9. Creating Art Ecologies through Contextual Analysis

This chapter introduces the method of contextual analysis and describes how working with contextual analysis, either discursively or in practice, produces art ecologies. In a contextual analysis, performances or performative events are examined comparatively, with the help of a theoretical concept, and in connection to a larger field of practice. At its core, contextual analysis is concerned with drawing out relations between performances and/or other artworks—through comparing topics, styles or artistic strategies—while exploring how these artworks jointly address and examine wider societal phenomena or developments within a cultural or artistic field. In that act, these intersections produce art ecologies, understood here as supportive, open-ended networks with many spheres of influence, in which artworks and performances enter into dialogue with one another. This method is first demonstrated by comparing the body politics in stage works of Marcelo Evelin, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Ho Rui An, pivoting around the concept of ‘politics of perception’ to organise the analysis, and then extended to the identification of ‘mycelium thinking’ across artistic research, fashion and anthropology.