Protest as Performance: The Staging of CAA Protests

P K, Neelakantan and Boipai, Saroj and Karanam, Devi Meghana (2021) Protest as Performance: The Staging of CAA Protests. In: 8th International Conference on Research into Design, ICoRD 2021, 7 January 2021 through 10 January 2021, Virtual, Online.

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Abstract

This paper employs a metaphoric reading of a political event of a protest from the perspective of design and space. It does this by treating the event as a performance, thus applying the notion of staging to the real life event. Protest stagings involve expressive spatiality and visualization. Visual images from the event are examined closely to reveal various vectors at work which upset the conventional opposition between performance and life; design and emergence. The method employs aspects of staging like actors, costumes, props, devices, scripts and dialogues to highlight the dramatic appropriation of everyday space for the sake of the event. The event creates spaces that do not otherwise exist outside the performance of democratic protest and pitches emergence against design and tactics against strategy. The widespread and intense protests that took place in India over the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019–2020 period serve as the event under study. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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