The performativity of political acts and artifacts: some examples of what leaks and varies while remaining here.
Demonstrations, occupations, and protests are social, political, and cultural infrastructures. They have a synchronic quality instructed by collective enunciation at a given specific moment; and a diachronic quality capable of carrying and resignifying enunciation through other contexts – daily life, cultural movements, and/or artistic practices. From these two principles, I organize here a small mashup of acts and artifacts to consider the contaminations between political manifestations and artistic practices, a denial of stagnation, or the performativity of what leaks and merges while varying.
.of some acts
In the book The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present (2019), T. V. Reed clarifies that «the boundaries between the political, the social, the economic, and the cultural» as well as what can be understood as «subcultures”, «formations» or «cultural movements» are in practice «frequently fluid» (Reed, 2019:398). It is in close participation-observation of the parts (to better understand the whole) that we access cultural and political continuities: a performativity between contexts and fields that were previously distinct but that somehow blend. For this reason, Reed refers to the impact that the Occupy Wall Street political movement had on revitalizing artistic practices in New York. Specifically, the occupation and production of social space, including institutional critique, progressively became central to New York’s artistic practices, with critical artists/theorists who experienced the occupation of Zuccotti Park (Reed, 2019: 325-370). Throughout his reflection, Reed raises some modes and social relations as artistic/political practice, and acts and artifacts for resistance and ongoing struggles instructed by the experience of occupation-demonstration in the square.
Similarly, in Portugal, the worsening of social inequalities following the 2008 global financial crisis, particularly the Portuguese debt crisis, precipitated a popular movement of political demonstrations and occupations of public space in the second decade of the 21st century. Since the advance of the TROIKA in the Portuguese territory (2011) until today, collectivism and political activism have been re-catalyzed as a social technology expressed in the proliferation of popular assemblies, the organization of commons, urban drifts, games, courses and autonomous schools, reading groups, conferences, and/or independent publications as artistic practices. Among these modes, the reorganization for labor rights in the arts and culture sector also stands out. From this chain of relationships and the fluidity between contexts pointed out by Reed, I present here a small selection of cases focused on Lisbon – partly because I experienced some, and partly because the panorama is as proliferative as it is heterogeneous in other territories of the country (and the mashup has limits for the analysis it supports). With another index, this selection of acts is circumscribed to critique as a practice in performance studies until 2022.
Looking back, I point to the Acampada in Rossio (2011): an occupation of the Rossio Square that, for a week and a half, established an infrastructure of assemblies and working groups for a new architecture of public space: a popular kitchen, a children's area, a study and library zone, another for sleeping safely, an open forum for political debates and cultural actions (I remember). The Acampada positioned itself as a practice of participatory democracy through its self-governance: hyper-visualizing its constituent principles, logistics, and decision-making mechanisms in open assemblies, the architecture of the new Rossio Square, and online communication platforms. It presented a written Manifesto as a popular protest against the austerity measures imposed by the Troika and the global financial order, as a call to participate in action, and as a declaration of the Manifesto itself as an open, ongoing process, just like the Acampada: «This is just the beginning. The streets are ours.» In 2014, before writing his thesis/book Contesting Austerity – Social Movements and the Left in Portugal and Spain (2008-2015), the researcher and participant in the Acampada Tiago Carvalho wrote on the blog L’Obéissance Est Mort:
«The resurgence of the street as a political factor in 2011 was a new card in the panorama of the local left. Its mobilizing capacity gradually exhausted itself, but it will be the realities produced in those streets that will shape the agenda in the coming years because it was fundamentally those experiences, not previous institutional frameworks, that formed militant subjectivities.» (Carvalho, 2014, available at: https://obeissancemorte.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/sobre-a-passagem-de-alguns-milhares-de-pessoas-por-uma-praca-a-2-de-marco-de-2013/)
Beyond the clear reference to Declaration (2012) by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – a small non-manifesto written about the occupations that took place in squares of numerous countries, which enunciates the new political subjectivities of the 2008 financial crisis –Tiago Carvalho highlights the lasting impact of forming these subjectivities on the political agendas that emerged after the Acampada. This deduction naturally encompasses culture and artistic practices, which also constitute themselves with these new militancies, the subjectivities of recent crises, and, once again invoking the fluidity between contexts, spill them into critique, political commentary, or protest. Indeed, making a more direct connection, the culture working group at the Acampada in Rossio was composed of a range of art, culture, and research professionals who continue today in acts of resistance and struggles for self-determination, collective action, and social transformation.
