Praxis–Body–Text: Revisiting Histories of Travel and Colonial Encounters Through Performative Practices

Abstract

The article provides a field report on some of the artistic approaches deployed in the transdisciplinary Praxis of Social Imaginaries (2023–2025) research project. The project emphasizes performative, site-specific, and embodied methods to enhance engagement with historical texts, viewing them as knowledge addressing present and future issues. It highlights the medieval and early colonial past’s rich performative culture, advocating for texts to be experienced as participatory events. The article describes two performative events: a mourning ritual inspired by colonial genocide accounts presented in Bartolomé de las Casas’s A short account of the destruction of the Indies (1550) and a performance-lecture using the 1513 Requerimiento text. These events illustrate the project’s approach to creating transformational learning environments through collective, participatory experiences that challenge traditional academic rituals.

1. Introduction

This article is a kind of explorative and open-ended forensic field report about a series of activities and transdisciplinary events that have occurred within the context of the Praxis of Social Imaginaries (2023–2025) research project. In my capacity as both participant and facilitator, I have investigated dialogue and engagement practices, with particular attention to their foundations in artistic research and methodologies, especially those emerging from the broad field of performance.

The forensic aspect of this article is twofold. First, it takes a retrospective and reconstructive approach by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting experiences and collaborative experiments in knowledge exchange and expanded textual inquiry. This is exemplified by the descriptions of two performative reading experiments (Section 5) held in August 2024 in the Danish town of Løgumkloster, Tønder Municipality, Southern Jutland, during the fourth session of the Praxis project.

Second, true to its Latin root forensis (meaning “of a forum”), this article examines the dynamics of collective research, in terms of how knowledge is both gathered and shared. It focuses on research methods and themes that are closely tied to a sense of community and the historical encounters between cultures, particularly in the context of European colonialism since the 1500s. This second aspect is addressed in the opening sections, which outline the article’s premises and methodology, and in the closing sections, which provide discussion and conclusion.

This article proceeds in four movements. Section 2 situates the project within its broader research context. Section 3 develops the conceptual and methodological premises, focusing on performance, embodiment, and site-specificity. Section 4 offers two detailed case descriptions from the project, presented through dual perspectives to illustrate its participatory ethos. Section 5 and Section 6 discuss implications for knowledge production and conclude by clarifying how this article differs from the larger project, which addresses additional themes beyond the scope of this piece. Unlike the full project, which spans multiple sessions and thematic strands, this article concentrates on the conceptual bridge between medieval performative traditions and contemporary artistic research practices, using two events as focal examples.

2. Background

The Praxis of Social Imaginaries project is a transdisciplinary initiative that brings together artists, activists, and researchers to explore and transform social imaginaries through performative and embodied practices. Economic support comes from various sources, primarily The Polin Institute at Åbo Akademi University, the Nordic Summer University (NSU),1 and diverse Nordic cooperation funds and national research endowments.

The project adopts a nomadic approach within the Nordic and Baltic regions, hosting in-person meetings and seminars where international participants convivially share and co-inhabit specific sites for limited, concentrated periods. The network unfolded across six on-site sessions, each lasting from three days to a full week, and through the dialogues, collaborations, and entanglements that emerged. These entanglements were shaped not only by geographic proximity but also by shared research interests, methodological affinities, and cultural experiences related to background, migration, and displacement.

The project focuses on three main strategies: reading, listening, and storytelling.

• Reading: Participants engage with medieval travelogues and narratives that chronicle journeys, encounters, and cultural exchanges. This approach aims to uncover the historical roots of racialized social imaginaries and understand the lived experiences of underrepresented populations today. Examples of texts: William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum (1253); Marco Polo’s The Description of the World (1300); Ibn Khaldun’s travels in Africa, found in The Muqaddimah (1377); Bartolomé de las Casas’s A short account of the destruction of the Indies (1550); Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1551); and José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Morales de las Indias (1589).
• Listening: This approach calls for a careful and critical engagement with the narrators’ stories and worldviews, as well as their portrayals of the communities they encountered, fostering a deeper appreciation of diverse perspectives and lived experiences.
• Storytelling: Participants co-create and share stories using performative and artistic methods to challenge and reimagine existing social narratives. Connecting historical accounts with contemporary issues, this approach seeks to understand how past views and paradigms have evolved over time—while still persisting at the foundations of our present and shaping the contours of our future.

Although the Praxis project originated within a Nordic context, the majority of its 30–40 participants came from non-European backgrounds, primarily from Africa (Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa), South and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, India), and South America (Peru, Brazil). While some participants self-identified as Indigenous and/or marginalized, others did not—a reminder that such identifications are inherently complex, multi-layered, and fluid. They are shaped by the contexts of participants’ practices, their interlocutors, the power relations at play, and the institutional frameworks hosting these exchanges. Nearly all participants engaged in research practices oriented toward Indigenous knowledge systems and postcolonial histories. Rather than employing the term marginalized, with its pejorative undertones, this project adopts the concept of the minor—invoked through notions such as minor or “subaltern” histories (Spivak 2010) and the “minor gesture” (Manning 2016).

The idea of minor histories emerges within postcolonial theory to describe historical narratives that are decentred, subaltern, or excluded from dominant historiography (Foucault 1972; Chakrabarty 2000; Spivak 2010). Minor histories constitute the very fabric of diversity, and recognizing and engaging with them is foundational to the kinds of entanglements and exchanges this project seeks to cultivate. The “minor gesture,” together with its musical metaphor of the “minor scale,” underscores the way in which “a minor key is always interlaced with major keys” (Manning 2016, p. 3). This suggests that while the major operates as a structural framework, defined by fixed values and meanings, the minor functions as a disruptive force that threads through it—destabilizing its coherence and challenging its normative foundations (ibid.).

