Performing Posses

Gini Müller
Novi Sad, January 26th 2008, 15:30 -16:00

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Politics, Activism and not at least performative potentials meet in the term “Posse“ as conflictive spaces of emancipatory wars against border- and bio-regimes. In their well known analyses of “Empire“ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe “Posse“ from the latin term as a verb of power, an activity, which refers to the political power and subjectivity of the multitude: Posse is what a mind and a body can do. In a wider context the word also expresses in english the branding of a gang or clique, and in german it's also the theatre-term for a scetch or form of comedy. In the spectacular fields of staged WTO/WEF/G8 Summits, many protest forms of Activism develop techniques of resistance, using Media, Theatre, and Art-tools, and lots of performative and subversive “Posse-Actors“ can be found in the last years: like the Rebel Clown Army, PublixTheatreCaravan, Tutte Bianche, Pink Block, noborder-Activism etc. Their methods of acting provoced in special moments of summit-spectacles the governmental techniques of repressive (police-)representations. Performing Posses refer in this sense more to Slogans like „Another war is possible!“ (noborderlab2003). Their forms of „wargames“ link struggles of social movements with a post-Brechtian and “minor“-acting gestures together.