Part of this group of people resonates in Salganhada, an informal post-Acampada (2011-2018) group, among whom I highlight key figures from the arts and performance studies in Portugal, such as Sofia Neuparth, Sílvia Pinto Coelho, Miguel Castro Caldas, and Ana Bigotte Vieira (Ana participated in the occupation of Zuccotti Park and later joined this post-Acampada group). Together with other individuals, they continued to meet as a critical reading group, engaging in the collective translation of fundamental texts for political struggles and in aesthetic-political debates. The mobilization became decentralized, the notion that «the street is ours» spilled over into and from other forms of collective action, becoming explicit in the activities of grassroots and autonomous schools, such as UNIPOP, with (among others) Elisa Lopes da Silva, Bruno Peixe Dias, Fernando Ramalho, Miguel Cardoso, and José Neves, or the Critical Thinking Course (2015), organized by Museu da Crise (2015). Similarly, the conference-performance Secalharidade (2012) by João Fiadeiro and Fernanda Eugénio – «There are no spectators; there are no artists; we are all (whether we take responsibility or not) artisans of our own coexistence» – gave rise to both a book (https://ghost.pt/Secalharidade-1) and a co-authored article, «Secalharidade as Ethics and a Way of Life: The AND_Lab Project and the Research on Practices of Encounter and Collective Handling of Living Together». (2012, available at: https://www.revistas.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/3191). With the same thread, I also traverse the experimental course designed by Ana Bigotte Vieira, Paula Caspão, Joana Braga, and Ricardo Seiça Salgado: Taking a Stand, the Political and the Place (2014), as well as the establishment of Baldio – Studies in Performance (2013- ) by Ana Pais, Ana Bigotte Vieira, Paula Caspão, Joana Braga, Ricardo Seiça Salgado, Ana Mira, Sílvia Pinto Coelho, and Miguel Castro Caldas. Together, they sustained the possibility of critique and collective modes as a social practice through performance studies and, to some extent, performance itself (a separate discussion).
Returning to a little over a year after the Acampada, October 13, 2012, was a historic date for the cultural sector: the organization Que Se Lixe a Troika – Cultural Protest (Fuck Troika) staged 23 simultaneous demonstrations across various cities in the country. The aim was to raise public awareness about the importance of culture (the right to cultural enjoyment is enshrined in the Portuguese Constitution) and to protest against budget cuts to the cultural sector. In Lisbon, at Praça de Espanha, a stage was set up for a Cultural Marathon program featuring numerous protest performances by musicians (among many others, Zé Pedro, Naifa, Deolinda, Vitorino, and Coro Acordai), visual artists (Margarida Gil, Bruno Cabral), and performing artists (I recall Sofia Neuparth with centro em movimento and Vera Mantero). Of great significance was the participation of technical and production teams in the protest. The cultural sector’s specific struggle, articulated with the Que Se Lixe a Troika movement, made evident the political potential of artistic practices through the very organization of the event/protest: 23 public cultural marathons, each taking place in a different city across the country. During the Salganhada period and the Que Se Lixe a Troika – Cultural Protest, these informal groups were already working in collaboration with other cultural sector organizations, such as REDE – Associação para a Dança Contemporânea. They were also engaging with political parties and unions to further common interests – while maintaining partisan autonomy as a guiding principle among these professional groups.