Accordingly, this project aims to foster a transformational learning environment in which shifts in awareness and epistemic paradigms can occur. Through collaborative laboratories of praxis, participants interrogate how historical and contemporary narratives shape social imaginaries and work toward developing new, inclusive modes of understanding and relating to the world.

3. Conceptual Premises and Methodological Framework

The foundational premise of this project, and the approaches discussed in this article, is that performative, site-specific, and embodied methods within a transdisciplinary and diverse context can enhance engagement with historical texts. For example, by revisiting, reexperiencing, and reliving them as performative manuscripts meant to be acted upon and through. In other words, historical accounts of cultural encounters and their frictions should be read not just as archival material for scholarly historiography but as knowledge addressing core issues of the present and future. These issues span a wide societal range, including cultural understanding, social justice, identity and belonging, conflict resolution, and globalization. They also touch on individual relevance, such as the ties between knowing and playing, cultural citizenship and embodiment, and the importance of nurturing intimate encounters in navigating life, not just as scholars, artists, or researchers, but as human beings.

3.1. Text as Performance and Performance Beyond Text

Medieval scholars urge us to think of “all of medieval literature, not just plays and songs, as works intended for performance” (Birge Vitz and Zaerr 2007). Silent reading was not the norm; instead, texts were performed, danced, played out, painted, drawn, woven, sculpted. Texts were integral to the fullness of telling and listening, intertwining the written and oral in a rush of expression and meaning. Importantly, especially in the context of our focus on communities and collective engagement, these texts were participatory events, relying on sophisticated forms of call-and-response, from rowdy acclaim to knowing snickers, to physical joining in and co-creation. Medieval performers often drew on their audience not just for response, but for active participation (Birge Vitz and Zaerr 2007).

According to prominent scholarship (Harris 2003; Gertsman 2008; Ruiz 2012; Ristuccia 2013; Ruiz et al. 2017; Frost and Frost 2022), the medieval and early colonial past was rich with performative, mixed arts manifestations, festivals, rituals, and celebrations. Festivals are key to understanding this expanded notion of text since they were the types of “public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance” (Postlewate and Hüsken 2007). Medieval calendars were punctuated by festivals such as Christmas and Easter, which blended solemn liturgy with exuberant feasting, music, and theatricality. Christmas celebrations extended over twelve days, with mumming—masked or costumed house-visiting performances involving short plays and music—and wassailing—a ritual of singing and drinking to bless households or orchards—adding theatrical and agrarian elements (Twycross and Carpenter 2002). May Day festivities featured maypole dances and floral processions, symbolizing fertility and renewal (Hutton 1996). Unlike contemporary festivals, these events were deeply embedded in religious frameworks, even when incorporating playful or carnivalesque elements. This distinction matters: while both medieval and modern festivals foster communal creativity, the former were inseparable from liturgical cycles, whereas examples like Burning Man operate largely outside religious structures.

Contemporary festivals echo this participatory ethos, though in new cultural registers. Events like Burning Man in Nevada transform desert landscapes into temporary cities of art, performance, and radical self-expression, foregrounding “immediacy and communal creativity as core principles” (Gilmore 2010, p. 12). Similarly, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—the world’s largest arts festival—turns the city into a sprawling stage, where “performance spills into streets, cafés, and improvised venues, collapsing boundaries between artist and audience” (Harvie 2013, p. 88). These examples demonstrate how the festival persists as a cultural form that “creates liminal spaces for experimentation, dialogue, and collective joy” (Stephenson 2009, p. 67).

Rather than reconstructing a specific festival in its cultural context, this project aims to reignite the festival’s spirit within a research setting, embracing its “ludic drive” (Ruiz 2012) as a space for both celebration and contestation. It seeks to create a space for collective celebration of curiosity and knowledge exchange, with text as a playfield, moving beyond traditional academic rituals to nurture the joy of learning through sharing, sensorial and intellectual on-site immersivity, ultimately fostering a vibrant community of engaged learners.

This emphasis on text as performance resonates with broader theoretical developments in the humanities, where performance and the performative have become essential analytical lenses. Performance is no longer confined to the stage; it is understood as a pervasive cultural mode, shaping social practices, identity formation, and knowledge production (Schechner 2020; Taylor 2003). Judith Butler’s notion of the performative act (1997) reframes language and gesture as constitutive forces—acts that do not merely express meaning but actively produce realities. Similarly, J. L. Austin’s foundational work on speech acts (1962) underscores how utterances can function as actions, transforming the world rather than simply describing it. For Austin, saying “I apologize” is not merely reporting an internal state; it is the act of apologizing itself (Austin 1962, pp. 6–8). Likewise, pronouncing “I now pronounce you married” or “I hereby declare the meeting open” performs the very reality it names. These are what Austin calls performative utterances, where language enacts rather than represents. Crucially, Austin emphasizes that the success of such performative utterances depends on contextual conditions—what he calls “felicity conditions” (1962, p. 14). These include the appropriate social setting, the authority of the speaker, and the shared understanding of conventions. For example, “I hereby declare the meeting open” only works if uttered by someone with the recognized authority in the proper institutional context. Outside these conditions, the utterance becomes “infelicitous” (1962, pp. 16–17), failing to achieve its intended effect. This insight highlights that language is not autonomous but deeply embedded in social and cultural frameworks, making context integral to its performative power.

In this expanded view, reading itself becomes a performative event, where bodies, voices, and spaces co-create meaning. Diana Taylor’s concept of the repertoire (2003) highlights embodied practices—gesture, movement, enactment—as vital carriers of cultural memory alongside the archive of written texts. This perspective invites us to approach collective reading not as passive reception but as an active, situated performance, where interpretation is enacted through voice, gesture, and relational dynamics, reframing and acknowledging “all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, p. 20). Such an approach aligns with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s call for a “production of presence” (2004), privileging the sensory and affective dimensions of cultural experience over purely hermeneutic models.

