Damian Martin, Diana (2024) ‘Live Art Vibes’ in Digital Culture – Affective Performances and Migrant Aesthetics from Eastern Europe. Contemporary Theatre Review, 24 (3). pp. 378-397. ISSN 1048-6801

Abstract

In this article I explore two intersections with live art as a conceptual and cultural strategy in relation to migrant cultures in and from ‘Eastern’ Europe, with a focus on Romania. Whilst live art is a debated term whose parameters have changed over time, its scope continues to remain strategic, framing a multiplicity of practices with differing and uneasy relationships to categorisation, institutionality and legibility. I am not interested in arguing for an expansion of live art as an art historical frame, but in developing a methodology for the analysis of work whose poetics sits uneasily across borders, in circulation. Through an engagement with ‘vibe’ I build on resonances of live art as they entangle with art histories of performance in Eastern Europe. I locate a radical possibility offered by ‘vibes’ as refusal and circulation of political agency. Taking up the provocation from that disaffection can act as a refusal to feel in the face of white sentimentality, I explore how an anonymous Instagram account called ‘Latifundiar’, which superimposes urban scenes, usually from Romanian towns and cities, against Western canonical art historical landscapes, manifests ‘live art vibes’ – seeking to capture the entanglement between complicity, affective regimes and political accountability in neo-colonial regimes in East and West Europe.