Infra- and Parastructures of Contemporary Liveness

When Marina Vishmidt introduced the concept of "infrastructural critique," she marked a form of interventionist practice that extends beyond revealing the ideologies inherent in the modernist and postmodernist gallery space, the museum, and academia. Departing from these thoughts, this research delves into "infra" structures of contemporary liveness – those subcutaneous elements that sustain both performance production and its knowledge networks. It examines the intersection of curatorial and paracuratorial practices of performance-based practices, questioning the material and embodied conditions of their realisation, documentation and archiving.

Key questions that motivate this research are: How do institutions frame and condition the development and presentation of performance? What temporal structures and forms of documentation characterise these practices, both in the short and long term? What implications do the systemic expansions of programming and exhibition-making, viewed through the lens of infra- and para-institutional visions, have for curatorial practice? To what extent does an infra- and parainstitutional form of critique exert influence within existing cultural structures? How can an infrastructural critique of performance be understood, particularly in relation to reclaiming the inherent incompleteness of processual practices within representational spaces? Finally, to what extent are these visions and their self-reflective forms of critique rooted in Western concepts?