Zooming In and Out: Tactical Media Performance in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

Transnational cultural production is often associated with processes of exchange, mobility and contact that redefine the way we think about location, subjectivity and social praxis. In what follows, I explore how performance, frequently theorized as an embodied, localized event, engages transnational spaces. Using theories of space, embodied agency and new media, I show how performances created to address conditions of marginalization and violence invigorate arguments about the central role of symbolic behaviour and spatial production in late capitalism. Which sites do artists choose and/or reclaim in order to address transnational issues? How do artists challenge previous notions of performance as an in situ event? In what way do transnational performances redefine the terms of interaction between bodies and state power at different geographical scales?