Tatlin

I founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) in 1985, as a response to a fraying of the social safety net. LAPD makes artistic work to change the narrative about people living in poverty. Believing change is about exchange and art is about surprise, for 30 years, LAPD has confused categories and confounded expectations, creating

From the inception of Magnet Theatre in the 1980s, the SA context has been steeped in a culture of violence where the body has become a marked site. The particular nature of violence imposed by colonialism and apartheid was one that impacted on the ability to move and these restrictions were predicated on the socially

Cinema Everywhere Non-profit initiative Founded in 2013 in Alexandria, Egypt Introducing new types of movies to Egyptian society, types they know nothing about (independent, alternative, young film-makers’ movies, and movies made in countries Egyptians are not used to seeing or following). Cinema Everywhere screens long and short movies (feature, experimental, documentary, animation). Cinema Everywhere takes responsibility to fulfil

The present study undertakes a selective exploration of what (Jon) Mckenzie would call the paradigm of ‘cultural performance’, whereby he marks how performance became an object of study with the formation of Performance Studies as a discipline….While engaging with the globality of performance regime, here I depart from McKenzi’s general theory of performance which categorically marks the substitution of the disciplinary regime by the performance regime. Instead I open up the category of cultural performance as one that has an ontology which is conceptualised in the region, thereby foregrounding how performance offers a distinct lens to understand the political in the contemporary. Organised under five distinct modes of presentation - vision, voice, gesture, machinic and the animal - I analyse a series of mainstream cultural performances in Kerala across different genres, like theatre, poetry recitals, kathaprasangam ( a popular form of storytelling that emerged in the 1920’s in kerala) and mimics parade. I highlight how performance is at the heart of the workings of the new modality of power, and following different strategies, how these cultural performances foreground what it is to perform, and therefore what it is to live in the contemporary. This book posits performance as a critical site of enquiry to unravel the sensory and affective contours in the transformation of the region into a neoliberal regime.

What does it take for societal hope to emerge and be sustained? What are the necessary conditions for the enacting of democracy by citizens in hopeless circumstances—that is, under and despite autocratic regimes, but also in the old, well-consolidated democracies that began to reveal their illiberal temptations? What I call performative democracy is exactly this kind of phenomenon that constitutes the early stages of a democratic project or that supplies strategies to keep a well-established democracy vibrant.