Transactivism, the Translocal, Art and Performance

Abstract

The 2014 exhibition ‘Global aCtIVISm: Art and Conflict in the 21^st Century’ at the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) underscored the growing significance of activism, art, performance and notions of the civic (civis). While the exhibition referenced global activism, the ZKM documentation and catalog demonstrate that most activist movements begin locally or regionally. Contemporary activist movements engage performative art (‘artivism’) to move across boundaries, spaces, platforms and media that are increasingly translocal. Translocal collectives and initiators create strategies and practices that are shared and collaborative -- while also adopting flexible and responsive forms of organization, ‘commoning’ and civic engagement that are transactivist. This article examines how projects by the collaborative MAMAZA, the arts project IDENSITAT and co-created projects by the artist-geographer Trevor Paglen contribute to a diverse landscape of emerging interventions that may be less overtly signified as protest, or institutional critique, but provide translocal interrogations that also rethink notions of civic engagement and performance. These projects also challenge audiences to engage in a dialectic of ‘performative seeing’ which asks them to imagine what might become visible by exposing the socio-political and virtual spaces of the invisible, but also to consider who or what remains absent. The article suggests that translocal perspectives not only provide an aperture for developing a fuller understanding of how the relations among activism, art and performance are being renegotiated through forms of transactivism, but also indicate that the terrain of contemporary activist practices has become increasingly complex and textured.