Performance and urban space: An ambivalent affair

Abstract

Artistic performance is increasingly seen as a crucial creative means of empowerment in the midst of urban transformation. However, the varied abilities of performance to challenge, or not, existing power structures are often lost in analyses that either celebrate the utopian potential of performance for challenging hegemonic oppression, or critique performance for being inevitably complicit with hegemonic sociopolitical ideologies due to its material conditions. By introducing a neo‐Marxist critical framework that focuses on the interplay between socio‐material conditions and performance, this paper promotes a nuanced analytic strategy for examining the relation between performance and urban space.

Digital and urban spaces: Oxymoron or binomial? Urban transformations in the digital era

“…In the urban transformations model the mode of resistance is quite fixed; resistance depends on the particular conditions characterizing the state of coexistence between digital and USs. As Dikeç (2012) and Olsen (2018) illustrate, this concept is similar to comparing a jigsaw puzzle with a mosaic. The pieces of a jigsaw puzzle really have only one rational and predetermined way of assembly, and but the tesserae of a mosaic have a variety of spatial possibilities.…”

The arts of attention and Oslo Architecture Triennale

“…The paper uses my curation of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 to discuss the challenges and potentials for developing an urban attention ecology in practice. In doing this, the paper brings together a suite of my previous work (Sachs Olsen, 2023, 2022a, 2022b, 2021Sachs Olsen & Juhlin, 2021). While I have previously discussed the idea of an urban attention ecology (see Sachs Olsen, 2022a), this paper is the first to explore in depth what the urban attention ecology is and the specific role of the arts in developing and promoting it through critical spatial practice.…”