How to understand the City as Performative? (immersive installation)
Polakvanbekkum
Permanent installation
Location: Z33

In this film we accompany Esther Polak on a walk during which she explores the question: How can we understand the City as Performative? Meditating on Judith Butler’s ideas on the performativity of gender she walks in circles around one apartment building and finds, step by step, ways to apply this to city space. Butler’s famous ideas about gender propose that the categories of male and female, are as performative as inescapable. Applying this to city space, Polak explores different possibilities of mobility-categories. Doing so she identified there are many more than just binaries, such as male-female: one could divide between practical categories such as walker, biker and automobilist, but one can also imagine more intentional categories, such as the arriver, the leaver or the one that hurries. This opens up a range of new categories to rethink and re-envision movement.