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Tactics of the Plot
Reimagining Tools and Methods for Resistance & Collective Futures
November 2024 - March 2025
Project website
Text by Laura Dubourjal
Tactics of the Plot brought together seven practitioners — artists, activists, theorists, educators and curators — whose social and artistic practices are entangled with neoliberal market structures and commodification. Between December 2024 and March 2025, the group collectively shared and explored their methods of resistance, refusal, coping, and imagination. Rooted in Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the “plot” — narrative, social, and spatial practices that imagine otherwise, and that enact possibilities of resistance within and against the market’s captive and extractive logic — this series of workshops sought to read Wynter’s work through a contemporary lens. As we suggest, the plot continues to resonate in spatial and artistic practices as acts of resistance against the ongoing forces of domination, exploitation, gentrification, and commodification.
Throughout the sessions, we asked ourselves:
How can artists sustain community-based and collective practices when such methods are increasingly absorbed by institutional frameworks?
How can the artistic and cultural field address the paradox of art-washing and private investment while public institutions face austerity and political instrumentalisation?
In the current political climate, what does resistance mean for artists, researchers, and educators, and what tactics might be necessary to respond to these shifting conditions?
And how can we ‘do’ theories and concepts of change, such as Wynter’s plot?
Drawing on Augusto Boal’s principle of theatre as a rehearsal for revolution, the sessions guided by Laura Dubourjal and Linnea Langfjord Kristensen, emphasised the active role of the spect-actor, collapsing the divide between performer and observer so that everyone present could intervene, propose alternatives, and rehearse forms of collective action. In parallel, the practice of affidamento, a feminist method of entrustment developed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, invited participants to ground their reflections in relations of mutual reliance, accountability, and situated knowledge.
Through play, breathing, storytelling, and re-enactment, the group experimented with forms of collective study and performance, in which embodied exchange became a means of imagining and testing other ways of organising, resisting, and relating.
Together, these approaches encouraged re-enactments and embodied explorations of collective tools and strategies for our collective present-futures.
To prepare for the discussion, we organized a series of preliminary meetings where we mapped out each participant’s methods, tactics, and tools—not through conventional introductions but through breath, movement, sound, laughter, food, and games. We intentionally slowed down, repeated, and rehearsed.
Lina Bravo Mora reflects:
"The Plot(ting) research group was a nurturing space to reflect with other socially engaged practitioners. The body-based methodology created trust within me to bring my most honest self to the group and to address the challenges of my work and the opportunities to radicalise and strengthen it. As an artist working with NGOs in spaces of repression and educated within art institutions, thinking collectively with Wynter's notion of the Plot felt like a support to rely on in these uncertain times, within untrustworthy institutional spaces."
Mayıs Rukel reflects:
"We reenacted moments of institutional conflict, uncovering new dimensions of agency. This somatic process revealed how narratives unfold, how oppression is embodied, and how resistance emerges. Through time, reflection, and collective storytelling, our research group became a community of shared stories, practices, and methods."
Although this cycle of Tactics of the Plot took place between December 2024 and March 2025, the inquiry continues as an evolving practice of thinking, moving, and creating together. On this page, you can listen to audio stories from each participant and watch the three-video episodes recorded during the March 2025 gathering.
Participants
Lina Bravo Mora
Mayıs Rukel
Inte Gloerich
Sepp Eckenhaussen
Wouter Stroet
Elisa Giuliano
Co-difficultators
Linnea Langfjord
Laura Dubourjal
Patricia de Vries
Video
Yana Khazanovich
Assistant camera
Lefteris Katsarakis
Sound
Andrés García Vidal
This project was done in collaboration with the INC (Institute Network Culture) and kindly supported by CoECI – Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation.
Linnea Langford Kristensen (b.1991, DK) is a writer and artist working between performance and text, supported by (sceno)graphic elements, video and workshops. Her practice explores questions about reality, language and the dominant narratives, norms and values that affect everyday life, and the rippling effects this has on everything from mental health to the climate crisis – with special attention to the ways in which ideas of ‘the meaningful life’ are constructed through popularised narratives and embodied in everyday actions and desires.
Laura Dubourjal is the creative and production coordinator at Art & Spatial Praxis. Her practice as a multidisciplinary visual artist and fashion designer draws from classical theatre techniques to work with emotional memory, behavioural landscapes, and interactive forms. She develops role-playing methods and uses open rehearsal as a site for collective and personal practice. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, she works with rehearsal as a tool for collective inquiry, exploring how groups inhabit and question the stories and structures they share.
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