Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Realities and concepts of citizenship have changed radically throughout history and will keep changing. Today, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, new articulations of citizenship emerge in citizen’s and non-citizen’s practices and struggles, and they often do so in conjunction with artistic practices. In these struggles and practices, citizenship is embodied and changed; new forms of togetherness, new strategies to claim rights and new civic roles are tested and rehearsed. Within this book, the editors want to present insights from a wide range of perspectives into how citizenship is performed and thereby changed; a body of thought across disciplines, based on in-depth-research and artistic experimentation.

The choreographer Deborah Hay calls this one of her core mottoes, in dance and in life. What does this instruction imply if taken for a maxim of performing citizenship? What advice can dance, the art of movement, offer to a body that, normally, is a citizen’s body by virtue of reflexes, not reactions? A policeman shouts, ‘Hey, you!’ and you turn around. This movement suffices to define you as a subject, as one subjected to the state’s authority, according to Louis Althusser (See, Louis Althusser (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in , trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 121–176). To the extent that citizenship is a legal status, not an achievement or a competence, the only performative utterance demanded from citizens by the state’s representatives consists of such small responsive movements of acknowledgment. The more automated, the more reliably locked into behavioral routines these responses are—the fewer signs of a true performance they show—the better, from a statist point of view. Disobedience, in this scenario, is left with only two alternatives. You either ignore the policeman and walk on; or you turn against him and engage in a confrontation—perhaps put up a fight. Police have been trained to deal with either form of insurrection.

In January 2015, I moved to Hamburg to start a new job at the HafenCity University Hamburg. I was 39 years old. After finishing my PhD, I was working as a freelance cultural producer, lecturer and writer; I also organized a weekly German language class in a reception centre for refugees in Berlin. Since this time, I became curious to find out the way in which my own approach to arriving in a new city corresponds to the situation and strategies of others who have recently arrived; equally, to those who have lived in Hamburg for a longer time but without a feeling of having arrived. My move to Hamburg was in no way comparable to the situation of somebody who left their hometown due to civil war or extreme poverty. I have no experience of war, abuse, torture or traumatizing events. I write this article as a white, gender-conforming woman from a fairly upper-middle-class background, with an international education and a work contract—albeit part-time and temporary. I am privileged ‘as hell’! The research I do is therefore bound to reflect those privileges.

The languages of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ have become prominent within the disciplines of social sciences and humanities and their interdisciplinary fields, enabling researchers to bridge between arts and sciences as well as sciences and politics. The reasons for this prominence are quite complex and derive from various sources involving a variety of uses, so that it is best to avoid imposing a singular meaning to this development. It is not necessary to declare a ‘performative turn’ in social sciences and humanities that announces a paradigmatic shift, a dominant view. There is something about performativity that in fact would (and should) resist becoming a dominant paradigm, since it destabilizes the grounds on which truth claims are made on behalf of various objects and subjects that paradigms constitute. Moreover, from a perspective that emphasizes multiple meanings and functions of words and the ways in which they do things, to impose a singular meaning on multiple ways in which performativity has been taken up would be misleading. So, rather than an ostensible performative turn, I would rather speak about a performative perspective on doing social science and humanities research and its multiple origins and developments.

If one speaks in the activist context of ‘the movement’, the concept of movement with regard to the ‘moving body’ is always threefold: the political movement; the actual physical, choreographic movement; and the associated inner movement and its personal affections.

The experience of collective and coordinated movement in public space plays an important role on the political field. This applies not only to the kinaesthetic and somatic potency of body experience—which has a direct effect on the social movement itself—but also to the efficacy of its reach to potential viewers because, through its movement in public space, the body’s ‘indexical force’(‘After all, there is an indexical force of the body [...]: it is body, and bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future [...]’ [Butler J, Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press, London, p 9; eBook, 2015]) becomes visible in a very special way and demands recognition. Butler points out that assemblies, irrespective of specific demands, have meaning: ‘The gathering signifies in excess of what is said, and that mode of signification is a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity’. (Butler J, Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press, London, p 8; eBook, 2015).

Throughout the ages, people have retained a fascination with designing and actively shaping bodies. Cultures have always provided a huge variety of tools to implement such modification. In Ancient Egypt for example, people already used various techniques such as masquerading, tattooing and mummifying as ways to fashion bodies and to preserve them from inevitable decay (Cf. Pommerening (2007) ‘Mumien, Mumifizierungstechnik und Totenkult im Alten Ägypten: eine chronologische Übersicht’ In: Wieczorek, Alfried (Hrsg). , pp. 71–88). But although bodies have always been possible to modify, the question of designs them—or which social group has the to manipulate and rule over them—has always been answered differently, depending on the society of any given time or place.

Political communities, such as cities, emerge in part through their approach to their own history. The question of citizenship is therefore always connected to a culture of remembrance. This question is particularly pertinent in the case of Hamburg, a city which, ‘as a gateway to the world for the German Empire played a key role in the colonization of Africa’ (Möhle et. al. 2006, p. 7). Which perspectives on this colonial legacy are represented in the public discourse is always a matter of political contestation.

In 2011, a year-long programme of cultural events and exhibitions celebrated Vancouver’s 125th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the Audain Gallery, the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC), and myself, as the gallery’s visiting artist, entered into a collaboration that resulted in the research and exhibition project , with its articulations of situated indigenous and immigrant perspectives as they are contingent to the specific local histories and globalized neoliberal conditions. The purpose of this essay is to provide critical contextualization to the project and its making public of the claims put forward by women from the DEWC. Claims-making is understood here as a political act that constitutes subjects of rights. The politics of collectively formulating demands and making a public claim to them is at the heart of this project, as it tests what it means to perform citizenship under Vancouver’s specific conditions as they are defined by coloniality and neoliberalism. My triple commitment to feminist political thought, involved curatorial practice, and critical urban research provides the basis for the following feminist materialist and locationally specific close description and analysis of the project.

Today, one way to understand the relationship between politics and culture, particularly in Latin America, is by observing how ‘spaces of citizenship’ are maintained. This concept emerges from empirical analyses I developed, focusing on Mexico. This opens a further area of research: How is one to reconstruct the formative process of social relations? How might ‘spaces of citizenship’ be reformulated so that new social subjects might emerge? These questions may appear obvious, but they pose a radically different way to conceive of societies globally—not only through the lens of Western traditions of knowledge in industrialized countries, but also from the perspective of the other ‘half’ of the world. The efforts of Latin-American scholars have not yet gone far enough in rethinking the social in a different fashion, or at least in a complementary approach taken from established Anglo- and Eurocentric positions.

Based on the hypothesis that citizenship is a performative act (Isin 2017:501), I would like to have a closer look at the spatial conditions for acts of citizenship. How and which kinds of urban situations can facilitate or prevent accessibility to the city? Are there possible spaces where citizenship might be provided or invented? How can citizenship as a practice be learned?

In order to reflect on some of these questions, I will focus on a certain moment of the “metroZones school for urban action”. At the metroZones school for urban action (2015-2016) a wide range of urban actors, activists and other urban citizens met in Berlin und Hamburg in order to discuss and put into practice a number of conceptual ideas and methodological tools from critical urban studies for the purpose of urban explorations and interventions.

How are urban spaces and configurations produced? Which actors and processes affect everyday life? How do individual as well collective perceptions and actions produce the city? What could be the role of the “metroZones school for urban action” in providing space and tools for debates and interventions to politicize the urban? Are there certain strategies and tactics we can learn in a school for urban action in order to be a part of the city: a first step towards [urban] citizenship?