ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws her field experience between 2014 and 2015, and her research in Italy within the frame of two international festivals dedicated to performance art. While reflecting on the core of her ethnography and discussing participation and spectatorship in performance, she explores the state of simultaneously being ethnographer and performer in two performances that can be respectively defined as collaborative and delegated in Bishop’s terms. Contemporary artists in performance still propose conditions of socialization that evade normative structures of power, but the aesthetics of performance seem to have shifted toward new models of embodiment and intersubjectivity that art curators, critics, and theoreticians have either enthusiastically embraced or sharply counter argued. Through a collection of memories and ethnographic materials, this chapter provides an insight into the author experience within these contested and intertwined territories from three standpoints and types of relationship.
