Feeling Dis/Connected: Interweaving Protest in the Online and Onsite Public Sphere

Usually, people gathering locally are (still) constituting the critical embodied element in advocating for social issues. However, the recent pandemic necessitated different pathways to making one’s voice heard. In this article, I investigate protesting impacted by the restrictions of public movement in which choreographic means are used as a tool to find new ways of political mobilization: through combining the online and the onsite public sphere. With Bennett’s and Segerberg’s idea of “connective action” I explore the example of the annual “Sternfahrt” protest of the German ADFC, an NGO lobbying for cycling in Berlin. Due to health and safety restrictions it was impossible for masses of cyclists to gather for a large tour in Berlin. Instead, the organizers decided to create a static “Fahrradstern” (a star formed by cyclists) spreading across the city center (June 2020). Using the app Critical Maps, an online tool to organize “critical mass movement around the world,” the usual dynamic get-together was reversed into creating an immobile star-shaped silhouette made out of cyclists standing at pre-arranged, physically distanced spots, which could be observed on the online map in real time.
Investigating the emerging problems in this action, I argue that choreography as embodied organization and navigation of spaces onsite and online can help to understand such interconnected actions. Not least, kinespheric and kinaesthetic arrangements and particularly the empathetic involvement in a protest crucially determine whether a campaign, and especially the sense of standing up for a common cause, feels successful for its participants.