The indistinction between protest and performance as a characteristic of labor and political struggles (more broadly) within the artistic and cultural sector has historically reemerged whenever necessary, as we recently witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–22). The mandatory lockdown suspended all public activities, including cultural events. The Portuguese government and institutions faced enormous challenges in implementing a consistent plan to address the extreme conditions in the sector. It was in this context that several groups of arts and culture professionals emerged (e.g., União Negra das Artes (Black Union of the Arts); Trabalhadores da Casa da Música (Workers of Casa da Música); Arte e Educadores de Serralves (Art and Educators of Serralves), etc.), among which Ação Cooperativista (Cooperativist Action) was founded: «An informal group with a non-hierarchical, collaborative working methodology. It seeks to unite arts and culture professionals while valuing diversity.» (https://www.facebook.com/acao.coperativista/).
This monadic nucleus, initiated by Carlota Lagido, sustained actions of political agitation (dissemination, mobilization, awareness) based on performative acts that merged social struggle with artistic creation – a choreopolitics that effectively operated in the field of affects and effects. Ação Cooperativista played a crucial role in uniting formal and informal groups with unions, ultimately forming an inter-collective force for negotiation and pressure regarding the Statute for Cultural Sector Professionals. Despite the issues it raised, this statute was a victory for collective struggle, as were the emergency aid measures and social policies addressing the specific conditions of cultural professionals (though these, too, came with challenges).
The artistic performativity of protest actions, or the political performativity of artistic practices, was evident in the online and viral protest/performance action #unidospelopresenteefuturodacultura (unitedbythepresentandfutureofculture), where artists and cultural professionals testified about their working conditions while advocating for the common cause. Another example was the call for fake applications (bureaucratic fictions) as a form of bureaucratic sabotage against grant applications for Direção-Geral das Artes (Directorate General for the Arts) (DGArtes), driven by an insufficient budget and allocation mechanisms misaligned with the sector’s realities. These are just two examples of the performative dimension of the struggle during the pandemic. Many more were documented within the working group Confined Artistic Practices: Resistance and Collectivism during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Portugal (Available at: https://institutodehistoriadaarte.com/research/seed-projects/praticas-artisticas-confinadas/ ).
Around the same time, researcher/choreographer Sílvia Pinto Coelho was developing her artistic research project Procrastination School (2020-22) (Available at: https://procrastinationschool.fcsh.unl.pt/). Among other activities during this period, the project included a Critical Reading Group (2020) – which I recall once again bringing together various professionals from the arts, culture, and research – and a Procrastination Marathon (2021) at the Lisbon Botanical Garden, during which a series of artists were invited to procrastinate as a means of producing critical public space. Regarding the Reading Group as a practice within the Procrastination School, Sílvia Pinto Coelho writes:
«Suddenly, COVID-19 fueled the project, giving it new possibilities. We found ourselves in a state of collective waiting, and everything had been postponed in some way. In 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Lisbon, an online Reading Group came together to think collectively about slowing down, procrastinating, sabotaging, laziness, modes of production, and, of course, about lockdown and the pandemic. Because it was one of the first online reading groups, familiar with what was happening in work, life, and the movement of daily life, a rather interesting political shift occurred within the proposed theme – we were speaking about the present, from our homes, with minds alert from the shock.» (Coelho, S.P., available at: https://www.icnova.fcsh.unl.pt/projetos/escola-da-procrastinacao/ ).
This political detour connects with the cultural and political fluidity within which I am, indeed (!), situating reading groups – in this case, the Procrastination School, which found itself shaped by the material conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other initiatives took place during a similar period, coinciding with the Procrastination School, such as the Expanded Practices All Over cycle, coordinated by Paula Caspão. Among its various activities, it included two workshops at centro em movimento (2022): one with researcher/poet Fred Moten – «addressing issues from the history of jazz, such as the emergence of Black experimental music at the intersection of freedom theory and queer theory»; and another with professor Shannon Jackson – Pandemic Aesthetics and ‘Post’-Pandemic Infrastructures, exploring the performativity of labor struggles and institutional critique in the performing arts.
