Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater’s ecological interventions and traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories, climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan’s site-specific performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena. Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia atlas is animated by a disorienting, anti-mapping strategy, producing a deterritorialized, nomadic, fluid atlas unfolding in real time as an archive of climate change in multidimensional, active space. The book is designed for pedagogical access, with interludes that consolidate the learning outcomes of the experimental theory animating each site-specific performance.
Accompanied by close descriptions of five performances and supplemented by digital documentation available online, this volume intervenes in discussions on climate change, urbanism, and postcolonization/decolonialization, and contributes to interdisciplinary studies of ecology and environmental politics, postcolonial/decolonial theories and practices, performance studies and aesthetics, in particular public art, and performance as research.
Author(s): May Joseph, Sofia Varino
Series: Critical Climate Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 119
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Prologues
Chapter 1: Storm as Method: Climate Performatives
Climate Ethnography: Opening the World
Performing Port City Ecologies: Dutch and Portuguese Legacies
Decolonial and Queer Performatives
Method to the Storm
Notes
Interlude: Aquatopia, Governors Island, New York,
USA (2017)
Chapter 2: Multidirectional Thalassology: Comparative Lagoon Ecologies
Venice, Postponed
Venetians in the Malabar
A Malabari in Venice
“Venetian Gulf”
Multidirectional Thalassology
Lagoon Ecologies
Aquatic Activity and Coastal Performatives
Learning from Aqua Alta
Interlude: Acqua Alta, Devil’s Bridge, Venice, Italy
(2014)
Chapter 3: Harmattan Theater as Oceanic Praxis: Why Water Matters to Performance
Aquatopia
Palimpsests, Biodegradables, and Ghosts
Virtuosity and Neoliberal Imperatives
Space/Time Compression and Strategies for Environmental Theater
Interlude: Far Rockaway, Tribute Park, Beach 116,
Rockaway Park, Queens (2013)
Chapter 4: Terrestrial Becomings: Walking for Climate
The Tagus River as Multispecies Assemblage
The Art of Repair
The Deep Body
Walking Art
Walking for Climate
Note
Interlude: Mar Português, Cais das Colunas, Terreiro do Paço, Lisbon (2012)
Chapter 5: Anthropogenic Citizens, Environmental Agents: Sea Dike, Singel Canal, Amsterdam (2014)
The Cultural Construction of Women as Environmental Citizens
Performers of the Sea
Anthropogenic Accountability
Notes
Interlude: Sea Dike, Singel Canal, Amsterdam (2014)
Chapter 6: Queering Climate: Ecologies of Historical Radiance
Becoming Radiant
The Lure of the Social: Relational Aesthetics as Ecology
Symbiotic Performatives
Spectatorship and Participation: Audiences, Publics, Communities
Epilogues
Harmattan Wind—Climate Change Aesthetics and the Nonhuman
Toward a Somatic Ecology—Harmattan Performs
Note
Bibliography
Index
