About the Essay

What possibilities does art not only offer to better understand our complicated present, but also to cope with it? Theatre and cultural studies scholar Azadeh Sharifi argues that co-presence, i.e. the joint presence of an audience with the artists during a performance, should not be understood as a passive spectatorship. Instead, participation in an artistic event should be used to question one’s own involvement in social phenomena and power structures and should assume co-responsibility for them.

Zur Autorin

Azadeh Sharifi is a visiting professor at the Institute of Theatre Studies at the FU Berlin. She was previously a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto and visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her research focuses on (post)colonial and (post)migrant theatre history, contemporary performance art as well as intersectional, decolonial and activist practices in theatre. She also works as a curator and author.

THE RESPOND-ABILITY OF CO-PRESENCE

«Speech was taken away from us for too long. That’s why this intimacy that I’m exposing is an artistic gesture that’s both personal and political.»
Rébecca Chaillon, Interview for the Festival TransAmériques

In an interview for the Festival TransAmériques, the Afro-French actress and director Rébecca Chaillon describes her artistic work as a practice shaped by postcolonial, decolonial and (Black) feminist thinkers:

«Inspired by Aimé Césaire and Audre Lorde, among others, I try to give rise to a poetic discourse, with echoes of Afrofantasy and Afrofuturism. It’s a rather long story we drop on the audience. But once our story’s been told, what can we dream of? How can we transform and transport ourselves into the future? The plastic images we build onstage are so many metaphors taken from the very pop culture that shaped us. But we want to overcome them. It’s a show that empowers Black women…»
Festival TransAmériques 2024

Rébecca Chaillon incorporates the experience of personal and politico-historical dehumanisation and marginalisation, also in the context of institutionalised art, into her work for the stage. Her artistic practice positions itself as resistant narratives that are not only dedicated to the deconstruction of colonial-racist images and attributions, but also create dreams and utopias, primarily for Black women. This very clear artistic positioning – as with many other racialised and marginalised artists, theatre groups, but also subjects and themes that are negotiated on the stages of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel – is at odds with the institution itself and its audience. The Zürcher Theater Spektakel has always seen itself as an international festival with a particular focus on artists and theatre groups from the Global South. And yet it is also an institution whose structures have been shaped by colonialism just as much as other (Western) European festivals. Even though Switzerland historically had no colonies, it still benefits from the forms and consequences of colonialism, as the Swiss social anthropologist Rohit Jain points out.

The current issue of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel is about how art can contribute to enduring the complexity of the situation in a world full of conflicts, in the knowledge of existing differences and inequalities. I would like to formulate the question differently: what «respond-ability» lies in the physical co-presence between artists, cultural workers and spectators to not only endure the complexity of artistic negotiations in their political and personal dimensions, but also to develop an attitude? Because, whatever the performers and audience members do has an impact on the perception of the other. Programming, performing and watching continue to be present. Only in this connectedness, or co-presence, can the interwoven stories of the festival, its artists and the audience be understood. And only in this connectedness can respond-ability be categorised: The artists respond with their art to social, political or historical events – and in this, the audience also takes on respond-ability.

In this essay, I want to argue that we resist the «non-performativity» that might emerge when witnessing the artistic practices of marginalised and colonised artists and their contexts in institutionalised settings. Non-performativity, as described by feminist scholar and author Sara Ahmed, means that statements and actions are constituted precisely through the non-realisation of the claimed action. «They ‘work’ precisely by not bringing about the effects that they name.» While, for example, an anti-racist and anti-colonial stance is repeatedly asserted in cultural institutions, colonial-racist language, images and metaphors are not only present on stage, but also backstage in various forms, and continue to be accepted.

«Non-performativity» is the moment in which colonialism is critically questioned in art and on stage, but still finds its continuation in institutionalised structures. It is claimed that artistic work has an effect on institutions and spectators, but the critical engagement only takes place on stage.

Taking on respond-ability would mean not only attending the artistic processes through a critical positioning of one’s own situated knowledges, but also actively using it as part of the co-creation in the co-presence. The concept of «situated knowledges» goes back to the philosopher Donna Haraway and categorises every form of knowledge as already historically and culturally specific. «Situated knowledges» refer to a philosophical view in which subjects cannot be separated from their environment, but are always connected to and embodied in it.

Many performances and productions involve racialised, marginalised and sometimes exoticised artists and communities who work against violence and for indigenous, decolonial and empowering narratives in their artistic practice.

Traumatic and violent experiences are pro-cessed in order to open up space for dreams and utopias. For example, when Zora Snake points out that his works are based on the «idea of resistance to silence» – also addressing the «silence of our ancestors, who remained silent, not out of fear of speaking, but out of fear of dying» – the performance is also a call to take respond-ability for a colonial past and its traces in the present, not only in the distant looted art of museums, but also in the way we relate to Black bodies and subjects in a still colonial-racist space.

The philosopher Donna Haraway suggests that we shouldn’t focus on a simple solution, but rather on «Staying with the Trouble»:
«Staying with the trouble does not require a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.» Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016

As Rébecca Chaillon, for example, suggests, artistic processes cannot be separated from one’s own experience and social position.

«Staying with the trouble», as an attitude for co-presence and beyond, can mean falling back on one’s own situated knowledges and facing up to the task and respond-ability in the process of artistic negotiation as a reality-constituting moment. Not just watching, but implementing one’s participation as a political and personal attitude. Not just watching, but also taking an active role and task in what is happening.

Therein lies the strength of art and artistic processes, not only to endure differences, but also to develop an attitude towards power and power relations and our entanglements in them.