Per/Form – How to Do Things with[out] Words

Performativity explores the in-between space when bodies or objects are left to perform. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatization (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics—these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making. Per/Form investigates the process of this enhancement—how to work through form, and how to let form speak for itself.
The meaning of performance and performativity today are examined here through different modes of “display”: a book, an exhibition, and its three “Intensity Days” of performative situations. This book compliments these events and the sixteen installations of the exhibition curated by Chantal Pontbriand, “PER/FORM_How to Do Things with[out] Words” (CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, March 22–September 21, 2014), with theoretical texts and visual essays by thirty participating artists, including musical scores, drawings, documents, and photographs, which all work together to generate various perspectives on the subject through different theoretical premises (politics, experience, immateriality, action, realization, manifestation) and also through the artists' many diverging perspectives.