WHAT IS PERFORMINGBORDERS
performingborders is a collectively run, migrant-led platform for artistic research and creation, centred on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders through live art and performance practices.
performingborders is a knowledge-sharing platform created in dialogue with its contributors. Since 2016 performingborders has woven a digital and live tapestry of interconnected, cross-border experiments through interviews, artist commissions, open calls, publications, residencies, workshops, conversations, events, newsletters, and pamphlets – all freely accessible online. To date, we have worked with over 200 contributors.
performingborders focuses on Border Artists – migrant and diaspora practitioners, thinkers, writers, organisers whose lived experience is impacted by political, economic, juridical and/or geographic barriers; and people whose creative expression and freedom are restricted through racial, gendered, ableist and classistborders. Our work seeks to nourish these practices as well as design new spaces, networks and ways of working, informed by a deep understanding of systemic injustice. performingborders is a platform where artists, methods, and approaches can cross-pollinate, think together, and imagine new expansive ways of connecting through live art and performance.
(Read ‘Our understanding of borders’ in the section below)
Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saravia Herrera, in collaboration with guest curators, thinkers, artists, activists and researchers.
WHERE TO FIND US
performingborders is primarily based online, on our website which hosts resources, research, artworks, performances and collaborations with artists, activists, organisations, and partners. The team is based between London (UK) and Porto (Portugal).
Live events and gatherings are curated, produced and/or presented in both the UK and internationally and so far have taken place in various locations such as: London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Peterborough, Bradford, Brighton and Exeter, as well as in Copenhagen (Denmark), border Mexico-US, Montemor (Portugal), and Nairobi (Kenya).
📧 The main way to follow our activities is to subscribe to our newsletter here
💻 To contact us fill in our contact form here
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HOW WE WORK
Ale, Xavi and Anahí are co-caretakers of performingborders, doing everything from admin to archives, cooking to curation.
The team works together on Wednesdays and Fridays, and we use this time to focus on curatorial and production meetings together.
The team operates horizontally, all members are allocated the same amount of pay and have a shared responsibility within the group. We actively get support, advice, and feedback from our critical friends. All knowledges and experiences are valued for the diversity of perspectives that they contribute to the group and how they nourish and inform our collective work.
We understand that we operate in an ecology where border-artists and live art practitioners face intersectional oppression and challenges in both their working and personal lives. performingborders works to create a caring and safe space that starts with fair pay, sustainable workloads, access to support and financial resources, curatorial support, transparency on deadlines and connection to performingborders’ network of partners, artists, and supporters. We work to address the power structures implicit in the arts sector and look to actively resist exploitative practices in how we engage with each other as curators/researchers and how we engage with artists. performingborders aims to humanise the work we do as cultural workers and acknowledges the intersectional structural oppressions that impact how we live.
Our Solidarity Pot
In 2022, we established our Solidarity Pot, a dedicated portion of our budget exclusively supporting art workers’ rights. This fund provides one-year subsidised memberships to unions or workers’ organisations and contributes towards migration-related legal and administrative expenses for everyone contributing to performingborders’ platform and activities. We believe a more equitable and fair art sector begins with ensuring people have access to the support they need to feel empowered and informed about their rights, while also standing against the ongoing challenges posed by hostile environment policies targeting migrant artists.
This work is ongoing and we continue to learn with the knowledge that performingborders can change and has to be responsive to the needs of the humans and non-humans involved, allowing for different paces at different times.
Our Commitment to PACBI
We at performingborders know that a cultural sector committed to dismantling borders must stand in solidarity and resistance with the people of Palestine. Therefore, we are proud to adhere to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
As part of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) since 2004, PACBI has called for the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions due to their complicity in the Israeli system of oppression. This system denies Palestinians their basic rights as guaranteed under international law, including the rights to freedom of movement and expression.
By endorsing PACBI, performingborders commits to its guidelines, including:
We invite all our partners and collaborators to join us in supporting PACBI and to learn more about the International Cultural Boycott Guidelines here
HOW WE FUND OUR ACTIVITIES
performingborders started in February 2016 as a non-funded monthly series of interviews and since then has been invited for paid and unpaid talks, seminars, workshops, panel discussions, and writing commissions.
Since 2019, the platform has initiated a series of digital and live free-to-access public programmes whose activities have been supported on a project-basis by the Arts Council England, Necessity Fund and through both financial and in-kind support from arts organisations, universities, grassroots and institutional partners (see list here).
After 8 years of operating within the performance art sector, performingborders was incorporated as a Community Interest Company (CIC) in 2024.
OUR UNDERSTANDING OF BORDERS
In both our collaborative work and individual research, we work with a definition of border that is open and acknowledges the diversity of experiences at the intersections of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, economic, and everyday borders.
We look at the tradition of Border Artists at La Frontera (Mexico/US border) and beyond, political theorists, and the embodied knowledge of practitioners that use the ‘border as a method’.
Live Art sits both at the borders of the art market and within a constant process of research, and so creates the possibility to go beyond the space of the artwork itself, flooding into public physical and digital spaces, and rethinking our relationship with borderline concepts and places. Live Art is a lived-in ground always in flux which allows for multiple political negotiations, claims, encounters, experiments , and constant research for alternatives to dominant power structures. Live Art becomes a method for us as it is a site of border-struggle.
performingborders centers the voices and embodied knowledges of those with lived experiences of borders and those with ties to various global diasporas. We reject the use of culture as an extension of empire, nationalism, ableism, fascism, capitalism and patriarchy, all of which maintain the violence of borders and how they are mapped on territories and our bodies.
For more on our understanding of borders read our Performing Borders Study Guide commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency, London, in 2016. As borders are always changing, so is our understanding of them so please refer also to the ongoing list of quotes in this page as further and alternative anchors and references we keep sharing as a group.
The first phase of the ‘performingborders. conversations on live art | crossings | europe’ project (February 2016 – February 2017) was initiated as part of the MRes in Arts: Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins – UAL, London, which Alessandra undertook from 2014 to 2016. With thanks to Dr. Chris Kul-Want, Dr. Karl Baker and fellow students for their invaluable support, advice, and time for conversations.
QUOTES / REFERENCES / ANCHORS (ongoing)
[W]e really focused on the border as a site of possibilities, as a spiral model as opposed to a dividing line and with the whole idea of the artist as a social thinker, as a binational diplomat, as an alternative chronicler […] So I think that the border method – the border way of working as an artist – implies crossing of internal borders between multiple milieus and multiple contexts. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, live artist, 2009
I have been straddling that tejas-Mexico border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Gloria Anzaldúa, activist and writer, 1987
I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance – as location of radical opennes and possibility. bell hooks, 1989
Method for us is as much about acting on the world as it is about knowing it. […] it is about the relation of action to knowledge in situations where many different knowledge regimes and practices come into conflict. Border as method involves negotiating the boundaries between the different kinds of knowledge that come to bear on the border and, in so doing, aims to throw light on the subjectivities that come into being through such conflicts. […] the border is for us not so much a research object as an epistemological viewpoint that allows an acute critical analysis not only of how relations of domination, dispossession, and exploitation are being redefined presently but also of the struggles that take shape around these changing relations. The border can be a method precisely insofar as it is conceived of as a site of struggle. Mezzadra and Neilson, political theorists, 2013
Since the border is always in between and in motion, it is a continually changing process. Thomas Nail, philosopher, 2016
[This space is ongoing and we’ll keep adding quotes and references alongside our research work]