The Performative Dimension of Anti-Speciesism Activism: Essere Animali and Anonymous for the Voiceless

Abstract

In this paper, I present performance activists’ work — developed at the beginning of the twenty-first century — that reflects and problematises emerging issues and problems relating to environmentalism and anti-speciesism in the form of ‘smart mobs’. I would like to highlight how these ‘alliances of bodies’ in space (Butler 2017) use aesthetic strategies, reminiscent of agit prop and guerrilla theatre (Davis 1966), but from the early 2000s join the new media, becoming ‘smart mobs’, according to the definition by Rheingold (2003) to distinguish them from the more playful ‘flash mob’, also born in New York at the beginning of the 2000s. Although the correlation between art and politics has found its most explicit theme in the utopian thrust of the twentieth-century art and theatre scene, it is necessary to re-understand the political nature of art and the semantics of activism in the post-twentieth century historical-cultural context.