By foregrounding performance and performativity, this project situates medieval texts within a continuum of embodied practices, while also engaging contemporary debates on materiality, affect, and relationality. It proposes reading as a ludic, participatory act, where knowledge emerges through doing—through the interplay of text, body, and community—thus bridging historical modes of engagement with present-day scholarly and creative practices.

3.2. Embodiment and Sensory Engagement

Medieval culture was deeply embodied, sensory, kinaesthetic, and cross-modal.2 When engaging with medieval texts—such as the travel and encounter narratives central to this project—one encounters vivid descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. From the pungent aroma of fermented mare’s milk in the Mongol steppes to the dazzling silks of Cathay, from the deafening roar of Arctic storms to the bitter metallic taste of mineral-rich waters in the Andes, these texts are saturated with sensory detail.

William of Rubruck, for instance, dwells on the tactile and gustatory experience of Mongol hospitality: “They offered us cosmos [fermented mare’s milk], sharp and biting on the tongue, with a strong odour that clings to the vessel” (van Ruysbroeck 1900, p. 96). Marco Polo similarly evokes the chromatic and olfactory richness of Asian markets: “In the city of Cambaluc, the streets are filled with spices—pepper, ginger, and cinnamon—whose fragrance mingles with the smoke of countless cooking fires” (Polo [1298] 1938, p. 212).

Ibn Khaldun, though primarily philosophical, offers sensorial glimpses in his geographical preface: “The air of the Maghrib is heavy with the scent of salt and seaweed, and the markets resound with the cries of merchants and the clatter of copper vessels” (Ibn Khaldun [1377] 1967, p. 75). Bartolomé de las Casas, in stark contrast, uses sensory excess to underscore atrocity: “The rivers ran red with blood, and the stench of burning flesh filled the valleys” (de Las Casas [1552] 1992, p. 41).

Olaus Magnus conjures the Nordic world through sound and touch: “The cracking of ice underfoot, the shrill whistle of northern winds, and the blinding whiteness of snow that dazzles the eyes” (Magnus [1555] 1996, p. 512). Finally, José de Acosta interlaces taste and temperature in his Andean observations: “The waters of the high mountains are so cold they numb the tongue, yet they carry a bitter savour of iron and sulphur” (de Acosta [1590] 2002, p. 87).

Reviving these sensory dimensions through collective reading practices today is not simply an aesthetically driven re-enactment; it constitutes a profound epistemic intervention. Medieval texts were not designed for silent, disembodied consumption but for oral, tactile, and communal engagement—modes that activated the body as a site of knowledge. To read them today without acknowledging this embodied heritage risks flattening their experiential richness and the cultural logics they encode. Contemporary scholarship on embodied reading underscores that meaning emerges through the interplay of cognition, sensation, and movement (Mangen and Schilhab 2020; Hultin and Hill 2021). Practices such as kinaesthetic anchoring—gestures, vocalization, and spatial positioning during reading—can reanimate the multisensory textures of these narratives, fostering deeper interpretive attunement and collective sense-making (Gumbrecht 2004; Mangen 2016). By situating reading as an embodied, relational act, we not only honour the historical conditions of these texts but also cultivate inclusive, participatory modes of knowledge production that resonate with their original performative ethos.

3.3. Site-Specificity

Medieval and contemporary performance practices remind us that meaning is not produced in a vacuum but emerges through a dynamic interplay between text, body, and place. Site-specificity foregrounds the material and symbolic dimensions of location, insisting that performance is “shaped by, and in turn reshapes, the spatial and social conditions of its occurrence” (Kaye 2000, p. 1). In other words, the site is not a neutral backdrop but an active agent in the performative event.

Historically, medieval festivals and rituals were deeply place-bound, embedded in the rhythms of agrarian life and the architecture of communal spaces. May Day celebrations, for instance, were inseparable from village greens and forest edges, where “the maypole stood as a vertical axis linking earth and sky, fertility and renewal” (Hutton 1996, p. 234). Similarly, Corpus Christi processions transformed urban streets into sacred theatres, “reconfiguring civic space as a stage for theological spectacle” (Beadle 1994, p. 78). These examples underscore that spatial context was not incidental but constitutive of meaning. Contemporary site-specific performance extends this logic, often interrogating the politics and poetics of place. As Pearson and Shanks argue, “site-specific work does not simply occupy a location; it engages with its histories, uses, and symbolic resonances” (Pearson and Shanks 2001, p. 23).

For this project, site-specificity is not merely logistical but epistemic. By situating collective reading and performative practices in historically resonant or symbolically charged spaces—whether cloisters, gardens, or public squares—we activate what Kaye calls “the reciprocal production of meaning between work and site” (2000, p. 3). Moreover, site-specificity involves exploring the potentials of the actual places where reading occurs—not only in relation to the geographical frames of the narratives but also through the everyday details that shape experience. Weather conditions, the availability of local food, interacting with locals and noticing their stewardship of the site, the visible traces of the past mingling with present architecture all contribute to the interpretive process.

These elements invite us to take reading beyond static indoor settings, embracing movement and contingency: outdoors in a garden, aboard a ship or a train, or while walking through streets layered with history. Such practices resonate with embodied and ecological approaches to reading, which emphasize that interpretation is not purely cognitive but emerges through bodily engagement with environments (Sidenius and Roald 2024; Toro and Trasmundi 2024). The multisensory affordances of a site—sounds, textures, smells—can saturate the reading experience, transforming it into a more impactful and anchored performative act (Hunter and Turner 2025; Pearson 2010). Such an approach resists the abstraction of text from its lived contexts, fostering an embodied, spatially attuned mode of scholarship that honours both medieval traditions and contemporary critical frameworks.