The space where these workshops took place, centro em movimento (c.e.m.), is a unique venue in Lisbon, dedicated to research and performance. Under the coordination of Sofia Neuparth, it hosts and presents to the public key figures of autonomous and situated thought and action, such as the recent talks and debates with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Amador Fernández-Savater, and María Galindo – her visit being supported by Sirigaita, Fabiana Miranda, Paulo Raposo (who was present at the Acampada at Rossio), the activist and cinema collective Left Hand Rotation, and As Damas. c.e.m. stands out as a rare space for articulating and connecting people from different nuclei of thought and action in Lisbon, bringing together arts and/or research institutions with spaces of association and activism such as Sirigaita, RDA69, and Zona Franca. This immense, often invisible labor of network-building and maintaining what leaks and shifts – the persistence and endurance of Sofia Neuparth, Margarida Agostinho, and Cristina Vilhena – continues to sustain this vital space.
Regarding the Procrastination Marathon, it is Sílvia Pinto Coelho and Carlos Oliveira themselves who highlight the Marathon as a form of collectivism, activism, and transmission (memory) in their article Retornos de Sísifo, a Exaustão da RE.AL e Outras Danças, published in COREIA newspaper #1 (2019). How can we not relate the Procrastination Marathon to the Cultural Marathon (2012), which took place during the Troika crisis? How can we not connect the Cultural Marathon to the Marathon for Dance (1993) (organized by Mónica Lapa and Cristina Santos), which was held at the Maria Matos Theater as a protest against the State’s lack of cultural policies and conditions at the time? Or how can we not associate the Marathon for Dance with the 12-hour For Mónica Marathon (April 7, 2002, Maria Matos Theater), held in honor of choreographer and curator Mónica Lapa, who had recently passed away? (Coelho, Sílvia P. / Oliveira, Carlos M, 2019). Furthermore, I would add that the Marathon, as a social mode of transmission (memory) and protest, persists over time. One can look at the recent Marathon in tribute to Gil Mendo (1946-2022), For Gil, at Culturgest, in which the memory of the programmer was revived through discussions on cultural policy, education, programming, and internationalization, culminating on the final day with a 12-hour performance marathon.
This format was also implicitly present in the Des|ocupação (Un|occupation) of Atelier RE.AL in June 2019. The closure of Atelier RE.AL was precipitated by the landlords' decision not to renew the lease. Acknowledging the critical interim state of eviction as a historical force, João Fiadeiro organized an open artistic program for the public, which took place over a week (July 15-22, 2019) under the name Des|ocupação – an occupation of an eviction. Throughout the week, the marathon brought together new performances (and bodies) of the present alongside historically significant performances and relationships tied to RE.AL. The space featured a dedicated exhibition-performance room for Para uma Timeline a Haver (For a Timeline to Be) (by Ana Bigotte Vieira, Ana Dinger, João dos Santos Martins, and Carlos Oliveira), focused on the histories of dance in Portugal, with particular attention to RE.AL. The marathon was further emphasized by fixed materialities – posters, publications, and RE.AL program leaflets, which were available for anyone present (!) to take home and keep.
On July 28, João Fiadeiro gave a final farewell to the space with a seven-hour improvisation to the sound of Vexations by Erik Satie, performed by pianist Joana Gama, during which the audience was invited to enter, stay, and leave at will. (At the Des|Ocupação, I saw a protest banner from the Que Se Lixe a Troika demonstration, which I had first encountered in a book published by GHOST Ma Vie Va Changer.) Maria João Guardão’s documentary about the Des|ocupação, Nada Pode Ficar (2020), reconfigures the occupation-protest with a new fold through this documentary medium, ensuring the continuation of transmission from an «ending» to new beginnings – social, poetic, and consequently political.
Here, the marathon was clearly expanded with new possibilities through the integration of fixed materialities of memory, echoing Silvia Pinto Coelho and Carlos Oliveira’s notion of «Performance as something that exists as a system of statements, of which all records are a part, and through which the past informs the present» (Idem, 2019).
