A Performance Project in Progress
Co-Created by
Shane Boyle & Brandon Woolf
The so-called “logistics revolution” emerged as a key component of capitalism’s spatial fix in the 1960s and 1970s. Within decades of the first boat loaded with intermodal shipping containers, the logistics infrastructure transformed global production and the world economy. While this infrastructure has become more and more powerful and widespread – helping capitalism to expand its economies of scale – it also has opened up new strategies, opportunities, and repertoires of activist resistance.
Since the onset of the financial crisis, an international array of movements has turned to logistics as a terrain of political struggle. This project – at the intersections of art and activism, theory and practice – explores and examines the sensibilities and techniques that performance can bring to the “supposedly” less spectacular tactics of counter-logistics. In many ways, this project is also an extension of our long-term artistic and scholarly investigation of the conjunctions between performance and political action. This collaboration began at UC Berkeley and persists now in and between different institutional and national contexts. The project is supported by a collaborative practice/research grant by the American Society of Theater Research (ASTR).