From vagrant scenographies to urban speculative gestures: a feminist turn

What kinds of scenographies emerge when we work through a feminist lens, vis à vis embodied perspectives, with the situated nature of city spaces? In this paper we explore instances and becomings of urban scenography as both embodied and speculative gestures in the city.
Inspired by recent writings on contemporary performance design and scenographic practices that ask us to consider how the field has expanded (McKinney and Palmer, 2017) or is moving “beyond scenography” (Hann, 2019), in this performance lecture we situate scenography within notions of the vagrant (Arnold, 2013), speculative gestures and “ecologies of practices” (Stengers), sympoiesis (Haraway), and embodiment (Grosz) to rethink urban processes and the potential role that scenographic knowledge/sensibilities/practices can be methodologically utilized for urban research. Importantly, we are interested in drawing from critical feminist frameworks to explore the potentials of scenographic practices and reflect on the wider politics of spatial agency in the urban realm, and what it means to (un)make and transform space from these perspectives.