Embodied Infrastructures and Other Tendencies for Collective Action

In her lecture-performance Transmuting Force of Life: Toward a Chaotic Approach (2023), presented in the gardens of the contemporary art center Maison des Arts de Malakoff, artist Fabiana Ex-Souza invited us to gather around her in a circle, mirroring the form she had created with white beans laid out on the floor. Her practice, which engages an ecology of care, highlights other ways to relate to the plant world and its sensibility, long disregarded by Western culture. After moving away from us to pour a few drops from a secret drink on the floor to honor the spirits of the place, she began to read a text in which she contemplates humans’ capacity to consider the “trans-mutational” virtues of seeds as part of a process of reconnection to the living world¹. Brazil’s colonial past and the living conditions of people of color in France were also brought up, always with the following question in mind: Who has the power to rewrite history? Broadly speaking, in her performances, Ex-Souza uses her own body to establish a dynamic of sharing related to her experience as an Afro-Brazilian woman. It is about creating a space for reflection but also for raising political and poetic awareness in the public, who often find themselves very involved in the performance. During Transmuting Force of Life, Ex-Souza poured each of us a glass of cachaça and asked us to come closer and closer to her until we became one body. Absorbed in listening, we then began an intense, slow circular movement, holding on to each other.

This artistic proposition could be envisaged as a space where bodies can be trained in other forms of social interaction. It is related to the “modalities of life” developed in what the African-American studies scholar Alexander G. Weheliye described as “the breaks, crevices, movements, languages, and such found in the zones between the flesh and the law.”² Ex-Souza’s way of training of bodies is built on tentative, hesitant, clumsy gestures, giving way to the effective embodiment of a consolidated common body. This is not far from being “in rehearsal” in the sense theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013): an intellectual and physical improvisation practice that puts institutional habits (like our work methods) and social habits (our ways of being together) into movement. With an emancipatory aim, this rehearsal generates new knowledge shared in the “undercommons”³ which here refer to cracks and recesses, the infra, the everyday. For Harney and Moten, the idea of rehearsal is associated with study which corresponds to “what one produces with others.”⁴ The idea of rehearsal draws its strength from the failure of existing systems which it highlights through strategies of interruption, irregularity, and deviation. “Deviation” could be understood in the sense developed by Sara Ahmed when she identifies queer forms of resistance in relation to the institutional framework. They are, she says, “how small deviations, a loosening […] can lead to more and more coming out.”⁵

The rehearsal referred to here can therefore be understood as a method, a practice, but also as an instance of reflection and/or criticism on artistic, curatorial, and institutional production processes. In this text, I propose to think of it as a sister notion to concepts such as contortion, choreography, pre-enactment (which involves role-playing, simulation exercises, prospective scenarios or experimenting with fictitious time and space settings), and foreshadowing. All of these bring us, as I will explore, to notions of collective training and resistance. More precisely, it is a matter of rethinking different practices (artistic, curatorial, or institutional) that, in a French context, generate tools and work against the causes of exhaustion and oppression. Most of these practices are situated at the intersection of performance, discursive propositions (assemblies, debate), and critical pedagogy⁶, and they will be considered as a space for reflection and experimentation. They generate instances of collectivity and a coming together that should promote a multiplicity of viewpoints and connections rather than aiming for efficiency and set answers. They often take the form of long-term projects—breaking with capitalistic logic—that develop within a post-representative dynamic and involve what Nora Sterneld and Luisa Ziaja have described as “processes of collaborative knowledge production with an unexpected outcome.”⁷ This relationship between performance and anti-academic teaching dates back at least to the 1960s.⁸ Not unparadoxically, this departure from representation sometimes relates to the vocabulary of dramaturgy and introduces a dimension of stage sets or scenes in order to better permeate social space and to better test other choreographies than those of neoliberal productivity. Some of the practices I address later on may resonate with the “new performance turn,” a term which emerged in the past decade and refers to, among other things, an institutional interest in performance’s critical potential and in the notion of performance itself.⁹ Considering all these characteristics, these practices seem to me to be equally essential in the development of new spaces—places to seek refuge—that will be discussed in this text.

