SPECULATIVE PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO

To SPECULATE is to imagine, to fantasize, to dream, to predict, to prophesize, to situate imagination in relation to the real, to navigate the cross-roads between what is and what might be, and to explore alternatives and potentials at that junction/juncture.

To PERFORM is to try, to attempt, to manifest with bodies in space, to do and to do self-consciously/ with acute self-awareness, to consciously modify behaviour to achieve an end (be that a flourish of virtuoso ability/talent, to demonstrate, to resist, to embody, to act, to enact, to try, to play ETC.).

To PERFORM SPECULATIVELY is to harness the wild potentiality of speculation to perform (and bring into felt/sensible – after Ranciére’s usage of ‘sensible’ – reality) versions of these imaginative possibilities, to ground them in self-conscious hiatuses of concrete reality and to play with and within them in real time and space, to try them on and see how they might feel and whether they fit, and to share and cohabit these potentialities with other people; and to allow these speculations around the new conditions of a world to affect what is made and how, in turn (hopefully) informing and affecting the actual conditions of the world in its myriad potentialities.

SPECULATIVE PERFORMANCE requires a conversation between events, situations or outcomes that might come to be and the preparation/rehearsal/testing of them in real time and space. It might be the role-playing of a difficult conversation with different responses, or preparing for an interview with various questions or under different conditions, or the trying on of many outfits until you find the one that balances the appropriate look for the environment you’re going to with how comfortable you feel and your mood. It could also be a way of mapping out relationships to the world and each other in a restructured future where we have located a better balance of resources with needs and pleasures, have redistributed wealth, attention, opportunity and respect and dismantled capitalism with all its attendant inequalities and oppressions; or other smaller and more nuanced steps towards incorporating alterity into exercises of felt, performed reality.


₵OVERT OPERATIONS, May 2020


First published in PARA Journal, Issue 1 (2020)