Giulia Palladini
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Some writing /Books
I have collected here a selection of my writings: books, articles and essays published in journals, online, and in collective volumes. These texts exist in different languages and overlap in different ways, just like what happens when books fall from a shelf, on the floor, and their pages involuntary touch.
Some recurring themes in my work are political imagination, social reproduction, and the erotics and domestics of artistic production. My writing has explored questions of labor and pleasure, work and free time, history and the archive, temporality and affect. My main concerns are possibilities of political resistance in artistic production and social life.
The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017
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Read more...Foreplay names a peculiar mode of being together and working in performance, recognized as distinctive of a group of artists operating in the 1960s New York scene, among which Ellen Stewart, John Vaccaro, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Tom Eyen, Jack Smith, Penny Arcade. Matching an original approach to historical materials and theoretical reflection, the book addresses the peculiar forms of production, reproduction and consumption elaborated in the 1960s scene, through artistic experiments and social performances, as labors of love, creating for artists a condition of ‘preliminarity’ toward professional work, and at the same time functioning as a counterforce within productive economy, as a prelude where value is not yet conferred upon labor. The book proposes that such labors of love can be considered both as paradigmatic for contemporary forms of precarious labor, and also as marginal forms of resistance to ideas of capitalist productivity and professionalism. This book, and the idea of foreplay which stands at its core, took shape as the unlikely encounter between two lines of inquiry which have punctuated my work in the last decade, proceeding simultaneously and progressively interlocking: a historical investigation into performance history, and a theoretical inquiry into modes of performance labor in contemporary capitalism.
The Scene of Foreplay: Theatre, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York elaborates the notion of foreplay as a theoretical proposal for reading a particular mode of performance production, existing outside of pre-determined structures of recognition, in terms of professionalism, artistic achievement and a logic of eventfulness.
Lexicon for an Affective Archive (ed. with Marco Pustianaz)
Bristol: Intellect/LADA , 2017
Leksykonu archiwum afektywnego (ed. with Marco Pustianaz) Warszawa/Gdańsk: Slowo/obraz/terytoria, 2015
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Read more...Foreplay names a peculiar mode of being together and working in performance, recognized as distinctive of a group of artists operating in the 1960s New York scene, among which Ellen Stewart, John Vaccaro, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Tom Eyen, Jack Smith, Penny Arcade. Matching an original approach to historical materials and theoretical reflection, the book addresses the peculiar forms of production, reproduction and consumption elaborated in the 1960s scene, through artistic experiments and social performances, as labors of love, creating for artists a condition of ‘preliminarity’ toward professional work, and at the same time functioning as a counterforce within productive economy, as a prelude where value is not yet conferred upon labor. The book proposes that such labors of love can be considered both as paradigmatic for contemporary forms of precarious labor, and also as marginal forms of resistance to ideas of capitalist productivity and professionalism. This book, and the idea of foreplay which stands at its core, took shape as the unlikely encounter between two lines of inquiry which have punctuated my work in the last decade, proceeding simultaneously and progressively interlocking: a historical investigation into performance history, and a theoretical inquiry into modes of performance labor in contemporary capitalism.
Lexicon for an Affective Archive is a collection of encounters with archives and archival materials – an encounter understood as an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory.
Some writing / Essays
I write about live art, performance, film and visual arts, in dialogue with the work of contemporary artists (such as Mapa Teatro, Forced Entertainment,Tara Fateh Irani, Pedro Lemebel) and through critical inquiries on particular moments of social and cultural history, such as the 1960s New York queer art scene, or Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. My work has enjoyed especially the essay form, and has recently focused in particular on Latin American art and performance. I have a strong interest in translation, and in the politics of translingualism.
2023
The Slow Hurry of Figuration. In Things That Go Through Your Mind When Falling: The Work of Forced Entertainment, edited by Adrian Heatfield. Leipzig: Spector Books: 218-231.
2021
Arti dal vivo, arti vive: verso una nuova politica di uso per le parole. In Il soccorso delle parole. Orizzonti di senso durante la pandemia, edited by Eide Spedicato et alii. Milano: Franco Angeli: 126-138.
