Silvia Battista’s last publication is out now with the main online bookstores
Mattering SpiritualitiesPerformative Experiments for a Radical Imagining of the World Becoming edited by Silvia Battista and David Mason brings together an array of international scholars and artists to explore spirituality in embodiment through the lens of performance, creative practices, performative writing, and performance studies.
The book concerns spirituality and takes the body as the site of whatever it is we call spirituality. This approach understands that careful attention to which bodies are performing in any given scenario is crucial, as is a sensitivity to the ramifications of any body’s race, gender, class, and biological ability. Performance can therefore be regarded as anything through which individuals and collectives experiment with bodies as technologies. Each chapter engages with such experiments to explore how bodies experience and relate to other bodies, human and other-than-human, but also how, by mobilizing bodies and changing relationships between them, practitioners can transform people, spaces and places, objects, ecologies large and small, and shift the borders-of-the-known. Such experiments can also reveal intersectional dynamics within given social, political, and biological borders offering new perspectives and angles of analysis.