The mixed societies that have emerged as the result of migration have benefited enormously from the arrival of people from many different cultures. Cities have become more heterogeneous ('colourful'), music and cinema have been enormously enriched and philosophy gratefully uses the potential offered by thinking along the lines of - and through metaphors relating to - migrancy. Mary Jacobus has argued that this has been the case for much longer in psychoanalysis. Theorizing itself opens up its creativity thanks to the need to shed the limitations harboured by local habit. There is an aesthetic to thought as much as to, say, fashion, film, or food. In short, this project examines: the positive import on the everyday that comes with migration, the now-common state of hybridity (where speaking of origins becomes almost forced and often impossible) and the 'small' aesthetics. It focuses on the utterly small yet significant aspects of everyday culture and academic thought that are 'foreign' in origin but not 'foreign' any longer. In a sense, these aspects are 'beyond' identity but carry traces of 'foreignness'. My current video works all centre on this cultural transformation.

This project results from my intense involvement with PhD training, both in the context of the ASCA Theory Seminar and in a large number of individual PhD projects. Through these pedagogical activities - in the Netherlands traditionally and oddly credited as 'research', not as teaching - I have developed insight into the indispensable contribution that can be expected to be made from reflecting on and deploying concepts in interdisciplinary cultural analysis. In 2002 I completed a book on this topic called 'Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide' (University of Toronto Press, the publisher of my previous pedagogically oriented work), which consists of an argument in favour of this view. A series of case studies demonstrates the consequences of replacing paradigm- and discipline-based methodologies with an open re-examination of concepts that have a history of 'travelling' between disciplines, historical periods and contexts, and even cultures. Under the rubric ‘travelling concepts’ I work on incidental, often commissioned papers.

Performance is not; it occurs. It happens and takes time. It has a past and a future, and hence, a present. From linguistics and the philosophy of language, we take the notion that utterances do something: they perform an act that produces an event. From theatre, we borrow the notion of role-playing, which can be extended to include social role-playing, then restrict it to that aspect of playing that is effective in that it affects the viewer. From anthropology, we take the idea that the performative speech act, in the extended sense, requires the participation in the production of meaning, of the ethnographer's partner, that is, of the people belonging to the culture studied. In art, this entails the indispensable participation of the visitor to the museum or the viewer of the work, without whom the artwork is simply nothing, just a dead object. In this project, then, due to this triple allegiance, the notion of 'performance' will be taken in all its ambiguity. The term encompasses 'performativity' as opposed to being distinct from it. I have tentatively worked with this cluster of aspects of the two terms in several recent articles on contemporary art not bound to specific traditional media. My ongoing video installation project ‘Nothing is Missing’ explores performativity in the process of documenting speakers who talk on camera on very private matters.

This term was central to one of my books on visual art ('Quoting Caravaggio', 1999), but I am not satisfied I have fully grounded or exploited the underlying idea. Under the heading 'indispensable anachronism' (Damisch), others have elaborated it differently. I am interested in joining this inquiry with current concerns about tradition, both cultural and academic, and with methodological issues of distance and proximity (Phillips), the place of the archive and museum presentations. This is not a well-organized project but rather an ongoing interest that shows up in much of my work.