Attempt at Doubt. The Abandonment of Aesthetic Automatisms Through Collective Exercises in the Performative Practice by Didymos

The research examines how contemporary performance art challenges aesthetic habits, which often manifest as disruptive and constraining elements within imaginative faculties. The Italian duo Didymos focuses its oeuvre on deconstructing routine and unintentional behav-iors. The artists employ a series of performative practices involving the audience in a political experience by im-plementing the category of doubt. Together, they engage in the execution of the most mundane actions, with the overarching objective of dismantling layers of conven-tional knowledge. This process entails a deliberate depar-ture from sensible automatism, ultimately facilitating an escape from arguably apolitical modes of engaging with the world. The essay explores Didymos’s recent artistic practice, A Social Gym, confronts the category of doubtused by the duo with Jacques Rancière’s concept of dis-sensus, and attempts at tracing the bind between aesthetic norms and artistic expressiveness from the perspective of the aesthetics-politics relationship.