Praxis–Body–Text: Revisiting Histories of Travel and Colonial Encounters Through Performative Practices

The article provides a field report on some of the artistic approaches deployed in the transdisciplinary Praxis of Social Imaginaries (2023–2025) research project. The project emphasizes performative, site-specific, and embodied methods to enhance engagement with historical texts, viewing them as knowledge addressing present and future issues. It highlights the medieval and early colonial past’s rich performative culture, advocating for texts to be experienced as participatory events. The article describes two performative events: a mourning ritual inspired by colonial genocide accounts presented in Bartolomé de las Casas’s A short account of the destruction of the Indies (1550) and a performance-lecture using the 1513 Requerimiento text. These events illustrate the project’s approach to creating transformational learning environments through collective, participatory experiences that challenge traditional academic rituals.