Ex-Souza’s lecture-performance took place as part of the curatorial project “Couper les fluides - alternatives pragmatopiques” (Cutting fluids - pragmatopic alternatives, (February 12–July 8, 2023), curated by Aude Cartier, director of Maison des Arts de Malakoff, and the art center’s team (Margot Belin, Julie Esmaeelipour, Juliette Giovannoni, Malo Legrand, Muntasir Koodruth, Noëmie Mallet, and Clara Zaragoza). The structure of the project involved the reduction of the use of resources (water, gas, and electricity) to an average of three hours a day. The team was supported throughout the process by Les Augures, a collective whose mission is to gather information and define tools that would be part of a transition to greater eco-responsibility. Even if the project included a small number of works in the exhibition space, such as the embroidery table from the collective « . » (Paul-Émile Bertonèche, Andréas .F, Romane Madede-Galan, Luna Villanueva) or Endre Tót’s photo On est heureux quand on manifeste (We are happy when we demonstrate, 1979), it was also structured around “agoras”—spaces for talking, debating, and listening to each other. The agoras took place on the first floor of the art center, in the Circo minimo (2023), a mobile amphitheater designed by architect Olivier Vadrot to echo a Roman forum. There, the collective Afrikadaa and BLA! National Association of Contemporary Art Mediation Professionals spoke about their work. This is how the project, as a working space, combined research and action. To borrow a phrase from philosopher Emma Bigé on the parallel she draws between the demonstrating body and dance, artistic and curatorial practices are not just things that can be seen, but also things that we do.

And in this doing, those manifesting create habits, muscle tendencies, train their potential. Repeating an action or embellishing a gesture does not only shape physical capacities, but inevitably, a social and psychological inclination toward thinking and reaction.¹⁰

The project involved a deep change in the venue’s practices. For instance, throughout its duration, a worktable was placed on the ground floor of the art center. Team members would meet there and greet the public themselves, contributing to visitor mediation tasks. While the reduced computer and internet access was a real constraint for certain disciplines, it also favored connection time assigned according to people’s needs, face-to-face exchanges with a larger number of people rather than emails, and improved quality of sleep. The latter is an essential point since, through this initiative, the Maison des Arts de Malakoff was more attentive to team members’ well-being. By working with human and architectural resources, the institution’s project seemed to echo the thinking of Marina Vishmidt, who favored a broadening of art institutional critique during the 1960s and ’70s toward “infrastructural critique,” focused on the material conditions that “located the institution in an expanded field of structural violence.”¹¹ 

In 2024, as an extension of “Couper les fluides - alternatives pragmatopiques”, the Maison des Arts de Malakoff imagined a project across its two locations over three consecutive years between 2024 and 2026, “Un centre d’art nourricier” (a nourishing art center). If we consider the art center’s potential capacity to provide intellectual as well as physical nourishment, it can become both an environmentally responsible place and an environmental research school. Rather than visiting an exhibition, it is more a question of experiencing or “living” the exhibition. By attending to matters of transmission and unlearning, it becomes the theater of a specific exercise, that of trying to rethink (or rehearse) different ways of sharing. The nourishing art center is based on permanent modules that would be there throughout the three years of the project (a kitchen, a vegetable garden, a video room, a nursery, a library, a residency, etc.), as well as invitations extended in six months cycles. The first cycle, “Éco-struggles” (March 23–July 20, 2024), reflects on the struggle of persons who are marginalized or made invisible, particularly highlighting the micro forms of resistance they lead on a daily basis through food practices, solidarity economy, feminist demonstrations, the struggles of people of color, and so on.

The agora program at the Maison des Arts de Malakoff continues in 2024; some of the agoras were entrusted to the publisher Shed and develop around critical reflection on colonial history and its consequences on the living. Such a discursive presence seems to arise from the will to “[p]ut on hold the institution’s programs […] in order to create assemblies, build community, press pause on decisions.” This is a proposition resulting from L’Assemblée des valeurs¹²  (2021), imagined by Anna Colin and Cédric Fauq at Villa Arson, in Nice. As an answer to a dysfunctional contemporary art system—which I only mention in passing here—this “re-enacted assembly” is also a reminder of how pertinent role-playing is as a tool for raising awareness in a community. On this subject, a parallel could be traced with Augusto Boal’s forum theater method.¹³ This type of initiative seems to go hand in hand with research, as theorist Irit Rogoff understands it: “not as something that happens in the Academy as such, but as an absolute existential necessity for the pursuit of life […], research is often a matter of survival.” It is also a matter of “figuring out where you are and what you can or can’t do and where you stand in the scheme of things,” or even yet “a process that help us get through something together.”¹⁴

