Launching of the joint issue of TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory and Les Journal des Laboratoires: “Exhausting Immaterial Labour in Performance”

During the first half of 2010, on three Public Editing sessions, members of TkH-Walking Theory (Belgrade) and les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers team met to produce a joint issue of Le Journal des Laboratoires and TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory entitled “Exhausting Immaterial Labour in Performance”. The decision to address immaterial labour in the performing arts today was motivated by the curiosity of suspicion. The recent, yet belated, “application” of the topic has amounted to an uncritical appraisal, and has only highlighted, as usual, the symptom whereby performance is seeking its political legitimacy and contemporaneity-upgrade in a theoretical transfer. The discussions with the interested audience and speakers invited for each session (Maurizio Lazzarato, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Florian Schneider and Judith Ickowicz) made it obvious that the concept of immaterial labour should be thoroughly exhausted, abandoned, or replaced with another conceptual framework. Far from mimicking or simulating a typical “editorial board” situation, Public Editing was performing the very shaping of the subject but also the entire journal with most of its contributions, in a public situation.

On October 21st, Bojana Cvejić, Ana Vujanović and Bojan Djordjev from TkH and Alice Chauchat and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez from les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers with guests – contributors to the Journal: Dušan Grlja, editor of PRELOM [break] magazine for images and politics from Belgrade and Vanessa Théodoropoulou, art historian and critic from Paris will present the three lingual, three volume journal featuring 18 contributions ranging from theoretical texts to art proposals and many things that fall inbetween.