Selected pages from "The Protest and The Recuperation"

tomore than fifty cities worldwide, fromMoscow to Istanbul. In a unique trajectory, an art collective, inspired by a theorist launching a popular protest performance, traveled across geopolitical space and culture. Las Tesis’s work, inspired by the Brazilian-Argentinian feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, is amanifestation of the tactical diffusion of the aesthetics of protest that I find particularly powerful. Segato writes, “That is why I have been saying, among other things, that for a number of reasons a feminine formof politics cannot be based on principles, but must be pragmatic and capable of improvising, directed to life in the here and now, its continuity and its splendor, despite everything, or—as we say—against all odds. Therefore, and in order to do so, it must always be nourished by what I have called an ‘ethics of dissatisfaction,’ the framework of any good politics and the opposite drive to an ethics of conformity, that ethics inwhich it is more important to be good than to act well.” 8 Las Tesis’s protest translates a feminist philosophical position into a performative political action. It manifests the permeability between themeasured and intentional sphere of art and theory and the public sphere, where urgent political messages are delivered extemporaneously. This popular andmobile intentional aesthetics represents the increasing importance of art, dance, and theater at protests. 9 With its convergence of theoretically informed art-making with popular rhythm

9. In the American context, Waiting for Tear Gas (1999–2000) by Allan Sekula, documenting the 1999 SeattleWorld Trade Organization anti-globalization protests, demonstrates how a protest can be represented in an artwork.

8. Rita Laura Segato, “The Virtues of Disobedience,” 2019; https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/40778/ the-virtues-of-disobedience/.

24 The Lure of Protest

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