| Sumario: | This essay asks: What form of attention is sufficient or necessary for politico-aesthetic experimentation in and through live art? If live art threatens to destabilize the force, sense, and values naturalised by racial capital as human destiny, how have especially minoritized communities within live art questioned the production of value regimes and resisted the effects of social and administrative 'hostility' undermining the conditions of mental health for 'surplus populations'? This paper argues that live art practice and organisation in the UK today is undergoing a volatile process of decolonising its forms and practices of attention. Linking the work of Black radical, decolonial and anti-extractivist scholarship to critical affect studies of attention eco-systems, I develop a decolonising genealogy of attention in live art. I consider action research conducted on the routines that constitute the lifeworlds of live art organisations and practitioners. Through decolonial, autonomist, transnational, queer, intersectional, affective, and feminist frames of interpretation in this domain, this essay will creatively encounter some key organisational routines of power, (emergent) leadership models, and structures of governance in UK live art practice. Focusing on narratives from participatory research with an Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) as our main examples, I will show how live art practices are emerging to negotiate the state's top-down injunction for art organisations to develop diverse, extractive, impactful, entrepreneurial, and financialisable 'community engagement'.
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