On Composite Bodies and New Media Dramaturgy

This dialogue between the artist and performance maker Kris Verdonck and scholar and dramaturg Peter Eckersall explores the dramaturgical significance of Verdonck’s work that typically features composite bodies, prototypes and machinic objects. Verdonck’s utilization of objects is often termed as “figures” and “actors” that are agents to express poetic sensibilities and an uncanny politics that question our existential relationships and our sense of place in the world. With reference to Maurizio Lazzarato, we consider the implications of Verdonck’s work as “the assemblage of human and non- human flows, [made] from a multiplicity of social and technical machines” (Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Semiotext(e), p. 51, 2014)? What are the implications—political, social, aesthetic—of Verdonck’s work that follow from such an ontological understanding of the machinic?