Zoning Play Complex

A Neighborhood Zoning Play is an as yet unrealised radio play based upon histories of transnational cultural production circulating in and through (post-)socialist Europe. Working towards the eventual staging of this play, the Zoning Play Complex workshop emerged as a testing ground for a cast of characters-in-the-making, all emergent from a pantheon of ‘infrastructural specters’ that haunt technologies of organization and cultural policy. In the workshop, the characters met as cultural partners gathering for a dinner party to discuss their collective vision for a new center for heritage preservation.

With the theater space loosely annotated to suggest the presence of a dinner table, a parking lot and a bar, a map of potential character relations was set up for participants to engage. In the first part of the day, they identified the contours of the eight characters being activated – their material needs, psychic desires, social relations and personal behaviors. Then, in the second part of the day, the participants enacted a process of group decision-making. Choosing from different linguistic/conceptual/political registers of (non-)alignment made available to them on the workshop menu, they track the open contradictions that emerge within and between each of the characters. Through the dramaturgies of negotiation that ensue, both the participants and the characters enter and exit zones of solidarity, navigating the unevenness of structural conditions that touch us all.