In his analysis of the word “subversion”—carried out during his carte blanche at the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA in 2021—artist and thinker Dénètem Touam Bona points out that the etymology of the word “version” refers to the act of turning. He goes on to say that it implies a twist, a distortion, a contortion. It seems as if the same movement is at work at the Maison des Arts de Malakoff. In fact, this project tries to create engagement through discussing, collecting, pooling together—but also by its will to give rise to radical and concrete measures—employing sidestepping, circumvention strategies and therefore, to a certain extent, subversion. The contortions it employs are realized by what happens in the interstices and by slowing down, they are ways of thinking beyond the separation between people. We might ask ourselves, however, if the perfection of such a proposition might not lie in its capacity to question conflict, to be that space where “critical publicity can be formulated, and counter-audiences can emerge.”¹⁵

The project that the Maison des Arts in Malakoff will run over several years proposes a different relation to time, one that might be at odds with the idea of performance. Academic Florian Gaité brings up how in Perform or Else (2001) performance theorist Jon McKenzie tracks “the emergence of the word ‘performance’ after World War II, by identifying the three key reading paradigms of the period. At the same time a mode of artistic experimentation, a model of neoliberal organization, and an industrial project, performance is reduced to being effective, being defined as ‘accomplishment.’ Nevertheless, not all artistic performances follow the road to success that is the essence of late capitalism.”¹⁶ It is this neoliberal notion of productivity that is called forth by artist Flora Bouteille in her evolving game systems, in which participants are invited to make moral choices as was evident in the series “Cannibales” (2023–24), developed with her performance company Angels’ Front and presented at the Pernod Ricard Foundation and then as part of the “Paris Performance” program at La Villette in Paris.

Angels’ Front’s work revolves around the capitalist system of power and ways to fight against it, not by literally denouncing it but by integrating and absorbing it to see how it might be possible, by digesting it, to implement strategies of resistance. The artist is inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto” (1928), where de Andrade—in the completely different context of Brazilian Modernism—advocates for the metaphorical act of devouring the colonizing European culture and, thus assimilated, its regurgitation in a new form.¹⁷ It is “this method’s infrastructure” that Angels’ Front question here. Divided in four participatory performances in which different technological tools (cameras, smartphones, microphones) are operated live around the audience, the series is also accompanied by one (or more) penetrable sculptural cubes conceived by artist Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos, with the intention of creating a space inside the institution that would translate the theory of the white cube into an object.

The performances take place after a phase where these tools and objects are practiced and articulated together during discussions where company members describe what they feel, see, and so on. Each performance is made of eight phases, the first of which generally starts by a moment of “conditioning,” where the audience is invited to experience a liminal state, to concentrate on their physical sensations and reflect. Then, they are invited, if they wish, to interact according to different modalities and in response to various triggers: some “triggers have very strong effects […] when we share a common geography, and a collective psychological landscape”¹⁸ Bouteille explains. Certain modules were monitored by a psychologist who, through information shared by the company, could establish parallels with her discipline. She ensures that certain boundaries are not crossed in the artistic setup. In addition, there is a certain lack of symmetry between spectators, who do not know in advance how the play will unfold, and the performers, who get different cues from the control room via their earpieces. That power relationship, however, is sometimes destabilized by spectators’ interventions that challenge the semi-prewritten script. 

Rather than the idea of rehearsal, Bouteille favors the notion of training, which is found in the company’s work at two different levels: at a methodological level (training for any eventualities that might come up as a result of the audience’s choices, much like the way algorithms work, which is a metaphor the artist often uses) and at a level where certain social choreographies, specially neoliberal productivity, become visible (by being reproduced). In this context, it is worth bringing up the theorist in comparative literature Andrew Hewitt, who, by connecting dance and everyday movement aesthetics, analyzes the term “social choreography” as a metaphor to reflect on modern social organization: “If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must […]  necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of the body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed.”¹⁹ This way, he shows that ideology must be understood as something embodied, practiced, therefore rehearsed.

The notion of pre-enactment is crucial as a method for making visible, questioning, but also envisaging other social choreographies. According to philosopher Oliver Marchart, pre-enactment should not be understood as the rehearsing of a choreography already learnt. Instead, he compares this kind of exercise to classical ballet barre movements (but without implying an authoritarian dimension). More specifically, he sees pre-enactment as “artistic anticipation of a future political event.”²⁰ Even if pre-enactment has nothing to do with a real socio-political event, it could be envisaged as a place to rehearse and prepare for potential conflicts to come. Pre-enactment would therefore be equivalent to a conscious or unconscious setup of actions and tools that could be activated when an unknown situation arises that is perceived to be antagonistic. This recalls the approach of the collective Bureau des depositions (Depositions Office), who have performed justice since 2017 through a shared creative format that reproduces or anticipates situations having to do with legal matters. The Bureau’s members are Mamadou Djouldé Baldé, Ben Bangoura, Laye Diakité, Aliou Diallo, Pathé Diallo, Mamy Kaba, Ousmane Kouyaté, Sarah Mekdjian, Marie Moreau, and Saâ Raphaël Moundekeno. It results from years of work carried out by artist Marie Moreau and teacher and researcher in social geography Sarah Mekdjian at Grenoble University, where they founded Patio solidaire, a living, self-determined space for cultural and political activities. That is where Bureau des dépositions’ members began to reflect and work on processual performances at the crossroads of copyright and legal right, particularly by writing letters to officials in charge of immigration policies, who represent an absent justice system.

