Digging into the Archive IV - We will not let you go

FR, 10 09 2021, 3:00 – 7:00 pm
Performance workshop
Concept: Performatorium (Olivia Jaques and Marlies Surtmann)

We will not let you go is the title of the 2017 submitted performance for the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance by Fanni Futterknecht. The H13 submissions are stored at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich; a now extensive repository of potential performances. From this collection Olivia Jaques and Marlies Surtmann chose Futterknecht's concept and, with her kind permission, may devote themselves to it in  Digging into the Archive IV. Futterknecht's tableau-like situations and moments of performative image are inspired by media pictures and protests in public space and are now to be carried into the art space. In order to collectively trace the performance we want to negotiate and rehearse a possible implementation of the concept. For us, the concept represents a latent form of a performance. This space of possibility contains an infinite number of potential realisations.

By Digging into the Archive, we want to 'exhume' a performance from the archive of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich and reiterate it with the help of a systematic analysis of performance documents. The project demands the end of contemplation: not a re-enactment, but a forensic composition of the traces, a physical recreation of a past event. For this, we use a ‘home made’ method, based on Diana Taylor's concept of the scenario. This forms a framework that allows for multi-perspective interpretations and shifts in time, place and culture; a formalistic structure that makes equal use of the modes of tradition.

On a practical level, we address the following questions: What can be experienced or understood through the process of repeating? What kind of updates or reinterpretations take place? What does this change of perspective imply for a feminist perspective on history, but also for an everyday dealing with past events? The focus shifts from the question of accurate and complete transmission to the question of what and how we learn from past (performance) events for a recent understanding of society and culture.

Artists and those interested in performance art are invited to participate in this experiment. Digging into the Archive is embedded in a research project for the archiving of performance art. By participating in the workshop, the participant agrees that recordings and images of the workshop, as well as images of any (artistic) results within the research project Archiving Performance Art? On the Archiving, Transmission and Mediation of an Art Form in Motion are subject to CC BY NC regulations and may be published and used for further research.

Please come in comfortable clothes (robe without patterns/prints).

Due to the measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19, the number of participants is limited to 8 persons. Please register until 9th of September HERE with the subject line Digging into the Archive IV. 

Digging into the Archive  is a collaboration project between Performatorium Vienna and Kunstraum Niederoesterreich.