Collaboration and Co-finitude Article Swipe

Our collaborative work started in 2019 on the pretext of being part of the organizing committee of the Performance Studies international (PSi) annual conference scheduled for the following year.Under the banner of 'Crises of Care: Act, respond, engage', the 2020 conference would bring together various 'streams' or sub-conferences that proposed an in-depth focus on a particular theme and corresponding way of working.The four of us (together with Rayya El Zein) proposed a stream titled 'Ends'.Our initial thinking in connecting our stream to a larger conference on 'Crises of Care' was to articulate connections between our work with collaborative methods for thinking, doing and writing (or care for one another) with our shared interests in ideas related to extinction, eschatology, planetarity, mourning and the non-human (or the crises of care themselves).The 2020 conference was subsequently cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we continued the work as a collective and then with colleagues who had registered for our stream.We started calling our group Ends, as we found the intersection in the theorization of ends and collaborative methodologies a position germane with possibilities to think through the larger crises of care that became all the more pressing during the pandemic.The use of the name is performative of our methodological intentions insofar as we are deeply committed to practices of co-authorship and the reflections about co-finitude and performance that are formed therein.If the unfolding ecocatastrophe and its entanglement with history, politics, technology and culture is presenting humankind with an ongoing multiplicity of crises, we wondered how starting from horizontally organized modes of collaboration could offer ways to care, entries to engage and respond to issues that can seem so overwhelming (or hyperobjective, as Morton would say (see Morton 2013)) and existential.After the PSi conference was postponed and then cancelled, we felt the need to continue thinking through ends and ways to care for them, especially amidst a pandemic that put death back amid our lives, all the while having the actual dying often happening in painful isolation.This article stems from one of the events organized amidst the feeling of living among the ends in the last thirty-six months.On 9 July 2021, we hosted a symposium titled 'World Ends Day', which was part of the series of events that Performance Studies international hosted throughout that year, under the Constellate Program. 1 'World Ends Day' took place online and the speakers included Rustom Bharucha, Steve Dixon, Eva Horn, Zarina Muhammad, Amanda Piña and Sankar Venkateswaran.It was an occasion to imagine, discuss and share perspectives on what a performance theory of ends might be.If colonial, capitalist and modernist systems have simultaneously denied and meted out death and finitude in a projection of everlasting growth, progress, expansion, youth and innovation, then the call to live with ends implies not only how we live or how we make and attend to performance, but also a larger systemic critique.Living with ends, with ending times, implies different ethics, redefining the way we consider life, living and liveness.Such an ethics demands a different way of caring for what came before and will come after.Performance understands ends.Few other creative forms are so directly tied to their own finitude.Whether we understand performance according to ontologies of disappearance (Phelan 1993), as mechanisms of memory and perpetuity (Schneider 2011) or as means of communication and control (McKenzie 2001), we acknowledge performance in relation to its power to end.And yet, it seems 'an attempt to provide a flexible framework for the activities of ... groups, in order to identify possible constellations of shared interest, opportunity and interaction' (Performance Studies International 2021).