Rethinking Spanish Visual Cultural Studies through an ‘Untimely’ Encounter with the Dance/Performance Art of La Ribot

This article focuses on the dance/performance art of La Ribot in order to conceive her work as a ‘theoretical object’ that articulates and reformulates key conceptual concerns in visual culture, enabling us to engage with questions that relate directly to the medium of dance/performance art and to think in a trans-disciplinary manner about other visual media. Through an exploration of La Ribot's formal and conceptual concerns in relation to embodiment and subjectivity, including sovereign power and resistance, language and silence, movement and stillness, repetition and difference, choreographic commands and contingencies, horizontality and verticality, gender ambivalence, or presence and erasure, La Ribot's dance/performance art transforms our perceptions and reconfigures our way of relating to our own and other bodies, potentially leading to the capacity for political action in an unpredictable futurity. Finally, I argue that La Ribot embodies the significance of dance/performance art for reformulating and putting pressure on critical and theoretical interpretations of visual cultural practices. Her performative pieces encourage us to mobilise theoretical and critical concepts, so that they can travel, to use Mieke Bal's term, across disciplines and media, thereby potentially causing to emerge new ways of interpreting visual cultural practices

Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Epistemology · Performative utterance · Relation (database · Silence · Sociology · Subjectivity · Visual arts · Architecture, Art, Education · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Philosophy · Public Spaces through Art