performingborders newsletter | June 2022

In this month’s newsletter performingborders presents new research paths where the group’s intertwined interests and ideas have manifested in a new constellation of work with the hope that the shared interviews will grow and develop into wider research.

Based on her ongoing research of equitable forms of organising within the cultural and live art sector, Alessandra has started On Work, a series of interviews with UK-based and international practitioners to learn, unlearn, gather and share knowledge to build safe and fair spaces for collective labour. This month’s newsletter hosts interviews with queer feminist practitioners Giulia Casalini and Niya B, and artists Jack Ky Tan whose work explores ‘the social, the legal and art’.

Rooted in her ongoing thinking around bodies and performance in feminist practice, Anahi starts Bodies in Resistance/ Encuerpando Resistancia, focusing on the body as a site of resistance. It is a series in dialogue with artists, activists, and those sitting in spaces of embodied practice, referencing the legacy of feminist Latin American movements and their work choreographing resistance. This evolving conversation-as-research aims to connect practices across the Abya Yala diaspora, linking performance/political practices as well as body/minds across borders. This month Anahi thinks with Thais Di Marco to explore political performance practices, inherited legacies, and choreographies of power. 

Starting from performingborders’ own transnational work over the years, Xavier is engaging in research on language, translation and cross-border working methodologies, starting with conversations with artists mandla, Ana Rocha and Two Destination Language. Fronteiras taps into how language and perception of cultural signifiers changes when working transnationally. Fronteiras is the word for borders in Portuguese, yet the contextual connotations around it allude to a more movement-based understanding of what is the border: the border as a frontier, a site of possibilities amidst oppressive systems. 

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image credits: Image of The Goldfish Bleeding in a Sea of Sharks – Wrestling Club, performed at FLAM Amsterdam in May 2022. Courtesy of the artist, performance photos by Thomas Lenden & David Cenzer.