Researching the Restiveness: This is NOT a Performance. This is NOT an Ethnography
(02.11.2018)

artist/activist/researcher
witnessing
coeval; co-temporal; co-performative
repertoire of contentions
rupture; resistance
hybrid, embodied and reflexive
humble, engaged and committed; dialogic; intersubjective
multitude; agonism
communitas
p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-t-i-v-e
auto ethno graphy
“I am a spy who collects information,” I usually made this joke when people queried what I was actually doing, “sometimes for the institutions, sometimes for my fellow artists.” As an artist/researcher, I conducted my doctoral research on the performative practices in art and activism in the post-Handover Hong Kong. This joke cannot save me from the mudded water as I worked with my fellow artists who were as “restive” as me in our performative and activist practices. Researching practices that are ephemeral and precarious, on the one hand, demand special care and specific methodology, especially within an institutional setting. On the other hand, the pro-democracy Occupy or Umbrella Movement in 2014 which was once endowed with people’s hope for change turned out to be a trauma of failure, successive prosecution and further oppression. When an artist becomes a scholar; when performance is an embodied research; when research is activism: I feel like walking a tightrope from time to time. How can a “performative autoethnography” be developed and used to review and re-imagine the construction and constructedness of our memories, experiences and knowledge as a dialogic, mutual and critical project that challenges, destabilises and even makes a change in status quo and power relations? What if this is not a performance and not an ethnography after all?

IDS: Wikidata: Q111802698