Cartography of performative imaginaries in climate movement: How creative activists perform disobedience in cultural spaces

This article constructs a dynamic cartography of the performative imaginaries shaping climate activism, analyzing the wave of creative and artistic direct actions targeting cultural spaces in Western Europe and North America. It documents and examines how activists, from groups like Extinction Rebellion and Dernière Rénovation to artivist collectives such as Fossil Free Culture NL, mobilize museums and heritage sites as stages for creative disobedience. By employing embodied and visual narratives, from throwing soup and gluing to artworks to performative mourning with costumes, activists delineate institutional responsibility and challenge the socio-ecological relations embedded within neoliberal cultural landscapes. Through digital ethnography and data visualization, the study maps the evolving repertoire from 2016 to 2025. The findings reveal a dual strategic movement: a place-based activism that localizes the global through situated critique and globalizes the local by diffusing that critique through a networked performative activism. The analysis constructs a spatiotemporal map to illustrate the choreography of a dynamic socio-ecological identity that reconfigures the relationship between culture, nature, and politics.