El tiempo es lo único que tenemos. Actualidad de las artes performativas

Today, the body is at the center of the debate, both as a space of control and social reproduction and as a space of resistance and transformation. The performative arts orbit around the body and its capacity to create reality, which is why they have become a fundamental field of aesthetic and political inquiry since drama ceased to be the core of the stage to give way to a set of sensitive practices whose focus is on space, time, movement, perception and the environment. The irruption of this set of stage experiences in recent decades not only blurred the boundaries between the so-called “living arts” (dance, theater, performance), but also put into crisis such structuring distinctions of modern experience as those that opposed doing and thinking, researching and creating, art and everyday life or actor and spectator. The essays gathered in this book do not pretend to establish a historical canon or to assemble a critical-interpretative apparatus: their point of departure is contemporary performative practice and they are presented as a whole as a continuum between action and reflection. They were written by artists from a wide geographical arc (from Brazil to Norway, from the United Kingdom to Mexico, from Argentina to Serbia or Spain), who by assuming the situated character of their interventions deal with such urgent issues as precariousness, dissident corporealities, post-humanism, speculative imagination or the Anthropocene. These texts corroborate the fact that artists today, more than making works, invent sensitive practices that function as protocols of experimentation aimed at destabilizing the senses and disarming conventions, as an invitation to return to the body, to think from the body and with the body about relations with the world and the encounter with others.