Embracing Homesickness: Human constraints and nonhuman agency in Solastalgia by The Agency

Abstract

In recent years, German based performance group The Agency has earned a reputation for their immersive plays that ironically appropriate techniques of neoliberalist self-optimization and body-culture. Departing from this approach, their last work Solastalgia (2022) stages a world beyond the self-optimized body in which the human no longer has a place. Accordingly, the spectator’s positionality gets obscure: In contrast to the extreme involvement in their former plays, The Agency exclude the visitors from the scene and degrade them to witnesses of their own extinction. Hence, the installative reductionism touches the performative situation in its core: Its concern is not human co-presence, but the possibility of not-only-human co-existence.

My essay reads the performance-installation with Jane Bennetts concept of vibrant matter to show how the agent of action here is no longer the unit of performers and audience but the material of the installation itself, which is merely ‘activated’ by performers. In a second step, this essay argues for an asymmetric understanding of the relation between object and subject. Some new boundaries and limitations will be drawn, that point to a negative understanding of nonhuman agency.

Within a larger framework, my essay argues for a re-evaluation of some axioms in the description of contemporary performance art: the promise of aesthetic participation seems increasingly entangled in the pitfalls of anthropocentric positions. Against this, I propose an understanding of self-limitation in the face of the climate catastrophe that can be conceptualized as a critique of subjective presence within the framework of the aesthetic.