Copyright: Antonio Cama
Caterina Iaquinta
Research project
Geoperformance as Method: Performing Knowledge between Space, Body and Power
Project summary
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.
Practicing Passionate Geographies
When artistic practice condenses languages that unite action, myth, ritual, memory, and word, what emerges is a writing that is at once artistic, performative, and geographical.
Can the act of mapping render visible the affective geographies of the bodies that traverse a space? What do the migratory movements of these bodies teach us, and what impact might this have not only on practice but on artistic knowledge itself?
To take a space such as the contemporary Mediterranean as a field of inquiry — and to observe it through the theoretical tools of feminism and the disruptive epistemologies of performance — means activating a critical space in which the objects of knowledge are constructed through the relationship between observer and observed.
Following Iain Chambers, the cartography generated by confidence in abstract universalism must be understood as “discriminatory.” This position is in the first instance destabilised by the openings offered by feminist geography, which reveals the incompleteness of spatial representation systems (Doreen Massey). From this perspective, the Mediterranean emerges as a privileged field of observation: through performance and feminist theories, it becomes possible to understand this space as a fluid epistemological device, generated by bodies and invisible memories in transit. Through the concept of geoperformance, geography itself can be interrogated from within the body: the space activated by that body becomes an active and non-neutral subject. Oriented towards the narration of the relationship between the migrant body and the sea, this perspective discloses a knowledge in constant mutation — non-linear, always in process — in which Mediterraneanness constitutes a field where, through art, power and violence, race and gender, memory and desire converge and become visible.
Floating Epistemologies
In this project, the Mediterranean is approached as a site in which the body becomes the essential means of engaging with a fluid and ever-transforming environment. The Mediterranean configures itself as a critical and affective horizon (Sara Ahmed) in which bodily mobility, diasporic trajectories, and minor aesthetic forms challenge the established divisions between centre and periphery, subject and object, knowledge and lived experience.
One of the project’s critical axes consists in dismantling the masculine subjectivity that has historically defined the symbolic processes through which the sea has been signified — as conquest, as challenge to nature, as a site of power and heroism — in order to allow other subjectivities, other species, and other forms of knowledge to emerge. Jeanne Barret, who changed her identity and name to board eighteenth-century scientific expeditions; Anita Conti, oceanographer who crossed the Atlantic to study marine fauna as a sustainable food resource, particularly in West Africa; Madleen Kulab, fisherwoman from Gaza and the only woman authorised to navigate the Strip, who claimed her right to the sea against gender-based restrictions and colonial blockade: these are but a few of the figures who have had to negotiate or subvert the symbolic order of the sea in order to access it. Alongside them, numerous artists active on the shores of the Mediterranean — from the collective Le Nemesiache to Zineb Sedira, from Bouchra Khalili among many others — have redrawn the discursive horizons around the sea, inscribing within them memories of trauma and violence as well as possibilities of relation and resistance.
In the context we inhabit, it is necessary to continually interrogate how to define a body that migrates, resists, and transforms itself, carrying with it memories and traumas as well as imagination and desire. The gendered dimension of migration can be identified across several interconnected aspects: the transgression of the immobility historically imposed on certain subjects from North African and Middle Eastern countries; the accumulation of violence along migratory routes, which does not cease upon arrival on European shores; and the process of constructing autonomy. The term geoperformance offers a methodological framework for investigating the epistemological dimensions of the migrant body and the space it traverses — identifying, at the intersection of performative arts, deconstructed geographical sciences, and feminist epistemologies, both a research method and an artistic practice.
Biography
Caterina Iaquinta is Course Leader of the BA in Painting and Visual Arts and the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where she has been teaching Modern and Contemporary Art History since 2019. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (2014), with a dissertation on performative languages in visual arts, focusing on the most radical practices of the 1970s in Italy and the contributions of feminist artists. After her doctorate, she contributed to founding the Clemen Parrocchetti Archive, dedicated to the work of the Italian feminist artist active during the Seventies. Her scholarly work focuses on performance art, feminism, and contemporary art practices, with essays published in academic journals and edited volumes.
Her publications include contributions to volumes such as Italian Female Filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies (Lenz), Storia dell’arte e femminismo. Una questione aperta (Electa), and Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977–1984) (Silvana Editoriale), as well as articles in Comunicazioni Sociali, Palinsesti, Elephant & Castle, and Il Capitale Culturale, and collaborations with Arte e Critica, Opera Viva, and Flash Art.
Caterina Iaquinta holds a FIAS fellowship for 2026-2027.
The FIAS fellowship Programme is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n°101217263.
