Performing Identities. Reframing Cities as Multifocal Narratives for Art, Performance and Theatre

Drawing on David Joselit’s critique of modernity in relation to the proprietary mindset that regulates the production and circulation of art on the art market, this article focuses on a few examples of artists employing gestures of displacement around techniques involving collage and montage – in various fields of expression from performance art, theatre, photography, installation to mixed media and sculpture and in relation to their spaces – to declassify the dominant perceptions of the real and history by exposing the arbitrary nature of social hierarchies and giving voice to those who are traditionally silenced. We will observe how these different approaches tackle, disrupt and offer an alternative to the commodified modes of spectatorship that in both the space of art and of the city (embodying and reflecting the mechanisms of modernity) perform a systematic dispossession of the other.

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