Non- Performance

Performance

Non-Performance Performance deliberates on NON-Performativity (being hyper visible while doing everyday chores) as philosophised by Fred-Moten. Activating Questions being core features, it’s Vishnu’s methodology in development, a segway to provoke second order thinking, without bringing any ready-made answers or case studies to think of futurisms.

I have coined the term non-performance-performance to define a performance concept metamorphosing Fred Morten’s notion of "non-performativity" with Sara Ahmed's concept named similarly. The two paradigms share the name but are conceptually distinct, and have been developed within different intellectual contexts with altogether different implications. Non-Performance-Performance, then, is a space of affect where ideas shift and swing between throbbing polarities, effortlessly existing within a state of apparent dissonance.

Non-Performance-Performance is about embracing the magic, the speculative and the divine, whilst science tends increasingly to the banal and the pedantic while losing sight of the whole.

As Bruce Sterling says, contemporary generations are ‘wired to the gills’ - and yet we see the rise of divination practices, healing, magical arts, the list is endless. This state of existing within the opposites, as opposed to between them, is at the core of our epoch of capitalist realism - it is a non-performance performance. It’s akin to a brown person like myself making their home and finding emancipation in a majority white nation.

This performance is an act of recognising circumstances, examining the forces and factors that shape our lives, a process of probing, questioning, and challenging our assumptions and thus an action of creating an intentional space.

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The Other