Performing hope at hopelessness: radical rhetorics, critical states, vulnerable populations

My performances and installations question the connections between the forces that cause social injustices and environmental catastrophes. Affective multimedia performances generate spaces of rupture, propelling radical interventions. Here, I consider the role of the activist artist as a form of radical rhetoric in situating contemporary conceptual art at/about the end of the world as a platform that focuses on seemingly distinct global issues on apart contexts e.g. the Syrian refugee crisis and climate change. I reimagine some of these stories in futurities to dismantle such hegemonic structures, subverting possibilities for the subaltern. Rhetorical studies have excluded the words and worlds of the minoritized, reducing its reach to limited Western discourses and Eurocentric genealogies, while interdisciplinary fields more comfortable in the margins, e.g. performance studies, queer of color critique, made spaces for the voices and experiences of the subaltern and the global majority. Radical rhetorics transports agency to the experiences of the minoritized individuals. I discuss how my artistic works juxtapose narratives of the world's end and radical rhetoric through decolonizing the minoritized identity, performing hope at hopelessness, and how they centralize the experiences of the always, already posthuman minorities, shaping radical rhetorics through multimedia art and performance.