4. Engaging with Situated Practice

The following descriptions of performative events co-created within the Praxis of Social Imaginaries project are presented through a deliberately bifocal lens—“from the outside” and “from the inside.” This dual-perspective structure is not simply a stylistic choice, but a methodological strategy that reflects the project’s commitment to layered, situated, and participatory modes of inquiry.

The “outside” perspective offers a circumstantial, sensorial account of the event as it unfolded—attuned to gesture, rhythm, and atmosphere, yet withholding interpretation. It is speculative and immersive, inviting the reader to inhabit the moment with its ambiguity and strangeness.

This mode of description is written in the second person—you are there, walking into the space, noticing the gestures, hearing the sounds. This is not incidental. The use of second-person address is a deliberate invitation: it calls the reader into the scene, not as a distant observer but as a participant in the unfolding experience. It echoes Massumi’s (2002) emphasis on affective immediacy and the generative potential of description, and aligns with LaBelle’s (2014) notion of the “acoustic shadow,” where listening becomes a mode of ethical attunement to what is often unheard or overlooked. Additionally, this approach resonates with Manning’s concept of the minor gesture (2016), where meaning emerges not through fixed categories but through affective attunement and relational movement.

The “inside” perspective reconstructs the conceptual and compositional intentions behind each event. It is reflective and situated, drawing from the author’s own memory and facilitation experience. As such, it is necessarily partial and open-ended. This mode of writing aligns with Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) practice of critical fabulation, where the act of reconstruction is both an ethical and imaginative engagement with the gaps and silences of history. It also draws on the ethos of artistic research, where process and reflection are inseparable from the production of knowledge (Avgitidou 2023).

Together, these perspectives enact a layered invitation—not only to observe, but to participate in the unfolding of meaning. They offer the reader a way into the performative space: through immersion, through reflection, and through the tension between presence and interpretation. This strategy foregrounds the project’s commitment to epistemic multiplicity and performative inquiry, where knowledge is not delivered but co-constituted.

The events described were co-created in real time, without fixed scripts or predetermined outcomes. Whether facilitated by the author or another participant, each unfolded through a shared willingness to dwell in uncertainty, to respond with care, and to allow the dynamics of the situation to be continually reconfigured by collective agency. This openness to emergence reflects the project’s broader aim: to cultivate spaces where inquiry is lived, relational, and transformative.

As a clarification, it should be noted that the first event (A) was proposed and facilitated by another participant—performance studies scholar and early modernist historian Lindsey Drury—while the second event (B) was facilitated by the author. Despite the difference in facilitation, both events were co-created through collective participation. Their presentation from two distinct perspectives is intended to reflect this shared authorship. The use of dual perspective is a deliberate strategy, for which the author alone assumes full responsibility.

4.1. Performative Event A—From the Outside

A summer afternoon in a small town in Denmark. A sunny, windless day. A park through which you walk by, with a church and a cloister looming in the background. A group of twenty or so people, first spread out in the grass, then moving to form a tighter circle. A facilitator introduces the focus and procedure of the session. Once that is established, in the middle of the group, someone else lays down in the green. The group grows quiet as members move in different ways. One person leaves the circle and returns with a freshly picked flower, placing it on the chest of the one lying down. Another arranges stones and small branches in a filigree pattern from the shoulders to the belly. Someone else gently places a feather in the person’s hair, the white-grey wisp contrasting with the deep black hue. Members of the group kneel close, or stand slightly apart, or move in the circle, all focused on the person lying down. He lies quietly, his breathing deepens, and eventually, he snores. The solemn mood changes, lightens. Smiles and contained laughter ripple through the group. Someone kneels by his head and whispers a kind of lullaby. You think you hear Portuguese—the song mentions a boat sailing in the wide sea without leaving a trace. The slow procession of gestures halts. The one lying down wakes, looks around, and slowly sits up, noticing the adornments on his body. The group unwinds as the facilitator ends the session and invites dialogue. People take turns sharing their experiences.

4.2. Performative Event A—From the Inside

Mourning rituals have become staples in contemporary performance, particularly in post-colonial, post-human, and ecological contexts (Cools 2021; Lykke 2022; Radomska 2023). To mourn a loss—even a loss as massive as a whole ecosystem, a geopolitical paradigm, an economic system or life on a planetary scale—resonates deeply with the very human experience of mortality, with everyday detachments and abandonments, and the changeable circumstances of life. Mourning is scalable, from personal to universal meanings and from individual to collective performances. It is both about coping with bereavement and celebrating the wealth of what was lost. Mourning is a strategy of persistence, aimed at acceptance and survival, offering an alternative to both apathetic powerlessness and constant action. In mourning, we pause, notice, cherish, nurture suffering, and gather meaning.

Within the diverse liturgies of mourning across cultures, the specific actions of being with the deceased and adorning their body with tokens of respect, remembrance, or celebration closely relate to the wake. In Western tradition, which evolved from pagan antiquity into Christianity (Alexiou 2002), the wake is a vigil that precedes the funeral procession and burial. It is a social gathering, often in the presence of the deceased’s body, that includes storytelling and reflection. The rituals associated with the wake—from hair cutting to self-flagellation, from silence to song and dance, from fasting and sobriety to intoxication and revelry (Alexiou 2002)—encompass a wide range of emotional and spiritual experiences. This not only honours the deceased’s life and impact but also prompts contemplation of mortality and its influence on how the living choose to live.

A particularly traumatic aspect of the experience of death occurs when, especially in conditions of conflict, genocide, or war, the wake or burial cannot be properly conducted. These rituals may be rushed, omitted, or performed under intense scrutiny and criticism, often disconnected from their cultural context. This situation adds the violence of “disenfranchised grief” (Doka 2002; French 2012)—grief that is not acknowledged or validated by society—to the violence of loss. Colonial trauma is deeply rooted in this kind of grief (Doka 2008; Snyder 2010; Mullan 2023)—from the unburied bodies of slaves drowned in the Atlantic, to the unmarked gravesites across colonial territories, and the erasure or overriding of native burial traditions by Christian influence.

