Phd in MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS

Thesis title: Il dispositivo assembleare tra politiche, ecologie e performance. Pratiche artistiche e attitudini curatoriali nella costruzione del possibile

This doctoral thesis examines the assembly as an aesthetic form, a curatorial infrastructure, and a political-ecological dispositif within contemporary performing arts. Positioned at the intersection of performance studies, curatorial theory, and political ecology, the study argues that the assembly should be understood not simply as a participatory or deliberative format, but as a material-discursive configuration through which collective existence is staged, negotiated, and reconfigured. Drawing on agonistic democratic theory, actor-network theory, feminist materialism, and theories of prefiguration, the thesis conceptualizes the assembly as a site of transindividual emergence in which bodies, discourses, infrastructures, and temporal regimes are co-constituted. The political appears here not as a pre-given domain but as an effect of situated relations. Particular attention is devoted to conditions of appearance, regimes of visibility, and the ecological entanglements that shape collective practice, with conflict understood as a generative force rather than a failure of consensus. Through the analysis of European case studies and artistic practices that activate assembly-based formats—conceived as processes of co-presence, negotiation, and worlding—the research demonstrates how performance operates as a threshold where institutional forms can be rehearsed, strained, and reimagined. The assembly emerges as a curatorial technology that redistributes agency, unsettles authorship, and tests the possibility of instituting non-extractive and ecologically implicated publics. The thesis ultimately contends that the assembly, in its performative dimension, does not represent political life but materially participates in its becoming, intervening in the constitution of the common and redefining the conditions of habitability within contemporary artistic ecologies.