To what extent could the double meaning of ‘custom’ function as tool or discursive resistance to activist strategies today. Is customs perhaps a keyword in respect of a general understanding of what activism or even activating practices intend to irrigate.

Precisely the paradoxical strategies inscribed in; the necessary and excluding strategies of creating a community, i.e. to create an axis of recognizable, reoccurring events around which a group of individuals can produce identity and allegiances. Strategies that in their turn produce notions of territory. An inside and an outside are established, or in other words a border which crossing always implies an exchange of economy, a custom.

Activist strategies constantly use, apply, deviate, undermine and activate customs of different kinds. The very accountability, its actual visibility, of an action or strategy is its invocation with costumes, be it demonstrations on the 1st of May, charity or media activism.

It is only when an opponent can detect the location of a different production that a negotiation can occur. This location must be invented, and invented outside existing or current customs in order to be successful. Such inventions however can only emerge out of singular situation and in its invention is also the production of a possible custom, which by any community can be interpreted and issued both as friendly and hostile, inclusive and restrictive.

If we understand activism as performative rather than consecutive, virtual rather than actual however its operations are with real people, issues and problems. This means that it might not be efficiency of an action itself that is of importance, but that it is the invocation, invention and establishment, or similarly destabilizing, of customs, and that it is already existing communities local and global that need to inscribe these customs in and of themselves. It is this passing from action to custom, in whatever sense, that produce activism as activating, that renders it an event.

In recent years new artistic strategies have occurred where the actual ëworkí is different kinds of animations of customs, and where what is shown to an art audience are documents, leftovers or testimonies of activities within communities or environments. The functions of such work is its in/direct relation with a community or context, not representations of communities or context as means to make visible injustices or discriminating policies etc. Strategies which often tend to, at best, offer the creator a good consciousness.

Similar strategies are articulated with activist communities where on the one side secondary level strategies are being emphasized, and on the other where the performance of activism, and its specificity, is being highlighted as an invocation in a general context, or set of customs.

This platform wish to discuss set of strategies of a wide range referring to customs in both senses of the word, however focusing on performativity. As workshop, session, debate etc. already is inscribed in sets of conventions and customs the platform will not be mediated or issue any agenda but it is the wish that different participants will bring and invent customs by themselves and in collaboration.

However, a few guest have been proposed to attend the sessions personally or over media.

The workshop is initiated by International Festival in collaboration with Palle Torsson, a number of guests are being invited but the main issue is to come together and discuss. All material with be put on a web so we can all bring media etc.

The set up will further be described as we close up to Borderline Academy.