Understanding Olympic ceremonies through a new lens: author interview

Professor Rodanthi Tzanelli has published her latest book, "Olympic Ceremonies as Relational Machines: Paris 2024’s Techniques of (De)mobilisation."

Following publication of Olympic Ceremonies as Relational Machines: Paris 2024’s Techniques of (De)mobilisation, Professor Tzanelli has shared key insights into the book, the inspirations behind it, and what comes next.

Please tell us about your new book?

My book explores Olympic opening and closing ceremonies as much more than displays of national identity or examples of what critical theorists call the “society of the spectacle.” I argue that especially the ceremonies of the 21st-century Olympiads have developed into powerful future-making spaces, mainly because we live in challenging times that invite forward thinking, even in spaces of entertainment. Such ceremonies are created collectively by artists, policymakers, technologists and cultural activists who work together to imagine new ways of living together in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world.

At the heart of the book is the idea that Olympic ceremonies function as what I call “relational machines.” They bring together diverse social groups, creative practices, technologies and media infrastructures to produce shared experiences. Through choreography, storytelling, digital innovation and embodied performance, ceremony creators reinterpret Olympic values such as excellence, respect and sportsmanship, transforming them into visions of hospitality, coexistence and human connection.

But really, interpretation is not just the ceremonial creators’ privilege. The book challenges traditional approaches that treat ceremonies as straightforward expressions of state power or national messaging. Instead, I suggest that they are better understood as fluid affective environments – atmospheres that invite audiences to imagine places, identities and futures in new ways. These events reveal both the possibilities and the limits of creative freedom within highly regulated global spectacles.

Using the controversies surrounding the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony as a key case study (but not the only example), I examine how Olympic ceremonies generate or advance public debate. Rather than viewing them simply as products of the culture industry, I present them as complex social events that encourage forms of conviviality extending beyond the human-centred perspective, opening conversations about diversity, coexistence and our collective planetary future. In fact, as the book attests, this process can also move in the opposite direction, generating opportunities for extremist political formations to threaten the health of planetary commons.

Ultimately, the book invites readers to rethink what Olympic ceremonialism does culturally and socially – not just reflecting the world as it is, but helping us imagine what it might become, with various positive and negative consequences.

Can you give an insight into the research process and journey leading up to publication?

Not in any neat, linear way. I grew up reading pop translations of first-generation critical theorists in a village that loved festivals. In the book stands of travelling vendors, I bought my first copies of Fromm, Adorno, Lazarsfeld and Arendt as a teenager. I also developed a bad habit of watching the Olympic Games mostly to evaluate their ceremonial stylistics – and by this, I mean how they inflect, rework and disseminate cultural heritage.

Yet it is precisely this projection of uniqueness that acts as a lightning rod for critical mega-event theory: perform your culture and you ultimately end up reproducing regionalist and nationalist sentiment. In my early career, I bought into this critique wholesale, not least because there is truth in the argument that ceremonies of this type can expose the ways national and capitalist interests converge behind post-industrial productions of spectacle. But look closely, and you begin to ask a different set of questions: are ceremonies “the Olympic industry”? Are they simply what Olympic protocol dictates? More fundamentally, should we treat Olympic ceremonies as a single, coherent event within the larger mega-event framework? I started asking these questions in a previous monograph on the Rio 2016 ceremonies, but at the time, I was more interested in rethinking what an Olympic industry may be for a deeply polarised and unequal society such as the Brazilian one.

This time, I wanted to make it clear that I do not view such ceremonies as a single event – that protocol and pageantry are not identical to their artistic and popular-cultural segments. Not because the latter are not political, but because their cultural politics is articulated differently from straightforward social movement grammars, including those of the Olympic movement itself. The research journey therefore became one of disentanglement: separating ceremony protocol from artistic practice, institutional messaging from creative experimentation, and official narratives from the affective experiences generated by performance. Once we isolate the art-pop aspects of Olympic ceremonialism from the rest, we must ask why these segments continue to be held hostage to ideas of “world order” that belong to a different era.

Several decades after their institutionalisation as part of a cultural programme shaped by the trauma of war and the promise of international reconciliation, Olympic ceremonies now operate in a radically different social and technological environment than the one inspired de Coubertin’s agenda. The rise of global media networks, digital participation, transnational mobility and new forms of cultural activism have changed both how ceremonies are produced and how they are received.

This realization led me to revisit a large archive of Olympic ceremonies comparatively, paying close attention not only to official scripts and visual designs but also to creative labour, audience interpretation, public controversy and media reaction. Paris 2024 became especially important because it exposed many of the tensions that had interested me for years: between protocol and innovation, heritage and experimentation, national representation and planetary imagination.

