Marina Hadjilouca

This a short Manifesto for the Role of the Performance Designer as a political actor, written by Marina Hadjilouca in July 2020.

The manifesto claims that the performance designer can become an instrument, by taking a methodology that is embedded within a dramaturgical tradition, and shifting it and sharing it. When performance design is taken outside the theatrical realm and applied as a methodology within social art practices focusing in the urban environment, it can contribute towards the political role of the field. In this way, the performance designer as instrument is able to diffuse skills and raise questions, through the production of small temporary interventional acts. 

The Scenographic Interventions were developed through Marina's PhD research and as part of her practice. The three interventions presented here were site-specific and were designed and executed in Phaneromeni Square. Phaneromeni is a contested site in Nicosia, Cyprus.

The interventions act as a research tool and are employed to negotiate our relationship (bodily, spatially and politically) to the square in the present, whilst taking in consideration the creation of this place through history. At the same time, the scenographic interventions seek to examine the relations between the square’s actors, the square as space, and the objects; that is, the existing objects within the square and the objects introduced by the interventions. By doing so, the interventions create a multiplicity of phenomena and act as manifestations of active co-existence. 

This toolkit has been designed as part of Marina Hadjilouca’s PhD practice-based research. The toolkit aims to introduce the notion of a temporary and site-specific Scenographic Intervention, through practice. 

By using this toolkit practitioners and researchers are able to use a range of interdisciplinary methods to examine contested public spaces as spatio-temporal events. 

The Toolkit for Scenographic Interventions may be used as a starting point for research on site-specificity and social practice through performance design. It may be used as a pedagogical tool within the fields of urbanism, scenography, performance design, social art practice, cultural geography, and architecture to introduce concepts of social change, self-reflexivity, and the practitioner's role within a site-specific project for social change.