| Summary: | The Politics of Dreaming as a practice-based research project asks: How might an inquiry into "political dreaming" manifest within my performance-video-based activist art practice? The political dream infers collective ideals that do not tally with political realities and refers conversely to my literal dreams, in relationship to the collective ideal. The research is situated within a time of socio-political crisis amidst increased technologies, in which the urgency of political dreaming is collective. Presented as a YouTube channel live online, it explores within video works my own dreams, literally and figuratively, in contrast to and in conversation with the political context of the current Neo-liberal Capitalist Dream (or Nightmare). I do this between my two homes: Berlin and Auckland. Offering a YouTube channel to experience performance as video-internet-art non- chronologically, activates complexities in collective political dreaming in digital capitalism, as subversion and a form of agency. My interconnected methods involve dream-journaling and analysis, activism across these centres and creative, embodied dance practices. This is how I explore the question of dreaming as political with video performance outcomes. This project is informed by the political, social, cultural and ecological issues currently in my life in New Zealand (NZ) and central Europe and online across borders. It promotes a methodological agency that can adapt to and from the similar political issues existing in my every day. I interweave dance practice as forms of movement and feminist agency, speaking to nomadism, multiple pleasures and embodied rhizomatic practice, framed by theorists. The project engages with theoretical, literary and artistic influences, which are political and ecological. Rosi Braidotti's book Nomadic subjects1 is offered as a decentering force displacing of hierarchical social power and nationalism. She embraces sexual difference as a strategy for generative agency from a feminist positioning as a nomadic project. This speaks to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus2 with its notion of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical embodiment of disparate forces to generate alternative perspectives for agency. The video performances are informed by these notions. The YouTube channel offers a range of videos, which move across different forms of social media video satire and subversion accessible through national borders and refers to the activation of viral wildfire activity in an urgent political time. Adrienne Maree Brown's book Emergent Strategy3 and Naomi Klein's No is not Enough4 offer a political context for framing the project's question and activism, with an emphasis on intersectional care and social movements as emergent strategies. 1 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 2 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translation) (London/New York: Continuum, 2004). 3 Adrienne Brown, Emergent Strategy (Chico: AK Press, 2017). 4 Naomi Klein, No is not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics (London: Penguin, 2017).
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