Performativity and Image Formation

Taking Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performative acts and gender constitution’ to explain “the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social sign”(Butler 1988, 519), this paper provides a model for understanding how social agents affect our making as artists.

More particularly, I try to answer the question, how do social barriers and modes of social temporality retrain our freedom of making? On the one hand, artists operate in a field of almost limitless possibility and permission; globalisation and digital technology seem to collapse the boundaries of time periods, space, styles and concepts, allowing total freedom. On the other hand, we all seem locked into an inescapable economic, political and ecological endgame.

With this conundrum in mind, this paper refers to the series of cross-disciplinary workshops titled Performativity and Image Formation that took place in collaboration with the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (February–June 2016). Performativity and Image Formation was designed to analyse different elements that are involved in “social agents” in our everyday life, aiming to establish a new dimension of looking at registered images or news documentary scenes by exploring the artistic movement of the body in space and bodily gestures (hands, facial expressions) from photographs produced by news channels in conflict zones such as Aleppo. A two-channel video and series of performances was the outcome of collaboration with artist Jakob Rowlinson and dancers Alina Pappi, David Rodriguez, Massimo Monticelli, Stephanie D’Arcy Collins, Evie Oldham and Olivia Thynne. Some sample images are included in this paper.