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.