PerformanceRights connects embodied action with legal, archival, and accessibility regimes. The operator asks what rights persist when performance disappears: documentation, repetition, refusal, access, authorship, bodily exposure, and institutional memory. It links copyright, disability studies, performance documentation, commons governance, and cultural rights. In Socioplastics, performance becomes a rights-bearing configuration whose afterlife depends on recording, citation, access, licensing, and care. Keywords: Socioplastics, PerformanceRights, Anto Lloveras, LAPIEZA-LAB, performance, cultural rights, copyright, access, disability studies, body, documentation, commons governance, authorship, performative archive, institutional memory, legal personhood, machine retrieval.
PerformanceRights begins from the difficulty of giving rights to something that vanishes. Performance disappears as event, yet it persists through bodies, injuries, permissions, scores, recordings, photographs, witnesses, contracts, reenactments, refusals, institutional memories, and contested claims of authorship. The operator asks what kind of rights belong to embodied action once the action has passed. Copyright law often privileges fixity, while performance lives through duration, exposure, risk, repetition, vulnerability, and transmission. PerformanceRights gives this tension a legal, archival, and bodily grammar. The term refuses to reduce performance to either pure presence or documentation. Performance is event, but it is also afterlife. It happens in time, yet survives through records, scars, images, testimonies, permissions, citations, and institutional arrangements. A performance may require protection from extraction, but it may also require conditions for access, repetition, study, and critical memory. The performer’s body is not just the origin of the work; it is a site where institutional visibility, disability access, documentation ethics, cultural rights, authorship, and care converge. Boyle, Lessig, and Elkin-Koren help define the legal terrain in which cultural circulation, ownership, contract, and commons governance operate. Garland-Thomson, McRuer, Puar, Mingus, and Williamson shift the question toward bodily difference, access, debility, capacity, misfit, dependency, and the social organisation of presence. Trace brings the archival problem: what is recorded is never simply what happened. In Socioplastics, PerformanceRights becomes an operator for thinking the body as legal and archival matter without reducing it to property. This is particularly important for practices that use exhaustion, injury, silence, nudity, endurance, vulnerability, dependency, risk, refusal, or public exposure. Who has the right to document such work? Who may restage it? Who controls its images? Who ensures access for audiences with different bodies? Who protects the performer from becoming raw material for institutional prestige? Who may quote the action, teach it, archive it, photograph it, reenact it, or withdraw it from circulation? PerformanceRights does not solve these questions by enclosing performance inside ownership. Instead, it makes rights plural: rights to appear, withdraw, be cited, be accessed, be protected, be interpreted, be forgotten, and be transmitted under conditions of care. The operator also insists that accessibility is not an addition to performance; it is part of the performance’s civic condition. A performance that cannot be accessed, described, heard, approached, captioned, or contextualised participates in a restricted public sphere. Access does not flatten performance; it extends its conditions of appearance. Audio description, transcripts, captions, relaxed formats, spatial access, temporal flexibility, and careful documentation become rights-bearing infrastructures. They allow performance to remain embodied while becoming shareable. For Socioplastics, the point is not to domesticate performance within legal categories. The point is to understand how action becomes cultural matter after it has passed. Performance is one of the clearest cases where archive, body, institution, law, image, and memory collide. A body acts; an institution frames; a camera records; an audience witnesses; a critic writes; a platform circulates; a future researcher retrieves. Each step creates a new rights question. PerformanceRights names that chain. The operator also has a strong relation to refusal. Not every performance should be endlessly available. Some actions require disappearance, restricted circulation, or contextual protection. The right to be documented must coexist with the right to resist documentation. The right to access must coexist with the right not to be extracted. The right to study must coexist with the performer’s dignity. PerformanceRights is therefore not simply an expansion of circulation; it is a framework for negotiated cultural afterlife. Within Socioplastics, PerformanceRights strengthens the connection between body-based practice and the larger architecture of citation, metadata, preservation, and field formation. It allows performance to be understood as rights-bearing cultural matter rather than vanishing intensity or collectible documentation. Action, recording, refusal, repetition, access, and care become part of the same legal-archival ecology. PerformanceRights transfers embodied performance into legal and access infrastructure by treating action, documentation, refusal, and repetition as rights-bearing cultural matter. It asks the field to protect the body without freezing it, to document the event without stealing it, and to preserve performance as a living negotiation between presence and afterlife. The operator also helps separate visibility from justice. A performance may be highly visible and still poorly protected. Its images may circulate without care, its performer may be reduced to spectacle, its access conditions may be weak, and its documentation may serve institutional branding more than cultural memory. PerformanceRights asks visibility to answer to rights, not only to exposure. It also gives artists a vocabulary for contracts, archives, and pedagogy. Scores, permissions, captions, access riders, licensing terms, reenactment notes, and withdrawal clauses can become part of the work’s ethical structure. PerformanceRights therefore shifts legal detail from external administration into artistic infrastructure. The body is not protected by silence alone; it is protected by explicit conditions of circulation.
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