Things that must be done: artistic experimentation and political imagination
Welcome to an open lecture with one of the Artistic Faculty’s 2024 honorary doctors, Eleonora Fabião. Creating highly dialogic and democratic projects through her artistic practice, Eleonora Fabião has been a great and inspiring asset in our environment. By using street actions as a source of knowledge and thinking, she expands not only the meaning of the public sphere, but also how performative art can operate in our conflictive world.
During this encounter, Eleonora Fabião will share selected actions from her extensive trajectory as a performance artist. This sharing will be intertwined with notes on topics in her practice such as: programs to deprogram, counter-colonial political imagination and artistic experimentation, production of strangeness, thing theory, magic and technique.
Some guiding questions are: what do we consider necessary to add to our world today? What actions, images, sensibilities? What relational modes? What forces and affects do we want to proliferate with our artistic practices and which ones do we want to move away? What arts do we want to create and what worlds do we want to create with our arts?
Eleonora Fabião is a performance artist and theorist. She has been performing, participating in exhibitions, lecturing, teaching and publishing internationally. Her performances have been enacted in several contexts – dance and theater festivals, biennials, exhibitions, universities, schools, sociocultural projects – and, mainly, in the streets. Things That Must Be Done Series (Performa Biennial, New York 2015) is the title of a work and, also, a way of referring to her artistic practice. Fabião (PhD in Performance Studies, New York University) is Full Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development in Brazil (CNPq).
Moderator
Sarah Melin, curator at Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival