Fluid Access: Archiving Performance-Based Arts
Barbara Büscher and Franz Anton Cramer
VALIE EXPORT Center Linz
15/04/2019, 18.00
Debates about the irretrievability of performance have accompanied the process of historicizing performance art as a presentation both in museums and on stage for about 20 years. Yet there are records and artefacts of all kinds that can refer to the past. In order to call them up and evaluate them, different archive procedures and techniques are necessary. Depending on the institutional context and artistic concept, these very different processes of recording, collecting, and organizing were at the center of the research project "Verzeichnungen. Media and Constitutive Orders of Archival Processes of the Performing Arts". Performing and exhibiting are - understood in this way - scenarios of processes of appropriation and overwriting that are never completed: mobile access. Nevertheless, the archive with its media transformations and descriptive structures forms the basis of contemporary understanding.
The lecture summarizes central results of the research, explains some of the case studies, from which in turn a series of questions arise for the practice - the archive, the research.
