Caterina Iaquinta

In a present marked by systemic crises, forced displacements, and profound reconfigurations of material and symbolic borders, diasporic processes, intercultural transits, and transnational movements invest not only artistic and social practices but the very construction of knowledge. In this increasingly unstable context, a critical reassessment of the epistemological foundations of knowledge becomes urgent — one that is dynamic, intergenerational, transcultural, and radically interdisciplinary. Grounded in the residency at Iméra, the project takes shape as an itinerant and generative laboratory, rooted in Marseille and open towards the Mediterranean, which through seminars, lecture-performances, encounters with artists, archival research, and publications explores the production and transmission of knowledge through the body, space, and gesture.

The neologism geoperformance operates as a methodological device combining tools from the performing arts and critical geographies to activate affective and insurgent practices capable of destabilising traditional epistemological codes. Performance, once an object of art-historical inquiry, becomes an embodied form of knowledge — one capable of interrogating the humanities and social sciences as well as scientific disciplines.

Performance Theory and Situated Knowledges

What does it mean to engage one’s object of study through a performative approach? What does it mean to put one’s own positioning at stake from within art history and the artistic sciences?

The project is structured around three conceptual axes: body and movement (performance), situated knowledges and feminist perspectives (epistemology), and spatial narratives and representations (critical geographies). Within this expanded field, artistic creation is not conceived as a product but as a mode of inquiry — capable of interrogating dominant forms of knowledge, dislocating disciplinary paradigms, and generating embodied theory.
To assume performance and performativity as method — rather than as object of study — means shifting the axis from documentation towards generativity: the performative act does not illustrate, it produces knowledge. Within this framework, a performative methodology takes the form of embodied thought, in which knowledge emerges through the interaction of artistic practices, subjective positionings, and material and relational contexts.

Among the specific objectives: to define a theoretical-performative approach grounded in the use of performance as a tool for transdisciplinary critical inquiry, operating across art, the social sciences, and scientific disciplines; to experiment with a methodology that refuses a historicised narrative of performance — drawing instead on the work of de Brugerolle, Schneider, Phelan, and Butler — in order to activate an embodied, relational, and grounded perspective on artistic and theoretical knowledge; to elaborate the concept of geoperformance as a device interrogating the relationship between body, space, and power, with particular attention to the spatialisation of inequalities, situated memory, and diasporic knowledges; and to construct a theoretical-practical archive of case studies demonstrating the impact of these epistemologies on bodies, through key concepts such as mobility, transit, agency, resistance, trauma, and violence.