In a world where bonds are systematically broken — by wars, forced migrations, policies of exclusion and exploitation — making kin is a subversive act. It means resisting the logic of isolation, the culture of the enemy, the construction of the “other” as threat. It means reactivating possibilities for care, reciprocity, and alliance—against the grain of separation and hierarchy.
Staying with the pain
We don’t wish to speak of kinship in naive or romantic terms. Pain, anger, loss, structural violence—these cannot be bypassed. Making kin is not an idyllic dream of harmony. It is—following Donna Haraway—a situated, “tentacular” practice that does not avoid conflict but passes through it. Kinship can be formed through friction, through limits and fractures.
Kin as alliances between vulnerabilities
In times of dehumanization, making kin can mean forging alliances among those who have been stripped of their humanity: between humans and non-humans, between racialized bodies, migrants, queer, poor, extinct or soon-to-be-extinct lives. These alliances are not built on similarity or identity, but on the shared terrain of risk and vulnerability.
Bayo Akomolafe reminds us that “the world is not something to be solved, but something to dance with.” His philosophy encourages us to recognize vulnerability as a space of connection and transformation—where wounds become meeting points rather than lines of separation.
Recognizing the kin that already exist
Even amid collapse, connections endure. The question is not only how to make kin, but with whom are we already in kinship, unknowingly? Who are we already touching, encountering, being shaped by? Making kin is also an act of recognition—an interruption of the loneliness and marginality that pervade our times.
Making kin as radical imagination
In an age of new colonialisms—economic, extractive, digital—making kin also means imagining other worlds: other ways of dwelling, of being together, of generating value not based on growth, profit, or domination. It is a speculative, poetic, utopian act—in the most concrete sense: inventing livable practices for unlivable times.
Accepting that not everyone wants to make kin
Alliance cannot be a moral imperative. We must also leave room for withdrawal, protection, and silence. Making kin must never be an obligation. It is always a situated choice—and often a painful one.
The role of the festival
The performing arts have a unique capacity to render relationships visible and tangible—to create spaces where kinship is not just represented, but enacted, inhabited, embodied. In times of separation and dehumanization, the performing body—vulnerable, affective, present—can become a territory of alliance. A space where new forms of coexistence can be imagined and tested.
Performance unsettles hierarchies: between spectator and performer, human and non-human, self and other. It opens cracks through which unfamiliar forms of kinship may take root.
Through somatic practices, relational choreographies, immersive devices and site-specific actions, the performing arts become laboratories of co-presence—spaces where we can remain in conflict without resolving it, stay with complexity without simplifying it. They are tools to make the invisible visible, to listen to what has been silenced, to build communities that are ephemeral yet deeply meaningful.
In this sense, the performing arts don’t just represent change: they provoke it, rehearse it, embody it. They become spaces where kinship is possible—even if only for a moment. And sometimes, that moment is enough to shift a trajectory.