Civic Re-Enactment and Public Re-Assembly

Re-Enactment has become a ubiquitous 21st century process, one that dynamizes populist ritual and as well as artworld experimentation in participatory aesthetics.  Arguably, however, participants have very different understandings of what re-enactment is and who it might serve.  Art institutions also seem to deploy the practice in service of a range of goals—whether to recall history, to advance a conceptual art project, or to build community.  After surveying a range of possibilities, this lecture considers what happens when re-enactment is lodged inside civic processes.  What happens when civic processes—in all of their mundanity, bureaucracy, regression, and progression—are re-enacted? And what is the relation amongst aesthetic re-enactments and the other technological and policy domains explored at Cultures of Participation? Inspired by UC-Berkeley’s research platform on Public (Re) Assembly — and using work of Aaron Landsman and Paul Ramirez Jonas as touchstones — we will ask whether the concept of the “civic” is mourned or resuscitated in the moment of re-enactment.  What new things can we learn about re-enactment and participation when the “civic sphere” is the object? What new things can we learn about our own participation in the civic sphere when re-enactment is our method of investigation?