Aquatopia: Climate Interventions

Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater’s ecological interventions and traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories, climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan’s site-specific performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena. Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia atlas is animated by a disorienting, anti-mapping strategy, producing a deterritorialized, nomadic, fluid atlas unfolding in real time as an archive of climate change in multidimensional, active space. The book is designed for pedagogical access, with interludes that consolidate the learning outcomes of the experimental theory animating each site-specific performance.

Accompanied by close descriptions of five performances and supplemented by digital documentation available online, this volume intervenes in discussions on climate change, urbanism, and postcolonization/decolonialization, and contributes to interdisciplinary studies of ecology and environmental politics, postcolonial/decolonial theories and practices, performance studies and aesthetics, in particular public art, and performance as research.

May Joseph is Founder of Harmattan Theater, Professor of Social Science at the Pratt Institute, and author of the ghosts oflumumba; Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York; Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination; and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship. Joseph is co-editor of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia and of Performing Hybridity. She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site-specific performances along Dutch and Portugese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Visit www.mayjoseph.com.

Sofia Varino is a writer and public scholar whose work focuses on radical thought and practice, cutting across political ecology, history and philosophy of science, and transdisciplinary gender studies. They have published in journals like Whatever, SHIMA, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, and co-edited a special issue of Somatechnics on data and gender in the life sciences. Varino is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the minor cosmopolitanisms research training group, a cooperation established among the University of Potsdam, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. Visit sofiavarino.com.