.of Some Artifacts
Speaking of fixed materialities… the cultural spillover of demonstrations is very evident in the artifacts that compose them. Communication and media researcher Zara Pinto-Coelho has written about «The Social Life of Protest Posters» (Available at: https://www.passeio.pt/galeria/a-vida-social-dos-cartazes-de-protesto/), which, among other analytical dimensions, discusses the relevance of these posters as visual objects and their role in disseminating political statements both online and offline. Part of their offline journey is precisely a multi-spatial cultural and artistic circuit, moving between «The streets and ateliers, museums or art centers, libraries, art books, and activist curations» (Zara Pinto-Coelho, 2020). What interests me in this circulation is, once again, the power of the people – a domestic quality that Zara Pinto-Coelho also highlights in the production of protest posters, both in their handmade creation and in the slogans, collages, colors, and poems they contain. This intimate, small-scale force translates into a poster for each body in the demonstrations they are made for. Furthermore, their circulation enables new possibilities between political scales – bridging the intimate-individual and the collective, connecting the domesticity of handmade production, dissemination, and institutionalization in museums and cultural spaces, thereby opening up new social relationships with the political object.
A Portuguese collective that has been prolific in utilizing and referencing these political objects is Estrela Decadente, an informal group that reassembles with different members for each specific artistic situation and medium. As I have previously written in an article, «Their Coordinates are Bunker-Spaces and assume a public drive and lexicon of urban guerrilla». The actions and work presentations «circulate within specific spaces of cultural and political associativism» and mark the territory through which they drift with a practice of public space intervention – using flags, banners, bombing, and political slogans written on walls and social media. Publication serves as a crucial means of mediation and organization for an artistic activity that is intentionally dispersed and intermedial. Thus, the Decadente magazine «documents and reflects on the artistic practices of the collective» through columns on artistic and cultural commentary in the city, while also «engaging in political critique, denunciation, and calls to action» for organizing, protesting, or political demonstration. The collective's connection to public demonstrations and desire for social transformation is so prominent that their latest project is titled Manifestos and Demonstrations (Available at: https://farra.pt/portfolio-item/estrela-decadente/).
The call to action, organization, and political agitation (dissemination, reflection, critique) through artistic practices takes shape in different ways. The cultural life of demonstrations is one of the expressive axes of the book Ma Vie Va Changer (2015) by GHOST Publishing. The publishing house was founded in 2011 by Patrícia Almeida and David-Alexandre Guéniot in the social context of the 2008 economic crisis and the austerity policies imposed by the government of Pedro Passos Coelho in 2012 – once again, the TROIKA. In 2015, they published the iconic book Ma Vie Va Changer (2015) (Available at: https://ghost.pt/Ma-Vie-Va-Changer-2015-1), which interrogates the material conditions of austerity from within everyday family life. Designed in the format of a family album, the book constructs a critical montage by juxtaposing newspaper and magazine clippings about the crisis with portraits of family life. The manufacturing process is made meaningful and hyper-visible through the plasticity of cut-up and collage techniques, as well as the use of handwritten notes and post-its – blending political and poetic commentary. Just as a handmade protest sign moves from home to demonstration, the book similarly activates a form of public domesticity as protest. The images of the crisis, embedded in everyday life, document the family at demonstrations, while at the same time, the protest signs appear inside the family home – revealing the transmissions and transfers between intimate space and the public sphere of protest.
However, Ma Vie Va Changer was not the first time GHOST Publishing engaged with these political artifacts. In 2012, they had already published I Fear Nothing (2012), a series of photographic portraits of protest signs left behind in public space after the demonstration October 15: Democracy Takes to the Streets!, organized in response to the Spanish movement Los Indignados. A few months later, they produced the poster Souvenir, featuring an image of a wooden slingshot with the word Portugal engraved. This poster was distributed and pasted around São Bento by GHOST during Chancellor Angela Merkel’s official visit to Portugal in November 2012. Years later, the desire for this souvenir became part of a group exhibition in which GHOST participated, Souvenirs from Europe (2016), which traveled through a network of European art/cultural spaces. While the act of photography and image-making is, of course, fundamental (!) to GHOST’s published books, what excites me in this discussion is the political performativity of images – activated through their expanded editorial practices. This game of citation, repetition, and recombination took place across different social contexts and artistic platforms. It intersects with the same montage-technique that, for instance, generates the critical and relational space between photography and clippings in Ma Vie Va Changer: editing becomes performative not only within the book itself but across books, situations, spaces, and other artifacts – such as posters and signs in the streets.