The performance Bureau des dépositions. Exercice de justice speculative (an exercise in speculative justice), developed during a residency at Magasin-CNAC in Grenoble (2019), consisted of reading letters where the conditions of their exile are voiced. As Moreau puts it, action is seen, in this context, as “working in search of social and political transformation.”²¹ During the performance, the co-authors sit in a semi-circle, with the audience occupying another quarter of the circle. They then get up one by one to read their letters at the microphone, which faces the remaining, empty quarter of the circle. The idea is that the letters change with each reading as the co-authors’ status changes. This perpetual re-presentation invites the idea of exercise and therefore repetition. In this approach, the idea of speculation is borrowed from philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise who describe how what is important ”implies attachment to something in a disappearing world, dwelling on possible becomings.”²² As Moreau and Sarah Mekdjian point out, “the futures we refer to are in the present, they are not ‘to come’ but already here, at least partially, and it is about making them matter, insisting.”²³

In addition, both co-authors compare the Bureau des dépositions’ approach to artist Franck Leibovici’s “display” works. The documents he produces are not objects to be exhibited but active agents looking for answers. In an interview with Cristelle Terroni, he explained these works:

That is what I call making something visible: it is not so much to point to objects and files and say, “look,” but rather to create situations that would allow readers or visitors to apprehend a way of seeing or understanding which was not natural to them before. It is about making this bulk of documents or this array of artifacts work like triggers that will spark an exercise—in the sense of gymnastics—supported by the idea that seeing is above all a matter of training.²⁴

The Bureau des dépositions’ founding principle is described in a contract stipulating that the presence of all co-authors is a necessary condition for performances in front of an audience. The contract holds the artwork’s buyers and displayers accountable by law to respecting its intellectual property, and is itself part of the artwork. The contract allows the work to be presented and be valued through the transfer of copyright.²⁵ That way, Moreau explains, connections are made between art institutions, administrative and judicial systems, and the aesthetic object in a context of structural state violence. In their second performance Minen kolotiri. Sculpter le droit pour le droit (Minen kolotiri: sculpting law with law), the negotiation, bypassing and diversion process was manifest. Minen kolotiri means “that which bring us together” in Pulaar, a language spoken in Senegal. The work poses the following questions: “What does working with others mean, when these others experience different administrative situations that generate competition? What could be the meaning of ‘creating, researching with,’ when some of the people involved are threatened of expulsion from the national territory?”²⁶ This performance was developed over two residencies, one in 2020 with the music improvisation Ensemble UN that had acquired, through contract, a performance in Bordeaux, at the OARA art Office in Nouvelle-Aquitaine; the other residency took place in October 2021 at the theater Les Subsistances in Lyon. On this occasion, the co-authors sat in a semi-circle extended by another semi-circle of spectators, and exhibited the co-authorship contract that ties them for the creation and distribution of their work. With each new performance, the contract is revised and negotiated, according to the authors’ experiences, like deportation orders issued by the authorities. By focusing on co-presence as a primary condition, the Bureau des dépositions acts as a tool to test the institution from within and to its limits. Minen kolotiri: Sculpting Law with Law was scheduled to be presented in Bordeaux in 2022, but two members of the Bureau had received removal notices and were forced to leave France, leading this time to the dissolution of the project and the bitter realization of a lack of engagement from government institutions.

