Performative Arts as Contact Zones in the Era of Global Migrations

The article is premised on the thesis that only seeing the West as one cultural resource among many others makes it possible to adequately multiply and shift our points of reference, to not only observe how modernizing forces negotiated and still negotiate with local histories and cultures, but also to work out local ways of performing specific knowledges in order to avoid a trap of "imperial globality". Therefore, the article adopts a concept of contact zones, introduced by a linguist Mary Louis Pratt and developed by Donna Haraway in her "When Species Meet" (2007), as a useful method to analyze recent transcultural phenomena in post-migrant performative cultures. In order to demonstrate the concept in action, it takes a closer look at the work of the art collective Slavs and Tatars, founded in 2006. Slavs and Tatars’ exhibitions, books, and performance lectures focus on Eurasian cultures, especially on frictions between European-Christian and Arab-Islamic worlds that Hans Belting ascribes respectively to Florence and Bagdad in his inspiring book on Renaissance art and Arab science. In the original German version he uses a telling phrase to describe those frictions: "eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks". Significantly this different attitude towards images is taken up in many Slavs and Tatars’ works as one among many important contact zones in Eurasian cultural traditions and todays worlds.