In many ways, the book emerged from my dissatisfaction with explanations that reduced ceremonies either to propaganda or to entertainment. I wanted to understand why, despite their obvious institutional constraints, these events continue to generate unexpected meanings, emotional investments and public debates.

The journey to publication was therefore less about proving a theory than about learning to ask better questions. Rather than asking what Olympic ceremonies represent, I became increasingly interested in what they do: how they assemble people, technologies, affects and cultural memories into temporary but powerful visions of collective life. That shift in perspective ultimately became the foundation of the book.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Books do not produce bulk takeaway meals for global readers. In fact, this particular book is deliberately designed to appeal to broad interdisciplinary audiences, and some chapters will be more to the liking of some readers than others. This is intentional and far from a “marketing” strategy, as the “key selling points” might suggest.

I just wanted readers to constantly have to change perspective – not just visually, but also affectively and ethically. I wanted them to consider ceremonies as hostages to an Olympic heritage wedded to war, racism, disablism, sexism and national pride; to the pleasure of spectacle, which is fun, but which few people readily admit to enjoying; to kin-making and the formation of creative solidarities, because those who make these shows form communities of interest and passion in order to bring them into being.

I also wanted readers to reflect on the fact that the very same people who are often maligned as privileged creators in some strands of critical mega-event studies may not always be as privileged as we assume. Many occupy precarious positions within cultural industries, subject to institutional pressures, public scrutiny and ideological expectations. They may themselves become targets of prejudice, exclusion or political attack.

More broadly, I hope readers will recognise that artistic production is never insulated from wider social struggles. Even art-making and popular cultural production are increasingly vulnerable to the growing forces of global populism, authoritarianism and digital biopolitical violence. The fierce public reactions to recent ceremonies remind us that cultural performances have become key battlegrounds in contemporary conflicts over identity, memory, belonging and public values. And Paris 2024 provided such a fertile ground for generating this multi-perspectival narrative that I could not resist the temptation to explore. It brought together many of the tensions that animate the book: creativity and regulation, heritage and reinvention, hospitality and exclusion, collective joy and political antagonism.

One thing I can say is that the book’s last chapter is bound to divide readers. There, I argue for the excision of geopolitically situated narratives of heritage from the Olympic cultural programme, giving Olympic ceremonies’ creative leaders more freedom to develop less authoritative cultural imaginaries of place, and to imagine forms of belonging that are not exclusively mediated by the nation-state.

My argument is not that history, memory or cultural heritage should disappear from Olympic ceremonies. Rather, I question whether national frameworks should continue to enjoy a near-monopoly over how those histories and memories are narrated. I do have the feeling that critical mega-event theorists may also have a problem with this position, not just nationalist proponents or marketing agents.

Ultimately, if there is one takeaway I would hope for, it is that readers begin to see Olympic ceremonies as more complex and politically ambivalent cultural forms than either their critics or their promoters tend to acknowledge. They are neither mere propaganda nor harmless entertainment. They are contested spaces in which different visions of community, humanity and the future struggle for visibility. Whether readers agree with my conclusions or not, I hope the book encourages them to think about these events in new and perhaps unexpected ways.

What is next for you?

A good rest would be my main comment.

Well, perhaps one further comment.

I would like to invite university colleagues, and anyone interested in the future of creativity to visit my most recent endeavour: a blended AI–human audio-visual storytelling project hosted on Vimeo.

In many ways, it extends some of the book’s central concerns with creativity, relationality and the productive interplay between humans and technologies. In fact, it audio-visualises many of my previous books. The endeavour is not for fun. If you want to have fun, find a hobby.

The project explores the creative potential of what I call “relational machines” in everyday life – assemblages in which human imagination, emotional intelligence, cultural memory and technological capacities work together rather than in opposition.

Anyone who thinks that this is the product of a master machine that has somehow diminished my creative potential, or replaced human agency altogether, I invite them to try to recreate the initiative themselves. They may quickly discover that meaningful creative work still depends on judgment, interpretation, aesthetic sensibility and a capacity to tell stories that resonate with human experience. I actually wanted to find out for myself how many times one has to re-shoot a scene to get it right; and why it matters to get it right, when you don’t create a story just for yourself. Whether through photographic narratives or AI compilations, audio-visual productions are primarily human outputs And sources of human malice, I should add, when it comes to some of the events narrated in my book.

Despite the anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, I remain sceptical of both utopian and dystopian narratives on machinic futures. Machines do not lead the show of imagination. They remain tools – albeit increasingly sophisticated ones – for those with the cognitive, emotional and cultural education to direct them.

So, after a well-earned rest, I will consider my options. But these are not for sharing yet.

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