E-Booklet

Anibal Quijano defined coloniality of power as the structures of power, control, and hegemony in all dimensions of social life, including sexuality, authority, subjectivity, and labour.

In Per°Form 2024, we invite global south strategies on Quijano's proposal for a socialisation of power or distribution of power which privileges local communities’ collective forms of authority, a shared power that rejects hierarchy, control, and subjectivation, as well as a form of active democratisation from bottom up.

In this year’s curation, we see this most radically in Yonofui, a transfeminist, grassroots, and alternative justice collective. The members of Yonofui have dedicated their lives to working with LGBTQNBA individuals and cis women, some of whom have been to prison. Many have re-found their lives through the work in Yonofui, creating mutual aid networks in everyday life management, mental health, and legal issues. And it all began with poetry and writing. I had the privilege to participate in their gathering in Buenos Aires re-performing the Parliament of Thieves, a 1966 Swedish gathering for humanising prisons. In the late summer of 1966, ex-prisoners and inmates spoke directly and powerful about their lives in prison, in collaboration with reformers and advocates. In the Yonofui re-performance, people-power groups gathered to collectively declare their positions in a public space which was architecturally the form of a forum. This was a step towards more and deeper collaborations between different communities in establishing alternative justice in Argentina. Per°Form as a platform, juxtaposes this with the civic and art parliament dreamt of by sister and brother dancemakers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi from Tunis. Their choreography “the minor gesture” had delicately imagined new societies based on cooperation, solidarity, and collective thinking processes.

In 2016, I came across an international zine writing about rave ethics[i]. I became fascinated with this notion of ethics in experimental communities which have a precarity with pleasure, yet could be mobilised as they had a secret language. With ethics, they were able to decolonise themselves from sexuality, authority, and subjectivity, if only for a suspended moment. Where everyone has a role to play to keep the space free and respectful, for the final performer is the different audience member. With these ethics, the community enjoyed a collective sharing of a safer space of care in those few hours, to celebrate as well as to criticise commercialism (consumerism, out of touch male djs, promoters, club owners).

In 2020, during the pandemic, ironically the rave scene in Singapore exploded. Endless Return, the first Singapore fellow in Per°Form Open Academy, has their own ethical call each time[ii]. Their raves are BYOB (bring your own booze), their dj line-up often include trans people[iii], they are completely independent and do not work with promoters, they are migratory, outside the reach of club owners. They find freer spaces which we have provided with this fellowship. With this fellowship, Endless Return[iv] has tasked themselves to create a world where the music becomes a representation of the community. To this end, they have provided audience microphones for participatory sound production which will be looped into the sonic environment during the 4.5 hours event.

The selection of Per°Form Fellows 2024 is rooted in the research of power-sensitive contexts in the global south. How can we rewrite power so that we liberate ourselves from power?

The diverse strategies employed by the Fellows to address the power narratives which control and imprison them are truly impressive. They range from the wonderment of new historicism, which couples the imaginative and futuristic visions of parafiction and the ancient Egyptian waterways (Marianne Fahmy), to the spoken word in local language and ethnic rap which subverts the culture of misogyny (Ujjwala Maharjan). Our age old friend, the archive, resurfaces this year, as a strategy to balance powers for sex workers (Radhika Hettiarachchi). The archive is also harnessed for kin-making of the curatorial in queer and feminist world-making (Aziz Sohail). Finally the archive is central in the oeuvre of documentary filmmaking of Saodat Ismailova. During the culminating Per°Form Open Academy Studio, Saodat will unpack her archives along numerous intersectional red lines in Uzbekistan and Central Asia (ecology, living with the non-human, colonisation, the female universe, tradition/landscape).

Nature, ecologies, climate change, and us themes continue to proliferate this year in different directions. Our worlds have been colonised by the extractivism of the Anthropocene era, and many artists have taken on personal responsibilities to inform, imagine, and meditate on different futurities. Apart from water mismanagement that Saodat will illuminate in the ex-Soviet empire, causing the near disappearance of the Aral Sea, and Marianne’s imaginative approach to environmental crisis, Hira Nabi combines film, visual arts, and lecture performance to reflect on how to love a tree in the hillstations of Pakistan.

Per°Form 2024 sees an intense interweaving of art and socialisation of power. Art is not powerless but instead performs a guardian role in stewarding liveable societies.

From contemporary arts education for young people re-addressing the “conspiracy of silence” and public taboos in Nepal (Sharareh Bajracharya) to the craziest theatricality which galvanises action (Etcetera), to dance on the streets as a dynamising movement in Lagos which ignites personal responsibility (Sunday Obiajulu Ozegbe or Valu), to reclamation of traditional rituals and sites of violence by discriminated queer communities who have appropriated these practices and spaces in Colombo as affirmation trajectories (Chaturi Nissansala). The field of design does not lag behind in Bogota cultural changemaker Diamantina Arcoiris’ work where she reconceives fashion as hope for the homeless, the marginal, and the disenfranchised. These are all strategies of decolonising the power of authorities and economies which they live under.

Ong Keng Sen, 13 April 2024