This element is of note in this session since the facilitated ritual was inspired, among other sources, by Bartolomé de las Casas’ vivid accounts of native genocide during the early colonial period, as detailed and explicitly condemned in his 1552 work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Las Casas writes: “They made bets as to who could slit a man’s throat in one stroke” (1992, p. 15), and describes how “the Spaniards fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days” (1992, p. 9). He recounts the systematic destruction of Indigenous lives and lands, noting that “the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress” (ibid.). Las Casas’ words—“They have treated them not as brute animals … so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road” (1992, p. 10)—underline the overarching dehumanization. These passages do not merely document violence—they evoke the absence of mourning, the denial of ritual, and the silencing of grief.

The participant who embodied the dead in the performance was the only South American in the group. His work as a filmmaker and artistic researcher is deeply connected to his Peruvian Amazonian background and to the protection and dissemination of native knowledge. The choice of who would lay down happened spontaneously, with no clear volunteering or role attribution. However, I argue there was a collective sense that this participant uniquely embodied the South American colonial and post-colonial past, present, and future. The unsettling element of human sacrifice, heightened by a sense of lineage, was thus integrated into the performance, resonating on multiple levels and with complex implications. The re-enacted burden of the native body, as both a site of exploitation and a symbol of righteous suffering transformed into a utopian ideal, sparked intense discussions and reflections. This did not happen immediately, but instead emerged throughout the following days. The community of care, mutual respect, and transparent engagement at the core of this project, through its very flaws and vulnerabilities, is itself an experiment in making such discussions possible.

In this project, a performative exploration is never seen as a self-contained event. Instead, it is meant to ripple beyond the confines of the specific theme and duration of a session and to feed back into the conversations happening across the different sessions. This involves a sense of liminality (Schechner and Appel 1990; Stenner 2017), a transitional stage where the usual order is suspended, leading to ambiguity, disorientation, and eventually reorientation. This transdisciplinary concept, drawn from performance studies, anthropology, philosophy, and theology, describes moments where boundaries blur and participants find themselves traversing or even “pulsing” in-between states. The goal is reorientation—returning to the dialogical space to form new connections, ask new questions, and shift perspectives. This is the essential principle and desired outcome.

4.3. Performative Event B—From the Outside

You are in a classroom with west-facing windows. It is a summer afternoon somewhere on Denmark’s west coast, and the intense sunlight colours the room yellow, despite the LED lamps overhead. People hang around chatting in small groups. Someone sits down and welcomes everyone, inviting them to do the same as the event begins. The person presents themselves and what is to come. Something about the importance of first encounters, of creating a shared experience, a performative-lecture using embodied approaches, examining a 1500s text on colonial encounters in the Americas and genocide. The presenter suggests pairing up in twos, looking at each other in silence, and reflecting on the first time you met (even if this is it) and the impression you had of each other. You find a partner, whether someone you know or a stranger in the group. You settle into contemplating each other and the circumstances of your first encounter. Your thoughts wander as you closely observe the person before you. Five minutes elapse. The facilitator thanks you all and without further ado fetches a snare drum which they place on a stand in front of them while holding and a pair of sticks. After a pause, a short staccato rhythm with a martial theme is played on the drum, like a call-to-arms or a crowd address. Once the drumming ceases, the presenter puts the snare to the side, turns on the sound from their computer and faces the wall, away from the group. You hear a reverb-drenched, monotone vocal dirge with indistinguishable words, possibly in Spanish. It lasts for circa five minutes. After the piece has been playing for a while, the presenter turns around, fetches their snare once more and holds the sticks up in the air as if in mid drumming movement. When the sound from the speakers stops, they immediately play a short rhythmical piece similar to the first. After the playing concludes, the presenter invites someone from the group to read a text. The inviter and the invitee read the same text together, one in English and the other in Spanish. The Spanish speaker sounds native, while the English speaker does not. The Spanish speaker sounds native, while the English speaker does not. Initially, they stand side by side facing the group, but soon they shift into a line with the Spanish speaker in front and the English speaker behind. You hear the overlapping of both languages, line by line. You might understand all, some or nothing at all of the content. Once the reading stops, the facilitator thanks the second speaker and addresses the group. Bilingual copies of the text are distributed, with English on one side and Spanish on the other. A task is proposed: participants are to form groups, read the text, and create short improvised presentations based on the idea of creating an alternative protocol for first encounters. They can use any available materials and will present their work to the group in 30 min. You join a group, re-read and discuss the text, and co-create a performance based on what interests your group the most. After the diverse presentations—some non-verbal, some using different languages, and some musical—the floor is open for discussion and reflection.

4.4. Performative Event B—From the Inside

I prepare the performance-lecture with the following elements in mind: a duration of circa one hour; a space in which to perform and meet the participants; a text in two languages; a sonic layer including voice (my own, another’s and an artificially synthetized one), a composed soundscape, and a piece of percussion.

The performative script, created from these ingredients, frames an open-ended process that encourages active group participation and concludes with a discussion of the shared experience at both collective and individual levels. This approach is inspired by an understanding of improvised co-creation as something that “doesn’t emerge spontaneously; it arises from a unique state of creative readiness” (Yusupova 2024, p. 133). The balance of fixed framing and dynamic near-improvised elements is essential to my approach to the performance-lecture as a knowledge exchange platform informed by artistic approaches. This balance invokes the liminal aspect mentioned earlier, where the interplay between prepared and improvised, or constructed and reactive, activates the transitional and in-between aspects of the situation. Ideally, this introduces a playful willingness to question one’s own beliefs, premises, or core values as they might be projected into the texts being read or the opinions and views being exchanged. At its best, this moving between the recognizable and the unpredictable in performative terms, and aiming towards in-betweenness, can powerfully reveal and even dislodge bias.

