Nature Theatre
performance, street intervention, art research, assemblage theorysupported by: Cultural Geogrpahy Workgroup at the Kiel University
2016-2017
About
A few square meters of a public place are being fenced off with the red and white barricade tape to mark the theater borders. The stage space between two trees (or in some cases street lights) is left open, facing the street. Inside the fenced off space, a couple of rows of chairs are placed, facing the stage: a parquet is set. Two posters outside give an overview of a cast: grass, trees, bugs, air and many more. The show is about to start.
Nature Theater interventions was one of several street interventions I did as part of my Master’s thesis research, looking at what we understand as “nature”, how the social imaginaries of what is “nature” are produced and how we might destabilize them. This work is rooted in geographic and political ecology scholarship that grapples with how political change, in the words of Alex Loftus, is “bound up in reworking the socio-natural relations through which everyday environments are produced and experienced.”
Theoretically, I’ve combined Erik Swyngedouw’s notion of socionature and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s assemblage theory with its recent interpretations by Manuel DeLanda. I looked at the assemblage's becoming (rather than Foucauldian regime and agency), relationships between its material and expressive components that constitute the incoherent whole and how imaginaries are reterritorialized in the process.
The way we understand or frame nature has political implications. Nature Theatre was a way to test how these frames come together and fall apart, and see what political possibilities emerge along the way.
I’ve also written a blogpost discussing the concept of the Nature Theater, my conceptual framework, literature I engaged with and what I learned.