Performance Is a Form of Knowing. Cosmopolitical Choreographies for a Burning Planet

Abstract

This paper explores performance as a form of knowing and as a cosmopolitical practice that reconfigures human relations with the world. In dialogue with First Nations ritual practices from Abya Yala – specifically the Wixarika practice of Asking for allowance to all directions – the text challenges colonial conceptions of performance as presentation. Instead, it proposes performance as an embodied, relational, and epistemic tool for world-making. Engaging with the works of Stengers, de la Cadena, and Blaser, and grounded in the author’s situated experience living between Europe and Latin America, the paper advocates for ontological pluralism and an ecology of knowledges. Through narrative, conceptual tools, and ritual practice, it offers performance as a counter-spell to modernity’s extractivist logics, reclaiming its potential to compose un/common worlds. A ritual script is included as an invitation to engage performance as a cosmopolitical act of relational re-attunement.