It is the protest signs in the hands of thousands of people that capture attention in the documentary RUA (2021) by the cinema and activism collective Left Hand Rotation («The street is ours!» – this is how the Rossio Acampada Manifesto ended). Emerging from their own activism, the collective filmed between 2019-2020 the Demonstration for the Right to Housing organized by the collectives Stop Despejos and Habita (September 2019); the Feminist March on March 8; the Climate Strike; and the Black Lives Matter protest in Lisbon (Available at: https://vimeo.com/lefthandrotation/videos/page:2/sort:date).
Left Hand Rotation’s cinema aligns with the urgency of documenting and transmitting their own activism as well as that of their allies. They distribute and exhibit their films primarily in activist and mutual aid spaces across different geographies, adhering to a radical model of culture – free from profit and publicly accessible. All their artistic production is available online, on social media, and at events they organize. Like a book, the documentary film emerges with Left Hand Rotation as a retro-active artifact – a tool for new activism, present and future.
In the documentary (and book) Around the World in 80 Catastrophes (2021; 2024), the Left Hand Rotation collective explores monuments that establish collective memory through both human and more-than-human catastrophes. Statues and monuments tend to material fixity and verticality, whereas memory – when understood as a cultural performativity – leans toward dynamic horizontality, toward that which spills over and varies while remaining present, structured by the bodies of those who have experienced catastrophe:
«The definition of catastrophe depends on many local and global factors and layers of power relations. It is rarely provided by the community that suffers the catastrophe, nor does that community have a say in its short or long-term management. (…) Catastrophes redefine collective memory and the experiences of communities. Existences are provoked, destabilized, agitated; human lives are suspended in the enduring effect of the event. Even though catastrophes occur at a specific moment, they have a temporality that transcends it, shaping various social and political debates. (…) Life and death are organized around the assumed risk of capitalism’s predatory dynamics and necropolitics. There are complex relationships between capitalism, colonialism, social inequalities, and geno-eco-cides.» (Left Hand Rotation, 2021: 6-8, available at: https://www.lefthandrotation.com/avoltaaomundoem80catastrofes/)
The (official) political management of catastrophes frequently excludes the participation of those who have experienced them. In this light, horizontal memory also functions as an ongoing collective performativity of popular power – a «space of conflict» that remains open to self-organization and self-determination by the victims. Thus, in the demolition of an official monument, «its empty pedestal should not invite us to forget the catastrophe”»(Left Hand Rotation, 2021:9). These onto-social processes demand conscious and critical reflection on unilateral narratives – they are conflictual because they intervene in the status quo, and because they actively engage in situated counter-memory. This way of collectivizing public memory, by pluralizing it through grassroots power, appears essential to the «formation of new activist movements», and, by extension, to the political performativity of artistic practices.
I believe that the social reorganization of the artifact through direct intervention, documentation, and editing connects with the acts I have traced as part of a shared performativity: the critical and autonomous interrogation of collective events as one of the ways to ensure the social struggles in becoming – a form of transmission as resistance?
This free format article was written based on research conducted for the doctoral thesis PIGS: Spaces of Exhaustion as Artistic Practices in Southern Europe (2012–2022), funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [2020.06548.BD].
The information presented here was gathered through participant «attention» interviews, informal conversations, and email exchanges. The bibliography is quoted and made available throughout the article, with notes containing the corresponding bibliographic references.
Review and critical suggestions by Sílvia Pinto Coelho
Reading and review by Nuno Marques and Elisa Pône; Bruno Humberto.
