Teatro Valle Occupato, MACAO Milan, ASILO Naples – since 2011 Italy has been overwhelmed by a wave of protests in which creatives, art workers and political activists have occupied theatre houses and other public buildings to fight social and economic precarisation of cultural labour and to struggle for a deeper institutional and social-political change. Through their simple physical presence, numerous artistic, social and institutional interventions as well as a well-thought-out and virally spread discourse, the “Italian Theatre Spring” has developed a critique of the contemporary amalgam of neoliberalism and representative democracy from the viewpoint of theatre. Enhancing the experimental exploration of self-administration, self-government and other alternative financial, institutional and political models, it has committed itself to rehabilitating commons as a juridical-political category, inventing and elaborating new practices of participation, decision- and law-making and developing a new language of a living together that is both solidary and antagonistic. These undoubtedly recurrent issues localize the Italian Theatre Spring in the wake of contemporary social movements from Tahrir Square to Wall Street. After all, it cannot escape a certain degree of media-based spectacularity, self-engineering and autopoietic discourse-making. Nonetheless, it also seems to reveal a more latent dimension of contemporary experience, which consists in a worldwide common experience of sharing (sufferance, hope, anger, pain, creativity). Referring to Derrida’s “spectrological” approach to Marx’ legacy, my paper tries to read the Italian Theatre Spring as a double-bound contemporary phenomenon, which on the one hand presents itself as a most consciously controlled critical project in the classical “ontological” (Marxist) way, whereas testifying, on the other hand, to unconscious, deep transformations of experience, sense and subjectivity.

Strack, Laura (5-7 settembre 2016).Spectres of the Common: The 'Italian Theatre Spring' in the Context of Global Social Movements.

Spectres of the Common: The 'Italian Theatre Spring' in the Context of Global Social Movements

Strack, Laura

Abstract

Teatro Valle Occupato, MACAO Milan, ASILO Naples – since 2011 Italy has been overwhelmed by a wave of protests in which creatives, art workers and political activists have occupied theatre houses and other public buildings to fight social and economic precarisation of cultural labour and to struggle for a deeper institutional and social-political change. Through their simple physical presence, numerous artistic, social and institutional interventions as well as a well-thought-out and virally spread discourse, the “Italian Theatre Spring” has developed a critique of the contemporary amalgam of neoliberalism and representative democracy from the viewpoint of theatre. Enhancing the experimental exploration of self-administration, self-government and other alternative financial, institutional and political models, it has committed itself to rehabilitating commons as a juridical-political category, inventing and elaborating new practices of participation, decision- and law-making and developing a new language of a living together that is both solidary and antagonistic. These undoubtedly recurrent issues localize the Italian Theatre Spring in the wake of contemporary social movements from Tahrir Square to Wall Street. After all, it cannot escape a certain degree of media-based spectacularity, self-engineering and autopoietic discourse-making. Nonetheless, it also seems to reveal a more latent dimension of contemporary experience, which consists in a worldwide common experience of sharing (sufferance, hope, anger, pain, creativity). Referring to Derrida’s “spectrological” approach to Marx’ legacy, my paper tries to read the Italian Theatre Spring as a double-bound contemporary phenomenon, which on the one hand presents itself as a most consciously controlled critical project in the classical “ontological” (Marxist) way, whereas testifying, on the other hand, to unconscious, deep transformations of experience, sense and subjectivity.
Theatre, performance, critique, social movements, urban movements, Derrida, Marx, occupy, subjectivity, phenomenology
Strack, Laura (5-7 settembre 2016).Spectres of the Common: The 'Italian Theatre Spring' in the Context of Global Social Movements.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10447/478485
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