Edited by Anik Fournier.

This publication documents and shares the trajectory of If I Can’t Dance’s engagement with ‘Social Movement’ as the field of inquiry for its seventh biannual programme (2017–18). Social Movement: Through the Lens of Performance and Performativity investigates how performance ontologies around bodily experience, affect and the relational better one’s understanding of social movement – and in turn how that understanding expands performance vocabularies.

Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Selçuk Balamir, Anne Boyer, Judith Butler, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nell Donkers, Pascale Gatzen, Édouard Glissant, Ayesha Hameed, Sands Joseph Horwitz-Dijks Murray-Wassink, Shannon Jackson, Rudolf Laban, Gregory Lennon, Audre Lorde, Ros Murray, AnnaMaria Pinaka, Tina Reden, Marjan Sax, Rebecca Schneider, Taka Taka, Simone Weil, Nagaré Willemsen; and postcard insert by Reza Mirabi.

A publication printed on the occasion of MOMMY, a group show that considered the mother, with work by Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sonya Hamilton, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eliot Porter, Jeff Preiss, Aura Rosenberg, Diane Simpson, Barbara T. Smith, Frances Stark, and Rosemarie Trockel. It also included new site-specific works by Cathy Wilkes and Anicka Yi, and a performance by Karin Schneider.

Selected writings by Lydia Davis, Doris Lessing, Elena Ferrante, Lisa Baraitser, Silvia Federici, Sara Ruddick, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Thomas Nagel, Anne Truitt, and Maggie Nelson.

A PDF of the reader can be downloaded here.

Reading / Feeling centers around the notion of affect, a term that delineates a field where the personal and the political meet through sensory movements between bodies. Affect, as a pre-emotional experience, constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of society. Reading / Feeling considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, with a selection of texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s reading groups in Amsterdam, Toronto and Sheffield for the past two years, as part of the programme Edition IV—Affect (2010–2012). It also includes three new essays, short statements by reading group members, and artist pages.