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Contribution short abstract

The use of performance art as a tool for disclosure in service of social and protest movements has grown during the last 30 years. Pedagogically approaching this trend allows us to examine the processes of collective reframing that it activates and promotes, as well as his potential for change.

Contribution long abstract

In recent decades, social movements have increasingly incorporated performing arts into their repertoires of contention, transforming protest into an aesthetic, embodied, and relational practice. Performative artivism functions not merely as a symbolic language but as a pedagogical dispositif that produces learning through bodies, affects, and imagination. Rather than transmitting information in a didactic manner, it activates cognitive, sensory, and empathetic engagement, reshaping perceptions of social and political issues.

Drawing on John Dewey’s theory of experience, learning is understood as emerging from the continuous interaction between individuals and their environment. Protest performances operate within this experiential space, mobilising memories, values, and lived experiences to generate new meanings. Participants and spectators are thus involved in experiential processes that foster reflexivity and cognitive transformation, rather than receiving explicit lessons.

Such dynamics are evident in recent mobilisations, including climate justice protests, youth-led movements of the 2020s, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations across Europe, where choreographed actions, symbolic gestures, and embodied rituals have played a central role in articulating political claims and forging collective identities. At the collective level, artivism intersects with processes of Collective Action Framing, reconfiguring shared interpretive frameworks. Central to this is prefiguration: the enactment in the present of the social relations and values movements seek to realise in the future (Maeckelbergh, 2011). Performative actions thus function as temporary laboratories in which political imaginaries are materially and symbolically staged.

Within this framework, the artivist assumes a hybrid role—performer, educator, and facilitator—expanding the transformative and political potential of performative art within contemporary social movements.