Tanzquartier Wien

Giulia Palladini’s lecture focuses on the idea of foreplay, a theoretical framework she has been developing in her work over the last couple of years to discuss a particular mode of performance production existing outside of predetermined structures of recognition in terms of professionalism, artistic achievement, and a logic of eventfulness. Borrowing the term and the concept from sexual terminology, she refers to foreplay as the condition of prolonged preliminarity in which artistic labour exists before and beyond its potential value realisation, as well as the possibility to disobey the logic of progressive time determining a supposed realisation of value: the accomplishment of a project, the climax of an event or the retrospective attribution of value to previously unpaid labour. In Palladini’s proposed use of the concept, foreplay denotes a peculiar temporality of artistic production, which can be considered both as paradigmatic for contemporary forms of precarious labour (too often suspended in a condition of eternal preliminarity) and also functioning as a counterforce within productive economy, as a prelude in which labour has not yet been assigned a value. The idea of foreplay shall be discussed not in light of a negative ontology – as a practice which is not yet, or not quite “the real thing” – but, on the contrary, as an affirmative horizon for a different measurement of temporality in pleasure and in production.