Conference Program

Without yielding to the temptation to frame posthumanism merely as a pacified cosmology of relational co-belonging, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how the interconnections between the human and the non-human, when captured and governed through logics of frontierization, may turn into architectures of domination, and how the theatre laboratory, in conjunction with ecopedagogical thought, can become a tool of resistance. Becoming Black of the world, brutalism, nanoracism and necropolitics reveal how modernity has produced a durable cartography of the less-than-human. In the age of the world’s combustion, of the exit from the climatic niche, of the triumph of computational reason and of lives deemed minuscule, Mbembe asserts the urgency – given the shift from the human condition to the terrestrial condition – of a new nomos of the Earth and a new planetary consciousness, one that goes beyond the rights of the people, historically intertwined with conquest and appropriation, and opens instead to the rights of the living and to “an integral community that embraces all living beings” (2024, p. 177). To the biotope state, which is ecofascist by definition, immune and closed, Mbembe contrasts the earthly community. By dismantling the founding assumption of the modern order (“In the beginning was the fence” as he states following Schmitt), Mbembe opens up the possibility of thinking democracy as a practice of cohabitation of the common. Proceeding from this, the research will seek to integrate Mbembe’s perspective with the pedagogical practice of the eco-theatre laboratory, seen as capable of resisting the museification of experience and, at the same time, of opening spaces for sensitive cohabitation with the more-than-human. Reframed through an ecological lens, the theatre laboratory – a phenomenological network of co-participation and co-creation – emerges as a form of applied theatre, i.e. a fabric of performative practices outside the mainstream, based on the ensemble and inhabiting the margins, which fosters immediate reflection on the present through shared experiences and knowledge. In this sense, through the analytic-reflective and creative-imaginative framing of environmental realities, as well as by interrogating material ecologies within collective performative geographies, the eco-theatre laboratory becomes a space for the pedagogical cultivation of a transpersonal consciousness. Moving beyond anthropocentric dichotomies and understanding transformation as a concrete possibility, this consciousness is a perceiving embodied awareness that learns and acts within relationships, that displaces itself and opens to the other within expanded ecosystems, creating better versions of the world that overturn existing structures of domination. At the intersection of animal, cultural, post-human, and performance studies, the eco-theatre laboratory practice, by fostering learning with rather than from, charts paths that reveal the epistemological limits of Western knowledge and cultures, captured in their complicity with neoliberal policies, and simultaneously promotes the exploration of alternative heuristic approaches by engaging with indigenous sciences that centres living as an interconnectedness among beings. It also encourages the participation of a fully integrated, active audience and the creation of networks and communities of spirit within utopian spaces of a just coexistence with the planet.