The lab brought together anthropologists, artists, and performance scholars to revisit the long and ambivalent legacy of radical alterity: the idea that epistemological and ontological differences may be so profound as to resist translation.  Participants reflected on how the spectre of such alterity continues to haunt contemporary theory and practice: as a critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and as a renewed site of political nativism and essentialism on the other.

The title Weary Worlding captured this tension.  To be weary of worlding is to register a fatigue with repeated calls to “make worlds otherwise” that too easily overlook their own conditions of power.  To be wary of worlding is to acknowledge that these gestures, even when decolonial in intent, remain entangled with the histories of colonial worlding—the imposition and naturalisation of particular worlds as the universal frame.  The workshop therefore asked what forms of making, imagining, and performing worlds might still be possible when worlding itself becomes an object of investigation.

Through discussions and case studies, participants examined how performance archives (understood broadly as the traces, practices, and sites through which performance endures) can serve as spaces to work through such questions.  Rather than seeing the archive as a repository of difference, the lab approached it as a field of negotiation and relation, where sameness, identity, and otherness are continually de- and re-constructed.

Emerging from these exchanges was a shared interest in alternative performance archives that foreground process over preservation, and uncertainty over closure. This trajectory continues to inform further collaborations, which foster experimental and critical dialogues across anthropology, art, and performance studies.