Performance Art in the Age of Extinction

This paper aims to map out the transformations in contemporary performance art during the current ‘age of extinction’. The first section extends Claire Bishop’s notion of “delegated performance” in order to categorize a turn towards the inclusion of other-than-human entities in the performance field. This operation leads to the concept of ‘performative animism’, referring to the strategies of re-animation of reality through artistic performance. The second section works out the idea of ‘planetarization’ of the performance field, which designates its opening to spatial and temporal fluxes coming from a dimension that overcomes the scale of human experience, that is, the planetary dimension. The third and final section interprets the meaning of these two transformations by introducing the concepts of ‘exbodiment’ and ‘excarnation’, which tie closely to a new political task for performance art.