In the understanding of performance and performative strategies (Fischer-Lichte 2008; Frank 2013; Reason and Lindelof 2017; Schechner 2020; Avgitidou 2023) I am informed by, the raw materials available for use overlap with those of life. Literally, anything—from essential elements like light, air, temperature, food, space, and the body’s metabolic states, to cultural artefacts such as movement, text, images, theories, and aesthetic principles—can be used to create a performance. Scale is also important: it is just as valid to use planetary gravitational forces (James 2018), like tides or dusk, as site-specific compositional aspects, as it is to use the sympathetic nervous system, such as in blushing, as a dramaturgical tool. From the cosmic to the microscopic,3 the whole of creation offers itself.

An important disclaimer: the fact that anything can be used does not mean that anything goes. There are many constraints in a performative space, including ethical aspects such as consent, safety, and respect, as well as the pedagogic, artistic, or scientific frameworks within which the performance unfolds as an intentional creative encounter. These constraints are just as important in these generative spaces of inquiry as the creative approaches deployed. The main reason for this detour is to emphasize that when reviewing the performative elements listed above, one should pay particular attention, as even seemingly casual elements might have been deliberately prepared with intention. Additionally, circumstantial elements—those found available rather than designed—can become compositional tools once noticed.

Case in point: the duration of one hour. While an hour is now a common measure of scheduling and measuring time, it carries a meaningful lineage. The concept of dividing the day into 24 h dates back to ancient Egypt around 1500 BCE (Dershowitz and Reingold 2008). This was significantly improved by the Greeks around 150 BCE when the astronomer Hipparchus proposed dividing the day into 24 equal hours, known as equinoctial hours, based on 12 h of daylight and 12 h of darkness on the equinox. However, it was only after the invention of mechanical clocks in the 14th century that the hour became standardized. It is noteworthy that the contemporary notion of an “hour” can be traced back to the same period from which many of the earliest texts our project is based on originate. So, we had an hour together, which is long enough without being too long.

The room where the group met for the performance was a classroom in a folk high school, a unique type of educational institution in Denmark (Ribble 2005). These schools offer non-formal adult education, emphasizing personal development, community living, and lifelong learning. They are often residential, with a curriculum that covers a wide range of subjects, focusing on artistic practice, applied knowledge, and a connection to the surrounding landscape. Inspired by the 19th-century humanist principles of Danish pastor, philosopher, and educator Nikolai Grundtvig (1783–1872), the room itself reflected this diversity. The tables were arranged in a half-circle, surrounded by a variety of educational resources, including shelves filled with books, musical instruments, art supplies, and maps. The room’s original purpose was, from the start, a perfect match for the premises of our gathering. It was plentiful with the potential for play, learning and experimenting, while at the same time being neutral enough as a standard functional space common enough to not take up too much attention from the activities and interactions that took place within it.

Performance, particularly within the theatrical tradition, is often associated with the ‘black box’ space developed by the European avant-garde in the early 1920s (Smith 2007). This space is typically a quadrilateral room with black walls, ceiling, and a flat floor. This setup allows for the focused erasure of technical aspects of the background (cabling, lighting apparatuses, entries, and exits off stage). However, it also situates the performance in a contextless bubble—a transportable, ready-made scenography with no actual ties to the site. This approach contrasts with the methods used in this project, where site-specificity does not mean setting the performance in spaces directly related to its theme (e.g., jungles and beaches of South America). Instead, it involves integrating the actual spaces where the performance takes place, treating them as encounters between facilitator and participants, and leveraging their potential as sites (McKinney and Palmer 2018).

The text at the core of this performance is the Requerimiento (“Requirement”) which was a document created in 1513 by the Spanish monarchy and read to indigenous peoples during the Spanish conquest of the Americas (Carballo 2020). This document served as a protocol for first encounters between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples. It was intended to justify the Spanish claim to the New World and to demand the submission of the indigenous populations to Spanish rule and Christianity. It consisted of a short history of Christianity, and particularly Spanish monarchy, presented as a lineage of divine right leading from the creation of Adam to the authority of the Pope; followed by a decreet—that the indigenous peoples were to accept Spanish rule and convert—and concluding in an ultimatum—comply or face enslavement and death.

The Requerimiento was meant to be read upon first contact but was often delivered in Spanish, making it incomprehensible to its audience. It might be read across a battlefield, at night while approaching a sleeping village, or even from the deck of a ship at first sight of land (de Las Casas [1552] 1992). The legal concern of legitimation that this document carried clashed radically with the sheer absurdity of its mode of performance, making its reading into a true performative gesture of very little practical use but of much symbolic significance.

Las Casas himself strongly objected to this “blindness of the most pernicious kind” (1992, p. 66) in which such a “gulf between theory and practice” (ibid.) is as “absurd as it is stupid and should be treated with the disrespect, scorn and contempt it so amply deserves.” (1992, p. 67). It is hard to view the Requerimiento from a contemporary perspective without recalling the avant-garde and often absurdist performances of the European Dadaists and Surrealists in the 1910s and 1920s. These movements used radical, dissociative, and even self-sabotaging approaches to unsettle and activate their audiences (Dachy 2006; Jones 2006). However, the absurdity of the Requerimiento did not challenge the status quo or confront established power structures; instead, it emanated from them.

The performance features various sonic elements that fall into three categories: composed, improvised, and site-generated. These categories are fluid, with elements layering, morphing into one another, and sometimes exhibiting hybrid qualities. One can argue that all these elements combine into a single evolving soundscape that unfolds over the duration of the experience.

