Ephemeral Art and Performance in Africa

Art History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimée Bessire
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Spiritual Beliefs ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Ephemeral Art ◽  
Insight Into

Ephemeral art presents an interesting and not often covered lens in the field of African studies. It provides insight into the values placed on materials and the opportunity for deeper understanding of cultural traditions, spiritual beliefs, or individual philosophies. Ephemeral art may include transient materials intended to decay, those created in order to be destroyed, or even a piece marking a temporal instant, as in performances and site-specific installations. The ephemeral is what is seen, used, or performed until it decays, is buried, destroyed, or completes its durational moment. Performances exist as a moment in time—once past, they remain a memory. In this sense performance is ephemeral. While there is a great deal of scholarship on performance traditions, there is very little on African ephemeral art. The two topics remain distinct in the scholarly literature with overlaps in studies on the symbolism of ephemeral materials in performance traditions. The following bibliography is organized in two separate categories: ephemeral art and performance art, each connected through the trope of transiency.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Indigenous Novels in Canada

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Hyland-Russell
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Power Of Story ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Place And Identity

Canadian Indigenous novels emerged as a specific genre within the last thirty years, rooted in a deep, thousands-year-old ‘performance art and poetic tradition’ of oratory, oral story, poetry, and drama. In addition to these oral and performance traditions are the ‘unique and varying methods of written communication’ that flourished long before contact with Europeans. The chapter considers Canadian novels by Indigenous writers. It shows that Indigenous fiction is deeply intertwined with history, politics, and a belief in the power of story to name, resist, and heal; that novel-length Aboriginal fiction in Canada built on a growing body of other forms of Indigenous literature; and that many Indigenous novels foreground their relationship with place and identity as key features of the resistance against systemic and institutional racism. It also examines coming-of-age novels of the 1980s and 1990s that are grounded in realism.

scholarly journals Whose Landscape Is It? Remapping Memory and History in Interwar Central Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nóra Veszprémi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.

Remote Thermal Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics: Turning Data Into Knowledge

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaomo Jiang ◽  
Craig Foster
Keyword(s):  
Anomaly Detection ◽  
Gas Turbines ◽  
Performance Monitoring ◽  
Combined Cycle ◽  
Integrated System ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Maintenance Schedule ◽  
Effectiveness Monitoring ◽  
And Performance

Gas turbine simple or combined cycle plants are built and operated with higher availability, reliability, and performance in order to provide the customer with sufficient operating revenues and reduced fuel costs meanwhile enhancing customer dispatch competitiveness. A tremendous amount of operational data is usually collected from the everyday operation of a power plant. It has become an increasingly important but challenging issue about how to turn this data into knowledge and further solutions via developing advanced state-of-the-art analytics. This paper presents an integrated system and methodology to pursue this purpose by automating multi-level, multi-paradigm, multi-facet performance monitoring and anomaly detection for heavy duty gas turbines. The system provides an intelligent platform to drive site-specific performance improvements, mitigate outage risk, rationalize operational pattern, and enhance maintenance schedule and service offerings via taking appropriate proactive actions. In addition, the paper also presents the components in the system, including data sensing, hardware, and operational anomaly detection, expertise proactive act of company, site specific degradation assessment, and water wash effectiveness monitoring and analytics. As demonstrated in two examples, this remote performance monitoring aims to improve equipment efficiency by converting data into knowledge and solutions in order to drive value for customers including lowering operating fuel cost and increasing customer power sales and life cycle value.

An insight into the effect of calcination conditions on catalytic cracking of toluene over 3Fe8Ni/palygorskite: Catalysts characterization and performance

Fuel ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 190 ◽  
pp. 47-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuehua Zou ◽  
Tianhu Chen ◽  
Haibo Liu ◽  
Ping Zhang ◽  
Zhiyuan Ma ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Catalytic Cracking ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Insight Into

scholarly journals Racist Victimization, Legal Estrangement and Resentful Reliance on the Police in Sweden

2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110239
Author(s):  
Kıvanç Atak
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Police Response ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Racial Hatred ◽  
Vicarious Experiences ◽  
Insight Into

Scholarly literature offers much insight into aggressive policing of racial minorities. However, research is not equally extensive regarding the experiences of racial minorities with law enforcement when police response might be decisive for their sense of recognition and protection as a community. Bridging debates from critical race studies, hate crimes and legal cynicism, this paper addresses how policing of racist victimization is experienced by members of racially targeted communities in Sweden. Drawing on interviews with people having personal and/or vicarious experiences with racist victimization, I analyze resentful reliance on the police through the concept of legal estrangement. While most respondents describe police treatment in somewhat positive terms, there is a shared resentment at the police due to the lived experience that racism often remains undetected. Previous interactions with law enforcement also pave the way for accumulated skepticism toward the utility of the policing of racial hatred. Disenchantment with law enforcement notwithstanding, reliance on the police manifests a will not just to be recognized as a victim, but also to make the pervasiveness of racism more visible.

An Invitation from the Displaced: Refuge Restaged in The Jungle and As Far as My Fingertips Take Me

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-372
Author(s):  
Jeff Casey
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
First Century ◽  
Good Chance ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Remedial Strategies ◽  
Mutual Responsibility

Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibility, and interdependence. Fingertips and The Jungle are substantially different artworks but are able to achieve similar results by utilizing the different affordances of their respective mediums. Thus, the taxonomy of strategies provides a more systematic and precise way of analyzing how refugee drama and performance achieve their goals. It avoids being overly prescriptive in how these goals should be achieved and instead recognizes how exploiting different tactics and medial affordances can advocate for refugees and other migrants.

scholarly journals Performing with Plants in the Ob-scene Anthropocene

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Annette Arlander
Keyword(s):  
Performance Analysis ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Art Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance As Research ◽  
Artistic Research

Is there a way for the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic art form par excellence, the theatre, or performance art for that matter, to expand beyond their human and humanist bias? Is the term Anthropocene in any way useful for theatre and performance studies or performance-as-research? In the anthology Anthropocene Feminism (Grusin 2017) Rosi Braidotti proposes four theses for a posthumanist feminism: 1) feminism is not a humanism, 2) anthropos is off-center, 3) zoe is the ruling principle, 4) sexuality is a force beyond gender. These assertions can undoubtedly be put on stage, but do they have relevance for developing or understanding performance practices off-stage and off-center, such as those trying to explore alternative ways and sites of performing, like performing with plants? In this text, I examine Braidotti’s affirmative theses and explore their usefulness with regard to performance analysis, use some of my experiments in the artistic research project “Performing with plants” as examples, and consider what the implications and possible uses of these theses are for our understanding of performances with other-than-human entities, which we share our planet with.

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