The question of the institution and its prefigurative dimension recalls the project École des Actes, a nonprofit initiated in 2016 by the Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers and opened in the neighborhood Fort d’Aubervilliers in early 2017. Since 2022–23, it has had its own administration and receives funding from the Cultural Affairs department of the Île-de-France region and from DRIEETS²⁷, among others. By defining itself as a socio-cultural, experimental micro-institution and a hospitality and learning space, the school becomes by its own decision an institutional space striving to represent a different way to relate with the world. This may be reminiscent of the definition of the institution proposed by HKW’s New Alphabet School during their “Instituting” edition in 2021: a “fugitive.”²⁸ This edition questioned self-organization and collective creation processes and how they could give way to other institutional forms. Before this “school” of actions was created, a survey was carried out in the neighborhood to identify the local population’s needs. They expressed a wish to learn to speak, read, and write French. The École des Actes thus began by providing free French lessons. In parallel, there were workshops on IT, introduction to French law, preventative health, drama, and sewing. The École also organizes assemblies to discuss chosen subjects. These assemblies are based on a specific working method: what is said is systematically translated into all of the participants’ languages, so that each one of them can follow the discussion and participate. The École des Actes also stands for the idea of patient thinking and gaining direct knowledge of our world’s situations through participants’ experiences. The fact that assemblies take place regularly allows for continuous collective work and the necessary time, on occasion several months, for a new proposal to emerge. The project focuses on being a place that is built with its users.

It is also a place for artistic collaboration between users and members of the École des Actes. Artist Gaëlle Choisne started working with the École in 2016 on a film project also called L’École des Actes. It started as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires (new patrons) action and was produced by the non-profit Societies. The idea was to speak about the École des Actes, about the political situation of some migrants in France, about solidarity and reparation, but also about cinema and documentary films in particular. During work sessions, volunteers chose the character they wanted to play. For Choisne it was a matter of “asking each person what event from their lives they wanted to replay, how to live it differently, as in regression hypnosis, which begins with a traumatic event in order to change the present, and which considers reality and fiction as the same thing.”²⁹ The project did not go that far. The idea was, above all, to use speech as a means for liberation. As we can see, some participants chose to conceal their identity in order to speak about their experiences, instead of playing a character. With Choisne, they created different scenarios. She also proposed that they design the sets and the costumes in La Villette’s workshops³⁰. The film alternates between scenes shot at the École des Actes and at La Commune—where the assemblies took place—as well as in La Villette. The final scene was shot in La Villette’s bamboo garden in Super 8; in it, a wedding banquet is underway and protagonists are wearing jewelry created by artist Ismail Afghan. The film is punctuated by images from the participants’ everyday life before they arrived in France as well as by a rap in Soninké (spoken in West Africa) created during a writing workshop led by Choisne around the idea of travel. This piece remains a work in progress even though it has already been shown on several occasions: at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, as part of the project “Monument aux Vivant·e·s” (May 2022–June 2023) as well as the art center Ferme du Buisson as part of the exhibition “Quotidien communs” (October 8, 2023–January 28, 2024). 

The above mentioned notion of pre-enactment is at least twofold since it has to do both with gathering ideas and putting them into action. Marchart traces a parallel with forms of political prefiguration present in civil rights movements during the 1960s as well as in contemporary activism. In connection with nineteenth-century anarchist theory, these forms of political prefiguration aim at embodying (and not only hoping for) the construction of another society: “the two components of the term prefiguration speak of a temporality of futurity (‘pre-’) and of a skill pertaining to the imaginal (‘figuration’), thus intersecting […] with today’s cultural and artistic practices.”³¹ In addition, the notion of prefiguration is borrowed from political theory in order to reflect on activists’ mode of action, and could therefore be used as a departure point for the development of an art and curatorial theory that would claim the transformational power of art in society, as is the case in the projects discussed in this text.

The prefigurative logic described here recalls the idea of ”embodied infrastructure” suggested by professor of architecture and urbanism Jilly Traganou³², which explores infrastructure as “a prefiguration and a reconfiguration of the world.” Traganou brings forth this notion to explore the working of activism, from the human chain formed by women during the pacifist occupation against the installation of nuclear missiles in Greenham Common Royal Air Force base in England between 1981 and 2000 to Judith Butler’s speech at Occupy Wall Street in New York (2011): since the philosopher had no microphone, her words were repeated by the public for those who couldn’t hear.³³Much like the common body formed during Ex-Souza’s performance, or other examples such as the exhibition “Un·Tuning Together” curated by Émilie Renard and Maud Jacquin at Bétonsalon in Paris (2023), certain art practices can activate, in their own particular way, a collective force destined to listening, being attentive, and/or constituting a form of solidarity and support. It is fair to ask to what extent this kind of action can work over time. Still, even if they are “inherently imperfect, prone to leaks, and in a permanent state of fragility,” embodied infrastructures nonetheless provide valuable models since “leaks are soon sensed by the collective body, always ready to mend and restore.”³⁴

Translated from French by Ana Verona, copy-edited by Orit Gat