Conference-conversation “Why, what, for and with whom?”

Conference-conversation in English.

Hypatia Vourloumis is a performance theorist and received her Ph.D in performance studies at Tisch, New York University. She was postdoctoral fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures research centre at Freie University, Berlin (2012-14), 2016 Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Athens Greece, and lecturer at the International Centre for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies in Athens. Publications include essays and experimental writing in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, ephemera, feministiqa, The Happy Hypocrite, numerous art catalogues and edited volumes, among others. She is co- editor of the Performance Research special issue ‘On Institutions’ and co-author of the books Formless Formation (Minor Compositions, 2021) and The Alleys (np, 2023), and a forthcoming monograph on the politics and performance of Indonesian postcolonial paralanguage. Her teaching and research interests include anticolonial, feminist, critical race and queer practice and theory; music, poetics, philosophies of language; sound studies and popular culture; aesthetic theory and practice. She teaches critical theory in the MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute.

Moving beyond mere solidarity, or expressions and statements of solidarity, requires us to move within the flow of the historical present. This gathering will emphasize the need for us to talk to one another. In a talk on October 25, 2023, cultural theorist, poet, and scholar teaching in Performance Studies, Fred Moten, asks a question that will guide our discussion: “How do we renew and refine our anticolonial practices?”

My hope is that we can talk with one another about our own singular and collective anticolonial practices within the present time, within the spaces we find ourselves in, our political economies. How is our attempt to talk, study and think together on the regeneration and cultivation of anticolonial practices bound up to our witnessing and joining with anticolonial movements, resistances, and bodies? How can our love for certain dance, art, poetic, and choreographic practices, and the ways we create, sense, and talk about them, help us begin to materially articulate anticolonial practice together?

The discursive program of the Sâlmon 2024 Festival articulates conferences and conversations by way of rehearsal, study and encounter. The proposals that are part of the program have been conceived by their authors in response to and in dialogue with the public program of the festival, and convene situated aesthetic and political sensibilities, arising from a critical position within the framework of contemporary artistic practices.