Chronologically, the first notable sonic element is the atmosphere of the room, with participants arriving and talking in groups in preparation for the session. In a musical context, this would be called a prelude, stemming from the Latin praeludere (‘to play beforehand for practice’) from prae- (‘before’) and ludere (‘to play’). The prelude serves as a kind of tuning in, a warm-up meant to activate the skills and components that will be used in the actual performance. Listening, speaking, finding one’s place, moving between conversations, and anticipating were the initial components of this site-generated prelude.

This led to an intro where I addressed the group, sharing the main thematic focus and session format without detailing the actual performative actions to come. In sonic terms, there was a counterpoint between my voice and the muted sounds in the room. Counterpoint is a technique of combining two or more independent sonic patterns to create an interwoven texture, similar to call-and-response.

The tone abruptly shifted, or at least paused, when I concluded my address. After the pairing exercise of considering first encounters, I immediately brought out a drum from the corner of the room and started playing an energetic rhythmic pattern. The volume, my stiff posture, and the martial tone of the beat immediately heightened the stillness and expectation among the participants. While playing, I maintained a forward gaze and broad eye contact with the participants, keeping my head up instead of looking down at the drumhead. I noticed their rigid postures and tension persisted even after I stopped.

The percussion piece was played on a snare drum, the highest pitched in a given set of drums with a sounding that is sharp, crisp and responsive, and using a traditional grip on the sticks. Both the specific drum, the kind of grip and the staccato composition are inspired by the field drumming tradition in military contexts, whose historic roots date back to antiquity. A snare drum or equivalent has been used to convey orders and coordinate troop movements in the battlefield in a western European context since the 13th century crusades (McNeill 2009; Norris 2012). Drumming of this kind has been a staple in ceremonial protocol and public proclamations. Its rhythmic sound is attention-grabbing due to its acoustic properties and intrinsically symbolizes power, even suggesting the threat of imposing rule by force since there is a clear analogue between the beat pattern and the sound of an army marching and manoeuvring on the battlefield.

This percussion piece, repeated twice, bookended another listening experience: a 2-channel stereo composition where a synthesized artificial voice reads the full text of the Requerimiento in Spanish. Created via a text-to-speech4 application and processed using convolution reverb5 based on the impulse-response6 profile of the St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, the monotone male computer voice sounded as if it were spoken aloud at the Christian centre of power. The lack of variation in the voice, combined with the strong reverb, muddled it into a drone-like dirge. These elements were deliberately used to create an obstacle to intelligibility, yet they were composed of ‘authentic’ layers—the right language, the full literal text, and the exemplary acoustics of the site of faith and power. The acoustic quality or fabric of the sound is in direct conflict with the transmission of the content.

In communication studies, this is analogous to the signal-to-noise ratio,7 where data integrity (the fidelity of the message) is measured by comparing the initial signal with the noise or disturbances encountered between sender and receiver. This serves as an absurdist nod to the Requerimiento—a message whose receiver the sender did not care about—understood as a token gesture or comfort ritual directed at the Spanish conquerors, rather than as a means to bridge the encounter with the indigenous peoples. This listening piece was inspired by the concept of migration of knowledge, which is central to transdisciplinary environments (Bernstein 2014; Salmela et al. 2025). It specifically transports principles from acoustics and sound design into performative spaces to illustrate historical tensions.

The two final layers of sound we wish to highlight in this session are of the improvised and site-generated kind. The first are the actual sounds created during the group protocol devising experiments and the second was the discussion at the end. Instances of collective discussion and dialogue can, in performative terms, be understood as polyphonic (Karsten 2024; Lampert and Lampert 2024) and choral (David 2006; Athanassaki and Bowie 2011) practices. Polyphony, from the Greek polys (“many”) and phōnē (“voice, sound”), refers to the multiplicity and diversity of expressions, meanings, and interweaved utterances in group dialogue. In contrast, choral refers to dynamic interaction, specifically the orchestration and variation in focus, intensity, and quality of voices. This also includes shifts in meanings, interpretations, and lines of thought that fluidly carry the flow of perspective. Notably, the etymology of choral highlights its sonic aspect and collective movement through dance, originating from the Latin chorus (“a dance in a circle, the persons singing and dancing”) and the Greek khoros (“round dance; dancing-place; band of dancers”).

Throughout the performative session, voices—both collective and individual—drove and guided the process, embodied and resonating with agency (Aczel 2001; Abrantes 2015; Cahill and Hamel 2021). It began with a layer of voices settling into attentive listening, followed by a series of addresses: the facilitator’s presentation, the percussive piece, and the synthesized voice uttering the Requerimiento. Ownership of the space was then handed back to the group through collective exercises and the final discussion.

The resulting dialogue was not only pointed and sharp but also lingered as a field of open questions and permeable perspectives, resonating outward into the event and the group, and inward into each participant’s process of inquiry. The fact that this performance emerged from a discussion of colonial narratives, where native voices are often “overheard, underrepresented, and interrupted” (LaBelle 2014), underscores the importance of re-uttering, re-listening, re-phrasing, and even re-singing the meanings and minor histories that have lingered in the acoustic shadow8 of more dominant discourses and louder voices.

5. Discussion

While the larger Praxis of Social Imaginaries project spans multiple sessions, sites, and thematic strands—including ecological mourning, migration, and pluriversal dialogues—this article narrows its lens to one specific concern: the conceptual and methodological bridge between medieval performative traditions and contemporary artistic research. By focusing on two situated experiments, it does not aim to represent the project in its entirety but to articulate a distinct argument about reading as a ludic, embodied, and site-responsive practice within scholarly contexts.

The performative events described in this article resist conventional academic categorization. Rather than presenting fixed outcomes or comparative evaluations, they operate within a framework of situated inquiry—where knowledge emerges through embodied, collective, and site-specific engagement. This approach foregrounds praxis as a mode of knowing that is relational, affective, and processual.

