IETM Rijeka Opening keynote speech: Anti-production with Goran Sergej Pristas

Performing arts practices of today survive in a peculiar ecology thanks to the role given to various cultural institutions, whose mission is no longer to produce art but to reproduce a consumerist relation to work in art, whereby the artists grow less and less present through their artworks and more and more through their labour. What art institutions produce today are no longer works offered to public viewing and valorisation, but it is valorisation itself that is reproduced and exchanged. The many decades of care for the spectator – who went through every stage, from observer to participant, and then became an "emancipated spectator" – have resulted in the subjectivation of spectatorship. Whereas the producers spoke of “their artists”, the curators now talks of “their audience”. The audience is viewed as a model of the public, but what we see from stage is programmed spectatorship. Is it not high time to discuss the production of works, spectators and politics of watching?