2020
The Incompletion of the Archive: Estrangement, Anthropophagy and Other Forms of Mishandling. In Mishandled Archive, edited by Tara Fatehi Irani, London, Live Art Development Agency: 232-237.
2019
On coexisting, mending and imagining: notes on the domestics of performance. In A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited by Ana Vujanovic and Livia Andrea Piazza, Berlin: B-Books Verlag: 106-132.
2016
2018
Lógica del preludio: sobre el valor de uso, el gozo y la lucha contra la agonía, translated by María Auxiliadora Balladares, Sycorax #1, December 7.
2020
Logic of prelude: on use value, pleasure, and the struggle against agony. In Interventions / Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. Issue 29.4: Political Times.
2018
Imagine una fiesta, imagine una revolución: la politica de montaje de Mapa Teatro. In Mapa Teatro: el Escenario Expandido, edited by Marta Rodriguez. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 669-679.
2015
Mapa Teatro: the Politics of Montage. In Not just a Mirror. Looking for the Political Theatre of Today, edited by Florian Malzacher. Berlin: Alexander Verlag: 141-146.
2017
A Camp Fairy Tale: the Dirty Class of John Waters’ Desperate Living. In The Dark Side of Camp - Queer Economy of Dust, Dirt and Patina, edited by Franziska Bergmann, Ingrid Hotz-Davies and Georg Vogt. London and New York: Routledge: 115-126.
2017
The Rise and Fall of Coney Island: Amusement, Catastrophe and the Dead Fire of Consumption. In Catastrophe & Spectacle. Variations of a Conceptual Relation from the 17th to the 21st Century, edited by Jörg Dünne, Gesine Hindemith and Judith Kasper. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag: 103-113.
2016
Foreplay in Many Axioms. A Theoretical Voguing on Performance, Labor, Pleasure and Multiplicity. In The Art of Being Many: Towards a Theory and Practice of Gathering, edited by Sibylle Peters, Martin Jörg Schäfer, Vassilis S. Tsianos. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag: 201-209.
2016
Collaboration and Waste, with Erik Göngrich. In Let’s Talk About Work (And Life), edited by Peter Krilles, Jacopo Lanteri and Silke Bake. Berlin: Tanzfabrik: 49-63.
2015
The Weimar Republic and its Return. Unemployment, Revolution, or Europe in a State of Schuld. In Performances of Capitalism, Crisis and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, edited by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 15-32.
2014
Taking Time Together: a posthumous reflection on a collaborative project and polyorgasmic disobedience. A dialogue between Giulia Palladini and Nora Sternfeld, Cumma Papers #6. Helsinki: Aalto University.
2013
Berceuses et Révolution with Nicholas Ridout, La Vie Manifeste.
2012
Commemorare Ellen Stewart, La Mama: invenzione e custodia di una parentela. Culture Teatrali 21: 233-253.
2012
Per farla finita con la tecnologia. Carmelo Bene e l’indisciplina delle forme mediatiche. In Teatro e Media, edited by Anna Barsotti and Carlo Titomanlio. Ghezzano (PI): Felici Editore: 161-178.
2011
The Amateur Hour: On Value, Personality and the Form of Appearance in the Economy of Attention. South Atlantic Review 75. 3: 59-77.
2011
Queer Kinship in the New York Underground: On the Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis.
Contemporary Theatre Review 21. 2: 126-153.
Some writing / Interviews
The Pleasure of Work and the Work of Pleasure. Conversation with Jernej Kaluža, in Maska.
2020
Interview with Emma Murray, hosted by Movement Art Practice Christchurch, New Zealand, August (online).
2020
Interview with Giulia Palladini by Daniel Lucas, El peligro de los intelectuales es quedarse en el lugar cómodo, Cartón Piedra n. 211, November 8th.
2015
2013
Interview with Giulia Palladini by Dorota Semenowicz, Afektywne Archiwum. Dwutygodnik. October 12.