My Space-Power of Weakness: The Case of Marosi Festival (Stromboli, IT)

Abstract

The 21^st century proliferates that desire to compose, manage and maintain a reality we do not live, whilst conceal or deny the one we do. Where daily performativity is that manifestation of those hegemonic systems of imposed societal synchronicities and unseen forces that demand our excessive expressiveness, incessant subjectivity that results paradoxically in our invisibility and objectivity. This paper will ask: have we become unconscious to consciousness? As Žižek has muted, are zombies more alive than we are, because they know they are dead? while we vegetate in the symbolic (2008, p. 221). Are the hegemonies of the seen symptomatic of our estrangement from what constitutes experience? What form can that emancipation through performance take to reclaim that actuality of place and self, if we are not to endlessly reiterate what we were, instead of make manifest our being and liveness of who we are?