Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater's ecological interventions and
traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories,
climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice,
Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan's site-specific
performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and
rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena.
Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia atlas
is animated by a disorienting, anti-mapping strategy, producing a
deterritorialized, nomadic, fluid atlas unfolding in real time as an
archive of climate change in multidimensional, active space. The book is
designed for pedagogical access, with interludes that consolidate the
learning outcomes of the experimental theory animating each
site-specific performance.
Accompanied by close descriptions of five performances and supplemented
by digital documentation available online, this volume intervenes in
discussions on climate change, urbanism, and
postcolonization/decolonialization, and contributes to interdisciplinary
studies of ecology and environmental politics, postcolonial/decolonial
theories and practices, performance studies and aesthetics, in
particular public art, and performance as research.