| Sumario: | This paper addresses the ways in which performative imagination in a restless social context operates through a case study of the dancer and performer Mihran Tomasyan's performance You're Not a Fish After All. Originally created in 2010 after the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, the artist developed and adapted his work throughout the years following a series of assassinations and traumatic historical events in Turkey. This paper particularly analyses its reinterpretation within and after Istanbul's Gezi Park movement, an event that became a pillar of a democratic revival of Turkish society where the Gezi Park in Taksim was occupied by activists and 'creative performativity' inhabited the space-time of action. The question arises as to how performance, both as an artistic genre and in the form of political action, challenges the present circumstances and contributes to the construction of alternative space-times. I argue that Tomasyan's work-in-progress performance reveals the ongoingness of events (Robin Wagner-Pacifici, What is an Event?, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017) while holding an element of surprise. It also incorporates an 'archival impulse' (Hal Foster, 'An archival impulse', October 110: 3–22, 2004) to revive the present through the acts of remembering and reminding collectively. This article analyzes the ways in which the artist fostered a performative social imagination that transcended the time and space of the physical performance.
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