Politics of Appearing

According to Hannah Arendt, we only come into political existence by coming forward, by appearing and thus marking a beginning. However, the political sphere is not only constituted by what appears, but also by what disappears, what is excluded or externalized. Against this conceptual background, this project examines performative and artistic practices that reveal the conditions of the possibility of coming into appearance. Such practices critically reflect the relationship between appearing and disappearing, being marked and being unmarked, exposition and externalization. The project analyzes scenes of appearance such as courtroom scenes, reconstructions like those undertaken by Forensic Architecture, transitory theater traditions ranging from the early modern Commedia dell’Arte to current post-migrant theater, and contemporary forms of ecopoetics. By looking at the temporary communities that emerge in such transitory scenes, the project seeks to develop a different politics of appearance that breaks with current techniques of concealment.

This project will result in three interconnected monographs: the first addresses performances of appearance of the defendants and the marginalization of victims in the NSU trial, by analyzing artistic strategies that render this marginalization visible. The second explores the theatrical implications of appearing by relating Shakespeare’s Ophelia to the Commedia dell’Arte and tracing her afterlife in post-migrant theater. The third monograph raises the question of how non-human entities such as earth or nature may appear. Here, the current discussion surrounding the rights of nature in international legal theory is brought into conversation with postcolonial debates and strategies of representation in ecopoetics.

Fig. above: Still from “The Seizure of the Iuventa” (2018), Source: Forensic Architecture (with courtesy of Forensic Architecture)