NEW BOOK – Cognitive Architecture of Critical Performance Studies

After many years going back to making academic books, to reworking old writings and co-writing new ones with my former professor and mentor Aleksandra Jovićević:

Cognitive Architecture of Critical Performance Studies (Architettura cognitiva e critica dei performance studies)
Aleksandra Jovićević & Ana Vujanović
Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2026
ISBN 979-12-5998-108-0

This book – published in Italian language and to an extent for the Italian context – offers a comprehensive introduction and critical reflection on performance studies, a relatively recent and interdisciplinary field that examines performance as a broad continuum of human and cultural actions, from ritual, play, and everyday social behavior to theatre, dance, and experimental artistic practices. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and feminist, gender, queer, and cultural studies, the authors explore how performance operates not only in the arts but across social, political, and cultural life.

Continue reading

A Live Gathering: Performance and politics in contemporary Europe

A Live Gathering: Performance and politics in contemporary Europe
edited by Ana Vujanovic, with Livia Piazza,
Berlin: b_books, 2019


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people.
Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’.

ISBN 978-3-942214-29-2

For more information Look inside!