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“[Bookperformance] explores modes of performing and thereby creating knowledge about the meaning of cultural production and belonging in a multilingual and pluricultural world.”
*Prof. Carsten Junker, TU Dresden
“Mirol’s captivating intervention, staged as an extended kinetic performance fusing dance, spoken word, video projections against a backdrop, and audience participation in annotating the [“Bookperformance Manifest”], invigorated our debate around the manifesto’s expressive possibilities, the role of the archive, and the ephemeral nature of the form. As a manifesto scholar, I found it to be at once lucid and densely allusive, accessible yet challenging and fiercely provocative”.
Dr. Julian Hanna, TiU
“During the process we discussed individual meanings and compared the conceptual and phonetic fit[s]. Thereby I gained some meaningful insight into the Bookperformance practice in the context of the textual flow of each of the [manifest threshold] to get at the rhythm of the English version, while allowing for German phonetic peculiarities, and still ensuring that the message is not dulled. During the Bookperformance we spontaneously ended up engaging speakers from the audience and together with the second part of the Bookperformance, an invitation to edit the [“Bookperformance Manifest”] text itself in English, the lines between author and reader were blurred […]. Since the venue was the study center of the museum […] displaying artistic artifacts and interacting with archival material, the creative collaboration was also shaped by the academic and artistic inspiration this space evokes”.
*Laura Handl, PhD candidate, TU Dresden
“While the prototypical manifesto is loud, decisive, contrarian, and self-contained, [“Bookperformance Manifest”] challenges these conventions by immersing itself in another manifestary tradition. It is dialogical, openly inviting readers to participate, fostering hospitality, generosity, and open-mindedness. The multilingualism of [it] adds another layer of pluralism, making it an inclusive endeavor rather than a closed and final tract. The performance itself invited participants to intervene in the ongoing writing process of the [“Bookperformance Manifest”], adding comments, erasing, and sketching, […] a living document, open for new voices to enter. It is an interesting process in which there is no separation between text and performance—the text is the performance, and the performance is the text”.
*Dr. Nana Ariel, Tel Aviv University
“This is indeed a remarkable way of looking into the fundamental problem of textual hermeneutics. [...] How do we retain the critical space to make thoughtful and creative reading possible? [B]ookperformance is finding an answer to make reading more critical and participatory. This is a deconstructive agenda to arrest the monological ways of looking into books as an object, to be mastered to extract some meaning out of it and the meanings are mostly determined by hegemonic narratives or ideological prejudices. [Bookperformance] poses a counter-discourse, offering a radical reading strategy in which books are re-born every time we approach it through new phenomenological perspectives and new context-driven approaches. I could also see that [it] allows the possibility of a decolonial and polysemic textual epoche. This is indeed a new politics of reading, a new ethics of responsibility with the text”.
*Prof. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, Kazi Nazrul University
“[Bookperformance] literalizes the idea of the manifesto as a constant “work in progress”, blurs the lines between who has “authority” over a text and a performance. [It] offers not only full of interesting content, but it challenges the boundaries of what a manifesto is and can be […] with video installation, invited scribbles on the page, live edits of the work, multiple languages of performance, and the involvement of the corporeal body in the process of writing. Çiğdem MiroMirol has a solid theoretical foundation to her work; it is academically robust […]. She invites us to expand our definition of both manifestos and performance art, not to mention the concept of “the book” itself”.
*Dr. Breanne Fahs, Arizona State University
******Co-authors of Bookperformance Manifest: Holding Life Unfolding Archive der Avantgarden (ADA), Dresden, 2024.