Manifesto ACTS! marks the charged space between the manifesto as a literary object and the manifesto as a material intervention. In this space, where the rhetorical and the discursive intervene in the world of social action, and in turn undergo various processes of reification and remediation, the manifesto produces its own terms of –terms which often exceed the intentions of the document’s authors.

While its popular use might seem anachronistic, recalling bygone periods of artistic and political ferment, the questions posed by the manifesto, and its history, remain potent, and are especially critical today, in a historical moment in which speech acts carry increasingly fraught and more ambiguous political meanings, and in which advances in internet use blur the lines between personal and public speech. 

For this project, a question of particular relevance is the question of survival. If the defining attitude of the manifesto is declarative, an attempt to present the authors’ viewpoints in accordance with or in opposition to prevailing norms, in what ways does the manifesto imagine its own persistence? How does it imagine its movement, either toward the realization of the world it affirms or against, and therefore beyond, the world it rejects? In other words, what is survived in and by the manifesto?

Crucial to the question of survival are questions of form: how does the manifesto survive, materially and discursively, after the moment of its production? Responsibility: to and for whom is the manifesto responsible? Risk: what does the manifesto risk in interrogating the conditions of its production? What does it risk in putting its language to work? Intervention: how does the manifesto participate in its reception? How is it marked, catalyzed, or constrained by the social world it enters? What affects and antimonies saturate its afterlives?

In exploring these questions, Manifesto ACTS! initiates projects, experiences, and interactions which take up notions of the public and publicness, authorship and authority, spectacle and speculation, text and intertextuality. The programme is curated by iranti press founder, Maryam Kazeem and writer Joshua-Segun Lean.