Summary: In The Creation Of The World, Jean Luc Nancy introduces the term mondialization or world forming, the making of a world. He prefers this to the term globalization for a variety of reasons. Mondialization evokes, for him, an expanding process throughout the expanse of human beings, cultures and nations. This is unlike globalization that seems to him to be the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality. Nancy discusses globalization as "the suppression of all world-forming of the world", as "an unprecedented geopolitical, economic, and ecological castastrophe". Globalization leads to the opposite of an inhabitable world, to the un-world [immonde]. His primary concern is to create a world that is "the contrary of a global injustice against the backdrop of general equivalence". I would like to discuss The Flying Circus (FCP), an artist laboratory that takes place in different sites in Asia, as an instance of intercultural performance, through a close reading of Nancy. The FOP can be said to have occurred due to the increased mobility in a globalized world. It was initiated in 1996 when the art world exploded with cultural and artistic exchanges, its artists were both self-confident and hungry to experience the world. Since 2004, most of these artists come from city centers or art metropolises; they are often trained in universities in Europe or the US; they are acutely aware of the speed of world economy and the power of information revolution in its electronic forms; they participate with savvy in the contemporary art market; they embrace hybrid identities, multiplicities as often they come from diasporic backgrounds; they are actively engaged in creation, expression and art in their communities of choice. Despite all this, I would like to argue that the FOP is a study of world forming, closer to mondialization rather than globalization.
