Performance Research Volume 24 Issue 6

On Animism

Issue editors: Mischa Twitchin & Carl Lavery

ISSN: 1352-8165 (2019) 24:6

As the concept of ‘performance’ crosses over between the mechanistic and the creative, between serving ‘time and motion’ studies and their suspension in ‘duration’, between the ‘frictionless’ and its interruption, such distinctions themselves seem to delineate fields of research. But it is precisely these distinctions that prove to be in question when invoking the concept of ‘animism’. Although defined historically in terms of these familiar oppositions, what has come to be called the ‘new animism’ concerns what cannot be accommodated by them—inviting a sense of the ‘re-enchantment’ of the world, even as a self-styled modernity appears intent on destroying it. Not the least of what performance research explores in the name of animism, then, are ‘alternatives’ to modes of globalized practice, affirming a pluralism of understanding relations in and to the world, which are not limited to those of human ‘actors’. Participating in the work of cosmopolitics, animism implies fundamental questions about the very ‘life’ of social relations—many varied examples of which are addressed in the essays of this issue of Performance Research.

On Animism : Introduction

Mischa Twitchin, Carl Lavery

pp. 1 - 5

‘This Artwork Is Having a Rest’

Mischa Twitchin

pp. 6 - 15

Complicating the Implication : Animism and spectrality in performances without humans

Pedro Manuel

pp. 16 - 21

There As Here : Living ecologies of film in Le Quattro Volte

Augusto Corrieri

pp. 22 - 28

Animating Tangible Futures : Returning (again) to Battleship Island

Carl Lavery

pp. 29 - 37

Dirt in the Lens : On matter and memory in photographic performance

Simon Bowes

pp. 38 - 46

The Miniature Object and the Living World

Eleanor Margolies

pp. 47 - 58

When I Grow Up I Want to Be an Indian

Nicolás Salazar Sutil

pp. 59 - 68

Entangled Animisms : Whakaaro and dialogue in the artwork of Shannon Te Ao

Christopher Braddock

pp. 69 - 78

Burning the Bull : The changing meanings of a harvest ritual in the Anthropocene

Tamara Searle

pp. 79 - 85

I Want It to Go to a Good Home : Animism in Western relationships with personal possessions

Amelia Mathews-Pett

pp. 86 - 94

Becoming Doll : Radical objectification in the performance of Freddie Mercado

Marina Barsy Janer

pp. 95 - 102

Addressing Residues and Relics : Puerto Rico, 2015–18

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya

pp. 103 - 113

The Animation of Contemporary Subjectivity in Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee

Katerina Paramana

pp. 114 - 121

Notes on Contributors

pp. 122