re: TACTICS of the plot

Tactics brought together seven practitioners – artists, activists, theorists, educators and curators – whose social and artistic practices are entangled with the neoliberal market structure, the academy, and commodification. Between December 2024 and March 2025, the group collectively shared and explored various methods of resistance, refusal, coping, imagining, and strategising. This series of workshops sought to read Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the plot in light of our present sociopolitical moment, dominated by the ongoing forces of exploitation, gentrification, commodification, and displacement.

Throughout the sessions, we asked ourselves:

How can artists sustain community-based and collective practices when such methods are increasingly absorbed by institutional frameworks?

How can the artistic and cultural field address the paradox of art-washing and private investment while public institutions face austerity and political instrumentalisation?

In the current political climate, what does resistance mean for artists, researchers, and educators, and what tactics might be necessary to respond to these shifting conditions?

And how can we ‘do’ theories and concepts of change, such as Wynter’s plot?

Drawing on Augusto Boal’s principle of theatre as a rehearsal for revolution, the sessions guided by Laura Dubourjal and Linnea Langfjord Kristensen, emphasised the active role of the spect-actor, collapsing the divide between performer and observer so that everyone present could intervene, propose alternatives, and rehearse forms of collective action. In parallel, the practice of affidamento, a feminist method of entrustment developed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, invited participants to ground their reflections in relations of mutual reliance, accountability, and situated knowledge.

Through play, breathing, storytelling, and re-enactment, the group experimented with forms of collective study and performance, in which embodied exchange became a means of imagining and testing other ways of organising, resisting, and relating.

Together, these approaches encouraged re-enactments and embodied explorations of collective tools and strategies for our collective present-futures

Although this cycle of Tactics of the Plot took place between December 2024 and March 2025, the inquiry continues as an evolving practice of thinking, moving, and creating together. On this page, you can listen to audio stories from each participant and watch the three-video episodes recorded during the March 2025 gathering.

This project was done in collaboration with the INC (Institute Network Culture) and kindly supported by CoECI – Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation.