Performing Ends is a four-year international research project funded by FWO. By analysing the work of various contemporary performance makers in The Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia, the project investigates how after the post-dramatic and posthumanist waves, we can now speak of a ‘posthumous’ tendency in the performing arts as a response to unfolding ecological, political, and technological ends. The project takes its cue from recent theatre and performance scholarship, which has placed ‘end’ as a key theme in contemporary theatre responding to multiple crises. It seeks to push the artistic and theoretical posthumanist perspectives that might still harbour “remnants of humanism” towards the “posthumous” in which human beings are decentred. The posthumous implies a perspective on our time as one “after extinction”, in the literal sense of extinction of humans and more than human beings, but also of cultural and symbolic orders.

Principal Investigators: Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, and Eero Laine

Post-Doctoral Researcher: Jonas Schnor

Doctoral Researchers: Luca Domenico Artuso and Theresa Spielmann

How are scholars in the humanities as well as artists and art curators rethinking the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds in our times of climate change and ecological crisis? How is the role of art and philosophy changing in response to the destruction of ecosystems, species extinction and the impact of both on social life?

In this seminar and lecture series we explore philosophical, artistic and activist perspectives that think with and beyond posthumanism: perspectives on human and nonhuman death, mourning and disappearance in the post-Anthropocene era. The title of the series, Posthumous Perspectives, is inspired by the anthology Posthumous Life: Theorizing beyond the Posthuman (2017), co-edited by one of the invited speakers, Dr. Jami Weinstein. As a suggested new area of research in the humanities, posthumous perspectives advance posthuman theory by rethinking the relation between life and death at a time when more-than-human worlds are endangered by human exploitation of natural resources.

Organised by Luca Domenico Artuso, Anne-Lise Brevers, Jonas Schnor and Theresa Spielmann.

Upcoming Lecture

22 October 2025, 2-4pm: Nina Lykke on Posthuman Eco-Poetics and Queer Ecologies
University of Antwerp, City Campus Room S.E.207
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Past Lectures

29 September 2025: Jami Weinstein on Posthumous Architecture and the Architectures of the Posthumous

14 May 2025: Tianzhuo Chen and Siko Setyanto