Viscous Performances (The Persistence of Creative Resistances in Neoliberal Chile)

Viscous Performances examines the endurance of creative protest performances in Chile from the 2011 student mobilizations to the aftermath of the 2019 social revolt. Drawing from performance theory, feminist new materialisms, affect studies, and decolonial perspectives, María José Contreras Lorenzini situates Chilean practices of resistance within a global conversation about the politics of performance while attending closely to the historical and material specificities of the Chilean context. Case studies include student interventions, feminist mobilizations, and commemorative actions that unfolded along a two-kilometer stretch of Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda. Contreras Lorenzini argues that repeated creative resistances that insistently occupied this same urban corridor generated a sticky, persistent, and affectively charged antidote to neoliberalism’s slow violence. These temporally dispersed acts territorialized the urban space as a site of resistance where echoes and reverberations of repertoires accumulated, thickened, and remained available for reenactment. By theorizing resistance as viscous rather than fleeting, Viscous Performances challenges neoliberal framings of dissent that privilege visibility and spectacle and highlights the quieter, less visible practices of care, collaboration, and imagination through which communities sustain long-term struggles.