At a time when the rhetorical trope of the “tragic” is stereotypically deployed as a common place of newscast spectacularization and humanitarian management of refugeeness and the vulnerable body, Antigone’s ambiguous poetic, epistemic, and cultural genealogy becomes for us a source of critical genres and decolonial discourses about the ethics and politics of witnessing, mourning, and suffering. Viewed from this perspective, Antigone is not taken merely as a model figure of classical western modernity, but rather as a cross-cultural and postcolonial/decolonial performative condition of the possibility to grapple with the question of embodied resistance –in its synapses with body, gender, race, social relationality, and survival– with regard to contemporary conditions of political violence, biopolitics, otherness, “foreigness”, displacement, vulnerability, and production of “superfluous” populations. What do the critical returns to Antigone’s figure —but also the critical departures from it— signify regarding the bodies of resistance, at a historical moment of post-political devaluation of dissent and democracy in contexts of neocolonial dominance, militarism, border securitization and necropolitics? The undertaken research re-inscribes Sophocles’ tragedy in the multiple (historical, political, epistemological, national, transnational, local) contexts of contemporary critical theory and poetics in order to rethink democracy through the question of how it engages with differential vernacular cultures of power, subjectivity, (non-)belonging, “the people”, citizenship, agonism, participatory politics and the construction of new publics. The research is located on the cross-sections of social theory and the performing arts. Through this interplay the aim is to problematize the epistemic, aesthetic, and cultural assumptions of both, especially regarding the ethico-politics of testimony and representation within the contemporary world order. The research experiments with transdisciplinary practices that go beyond conventional boundaries between philosophy and performance, theory and practice, textuality and embodiment, as well as politics and aesthetics.