Transformation, in this context, does not refer to a measurable shift in belief or behaviour, but to a subtle reorientation of perception and epistemic stance. It is about cultivating attunement—to place, to others, to history, and to the textures of lived experience. The performative practices described here invite participants to inhabit texts not as distant artefacts but as living, resonant materials. Through ritual, improvisation, and co-creation, participants engage in a kind of epistemic rehearsal: testing new ways of sensing, interpreting, and relating.

One such moment unfolded during the mourning ritual in Løgumkloster, where a participant lay silently in the grass, adorned with feathers, stones, and flowers by others in the group. The act of lying down—voluntarily yet unspoken—evoked a powerful sense of vulnerability and reverence. The participant’s deep breathing, eventually turning into snoring, introduced a rupture: solemnity gave way to laughter, and the group shifted from mourning to gentle play. This moment, described as both unsettling and tender, exemplifies the liminal space where performance becomes a site of epistemic and emotional transformation (Stenner 2017). It also foregrounds the body as a site of knowledge, echoing Diana Taylor’s (2003) insistence that embodied acts are vital carriers of cultural memory.

Another striking moment occurred during the performance-lecture centred on the Requerimiento text. The facilitator’s martial drumming, followed by a reverb-drenched synthetic voice reading the colonial decree in Spanish, created a sonic landscape of power and absurdity. The acoustic simulation of St. Peter’s Basilica amplified the symbolic violence of the text, while its incomprehensibility mirrored the historical absurdity of its original use. Participants responded by devising alternative protocols for first encounters, using multilingual improvisation, music, and gesture. This act of reimagining colonial scripts through embodied co-creation exemplifies the project’s commitment to polyphonic and pluriversal knowledge production (LaBelle 2014; Manning 2016).

Crucially, these performative rituals are framed but not scripted. There are structures—temporal, spatial, thematic—but no predetermined outcomes. The facilitator, participants, and even those in seemingly passive roles co-create the unfolding event in real time. This radical embrace of process over product aligns with contemporary performance theory, which views improvisation not as lack of preparation but as a form of “creative readiness” (Yusupova 2024). It also echoes Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) notion of the “autopoietic feedback loop,” where performers and audience mutually influence the event’s trajectory. In this sense, the ritual becomes a living inquiry, shaped by the moment, the bodies present, and the relational dynamics that emerge.

Awareness, then, is not a static state but a dynamic process of becoming-with. It involves noticing what is usually overlooked, listening beyond the audible, and allowing oneself to be affected (LaBelle 2014; Mangen and Schilhab 2020). Epistemic paradigms are understood not as abstract systems but as embodied orientations—ways of being in the world that are shaped by history, power, and imagination. The project’s emphasis on minor histories and gestures destabilizes dominant frameworks and opens space for plural, situated knowledges.

The events described also demonstrate how performative inquiry can surface tensions—between past and present, between representation and experience, between authority and vulnerability. These tensions are not resolved but held, explored, and reflected upon. The dialogical structure of the symposia, and the emphasis on collective reflection, ensures that these moments of rupture become opportunities for learning and reconfiguration (Reason and Lindelof 2017).

6. Conclusions

The Praxis of Social Imaginaries project proposes a model of research that is not only transdisciplinary but radically processual, relational, and embodied. It seeks to reanimate historical texts through performative practices that foreground communal inquiry, affective resonance, and situated knowledge. In doing so, it challenges the boundaries of academic knowledge production and invites a rethinking of what counts as evidence, insight, and transformation (Avgitidou 2023; Frank 2013).

Transformational learning, as enacted here, is not about acquiring new information but about shifting the conditions of possibility for thought and relation. It is about creating spaces where epistemic paradigms can be questioned, where awareness can deepen through shared experience, and where knowledge can be co-created in ways that honour complexity, plurality, and care (Fischer-Lichte 2008; Butler 1997). These shifts are not imposed but emerge through the unfolding of collective rituals—rituals that are framed but unscripted, where facilitators and participants alike engage in a co-creative process of discovery.

The absence of fixed outcomes or predetermined roles is not a limitation but a methodological choice. It reflects a commitment to improvisation as a form of “creative readiness” (Yusupova 2024), and to the autopoietic feedback loop between performer and audience (Fischer-Lichte 2008). This openness allows for liminal experiences (Stenner 2017), where participants traverse thresholds of meaning, identity, and relation. The rituals described—whether mourning a colonial wound or reimagining a violent decree—are not ends in themselves but invitations to dwell in uncertainty, to listen deeply, and to respond with care.

By engaging with colonial histories through artistic and performative means, the project contributes to decolonial methodologies—foregrounding the importance of ritual, storytelling, and embodied presence in the reconstitution of social imaginaries (de Las Casas [1552] 1992; Carballo 2020; Radomska 2023). The events described are not endpoints but openings: invitations to continue listening, sensing, and imagining otherwise.

My own role within this project has been hybrid and evolving: artist, researcher, participant, facilitator—and now, in the writing of this article, scholar and critic. This multiplicity is not incidental but central to the ethos of the project. It reflects a commitment to inhabiting knowledge from multiple vantage points, and to allowing the boundaries between roles to blur and shift. This position implies a kind of solidity—not in the sense of fixed authority, but in the sense of grounded presence: a willingness to hold space, to bear the suspense of not immediately clarifying, and to take the risk of being vulnerable within the unfolding process. This risk is constantly counterbalanced by a willingness to allow collective agency to overturn, reconfigure, and reinvent the very dynamics of the situation (Schechner and Appel 1990; Reason and Lindelof 2017; Fischer-Lichte 2008). In embracing this fluid and participatory stance, the project affirms its commitment to inquiry as a living, shared, and continually reimagined practice.