial performativity.’ Through a ‘trilogy of getting stuck’ I stage three different environments to explore through the acts of three different characters who have got stuck in them. Each of the three characters—the geologist, the illegal traveller and the carrier—takes us on a journey through three ecologies of pollution, borders and confinement; ecologies that represent environmental, social and political crises that have resulted in unsupported refugees, polluted environments and the deterioration of society.

A performance lens can situate these isolated acts in a larger global struggle, where the world becomes a series of ‘performing grounds’ in which, as Laura Levin describes, ‘the human body commingles with or is presented as a direct extension of its setting’. These scattered and isolated situations create a landscape of interconnected performing grounds, where those who struggle in silence and isolation against frustrating situations, in forgotten, hidden and unsupported spaces, reach out and are connected globally.

Notes

1 The term is borrowed from the title of the book ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders, by Shahram Khosravi (2010).