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A performative perspective on citizenship allows us to overcome conventional views of citizenship and points a spotlight on the question of how people articulate claims as rights (Isin, Performative citizenship. In Shachar A, Bauböck R, Bloemraad I, Vink M (ed) Oxford handbook of citizenship, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 500–523, 2017). In this chapter, I will focus on this question by using the example of the Gängeviertel—the abandoned quarter in the middle of Hamburg that was occupied by an activist initiative in 2009. Since then, the Gängeviertel activists continue to publicly articulate claims concerning the self-management of the place and the right to the city. They apply these practices in situ, and therewith continuously produce a space of performing citizenship. I will illustrate some of these practices and point out how they contribute to an effective articulation of claims with the help of a spatial entanglement of the public to the place. With reference to Lefebvre’s concept of the production of social space, I will show thereby that place-specific conditions play a particular and important role.

With an annual turnover of 7734 million Euros in 2016, Hapag-Lloyd is one of the world’s biggest container carriers. Its business activity, first and foremost, is logistics. This large-scale transportation company is based in Hamburg. In 2012, the city of Hamburg itself held nearly 37 percent of the company in shares. This, in fact, makes Hamburg citizens one of the company’s major owners. Relating the companies name back to Edward Lloyd, who, in 1688, opened a coffeehouse in London, we propose to think of the entanglement of a practice of modern citizenship with choreographic and logistic modes of abducting bodies and resources. In fact, in elucidating what we term 'Lloyd's assemblage', we might shed some light on the concurrent emergence of places and practices such as the coffeehouse, the liberal public sphere, but also logistical modes of violently abducting and transporting people in the transatlantic slave-trade, which in turn is linked to new forms of financial speculation. To get a hold on these entanglements, we here think about the notion of delegated performance and its specific meaning within a modern practice of citizenship.

When in 2015 the purported ‘summer of migration’ occurred, the question of how to deal with the pressure of assimilation within the discourse of citizenship became ubiquitous. Citizenship is not only a legal and bureaucratic tool of exclusion, it is comprised of cultural and social interaction. Furthermore, the unspoken and informal knowledge carried within the practice of citizenship leads to modalities of exclusion and participation. In this sphere, legal means are to a large extent ineffective. That gap within the daily practice of citizenship is plastic, providing for the racist, sexist and homophobic practices of ‘othering’, as well as production of a space for resistance. Within the triangle of habitus, status and origin, the social and cultural capital also produces the homogenous desire for normalcy. Although resistance does not depend solely on differently empowered realms, the question of agency in the practice of ‘othering’ occurs. Inside the labelling concept of Erwing Goffman and the theory of subjectivation of Michel Foucault, the practice of ‘othering’ betrays its ambivalent basis. Therefore the need of a tool, without high level of restraint, difficult approach or complicit methodology, may be answered in this essay, within exploring the practice of mimicry as a subversive tool of reflection.

This is a first report from a long-term research into paralogistics. It covers about seven years of inquiry and travel over the course of several projects that dealt with questions around Hamburg port, shipping, radical seafaring, cruise ships and seafarers’ rights, with piracy and the right to the sea – most of them conducted by the performance collective ( is an open collective working in performance art, cultural studies and activism, , date accessed 1 March 2018). At the beginning of this journey, I did not know that this research was about paralogistics. In fact, the whole concept of paralogistics, including the term itself, is a recent invention – or rather discovery – that allows me to put experiences, difficulties and insights of these last years and months into perspective.

The ‘English Garden Effect’—a phrase borrowed from the poetry of John Ashbery, first written by the novelist Walter Abish in his short story of that name—describes a process by which a landscape might be rearranged to conceal its historical determinants by those who might gain from such scenic concealing. In his story Abish writes, ‘Remnants of the old atrocity persist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts of scenery, a sort of “English Garden” effect to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope’ (Abish, Walter (1980) ‘The English Garden Effect’ in , p. 1). I am interested in what such an ‘English Garden Effect’ might mean for us as artists, outsiders, visitors, to my proposed of performance—looking for a way to work that eschews the opportunistic occupational mode of the site specific, and thinks itself into site in a more responsive and responsible fashion.

While the plague raged in 14th century Venice—eradicating countless patrician families, who were what kept the Maritime Republic alive with its unique system of office rotation and power distribution—the Venetians reinvented their endangered community and polity, with the help of a uniform white mask or a black hood and a three-pointed hat.

‘I did not choose this theatre course. I do not want to go on stage’. Leyla, a 13-year-old student with whom I was working in my artistic research project , said this when we were preparing a public presentation of our research about what it means to be a female citizen—in the sense of being an active member—of our postmigrant (The term ‘postmigrant’, originally deriving from American cultural and literature studies, was brought into the German discussion by Sṃhermin Langhoff, director of the in Berlin. The prefix ‘post’ does not name an end of migration, but marks cultural and social transformation, and negotiation processes that occur after migration has become characteristic for [German] society as a whole. [Foroutan et al., Deutschland postmigrantisch 1: Gesellschaft, Religion, Identität: Erste Ergebnisse. BIM, Berlin, 2014; Widmann: Was heißt postmigrantisch?, Berliner Zeitung. , Accessed 19 Dec 2016, 2014]) society. I was disappointed, irritated, disempowered. Actually, my project was inviting the 12 co-researching girls to take the stage, so becoming and as citizens in public. I noticed that I presupposed performing on stage would be a desirable moment of agency and would form an emancipatory approach to my research setup. However, Leyla’ s statement made me rethink the relation between visibility, performance, agency and citizenship.

Giving someone ‘a voice’ is a popular motto that promises (political) participation as a means and an end in equal measure. To be more than a catchphrase however, it requires active listening: as an act of response rather than a simple act of recording; it does not defer responsibility by placing it on the Other’s ability to speak, to find their voice within the frame given to them in the act of ‘giving’ or ‘lending’. The German term Aufnahme means recording, admission and inclusion. Aufnahme is the verb used to describe the current arrival of refugees and migrants. Aufnahme outlines the bureaucratic processes migrants have to pass through as imposed by the supposed ‘host’ society, that is Germany. The sites of their registration are called Aufnahmezentren, or ‘reception centers’. These euphemisms should, I argue, indeed be taken by the word. One way to do so might lie in the semantic layers of the word: let’s turn to the sound of Aufnahme, let’s listen to arrival, let’s think migration through the ear.

Children are everywhere, all identity groups have them, and all of us, no matter our identity or our politics, have been a child and experienced the acute powerlessness that is the child’s condition. Can the child—and efforts to infiltrate much of the world with the presence of children—provide a strategy for destabilizing the status quo? And if so, can this strategy attract the critical mass currently missing from the many fractured movements that wrestle with the question of fairness? Our understanding of what it means to be a child and what children are capable of contributing is rapidly evolving. I believe we do have the possibility of both subverting business as usual and finding a common cause to organize around, a stealthy little cause that, at first, seems naive and innocuous—sure, let the kids in—but that might radically revolutionize the world.

The changing nature of work has taken on features of political action. Vocational orientation is thus tasked with training young people to become working citizens, in which they are addressed as experts in a designable working world. In general, the conventional role of students undertaking internships has been to adapt to the given structures of the workplace. In this chapter and in her artistic research project , the author deals with the question of how vocational orientation can be enriched with a performative, artistic form of agency. In collaborating with the pupils, she has been researching a new form of vocational orientation using the device of Instruction Art within the framework of mandatory internships. The young working citizens designed scopes of action by contributing their own micro practices into the working day which, in their view, were missing in the work environment—actions such as sleeping, language translation or playing the recorder. With artistic performance they created alternative working realities that focus on human needs. In this way, they approached ideas of post-growth. In the context of free choice of profession (Article 12, Basic Law), the project aims to reconsider and negotiate citizenship as an inclusive phenomenon from the perspective of active, responsible subjects.