Inspired by the anarchival practice (see about the archive), I encountered the object lesson picture books as fragments of a historical narrative that remains partial and inevitably points beyond the confines of the archive. Departing from the object lesson picture books that circulated in imperial Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and are housed in several digital and physical state and university libraries in Germany and Portugal, I began to experiment with artistic methods in my archival research and which resulted in what I call a performative-archival practice.
I took up the archival documents as performative programs or “triggers” of extra-archival production. Doing so allowed me to question the documents and objects that constitute the archive at play within my research, and through them, expand the ways in which such archival document relates to conflicts and imaginations of the present-day society (Zaayman, 2023, p. 23). This led me to ask: What do these picture books, their images, and their visual pedagogy mean for me and society today? In consequence, investigating and dealing with politics and pedagogies of the visual, the production of racial difference and whiteness as well as images of ‘nature’ turned specifically important to my research.
Starting from a critical posture towards the emergence, mechanisms and politics of the institution of the archive, my chosen methodologies attempt to inquire and to expand the potentials and limitations of performative and visual artistic practices as modes of archival research. Such approach lays out how I put into motion archival documents and come to know through those methodologies, emphasising performativity, visual, and affective knowledges within the history of education.
Programs and scores
I mobilise the picture books as and as part of “performative programs” or scores (Fabião, 2013), to borrow the language that performance artist Eleonora Fabião uses to describe the set of enunciations, the script, for the enactment of a performance. The performative practice comprises a set of previously stipulated, clearly articulated and conceptually polished actions to be performed by the artist, the audience or both without previous rehearsal. Experimentation is enabled, guided and moved through such scoring.
A score may be written, thought, spoken, or quite simply an object or image that functions as a tool of information and inspiration (Burrows, 2010, p. 141). In such reading, the score is a source or onset but whose shape may be very different from the final realisation of the performance (Burrows, 2010, p. 141).
The basic idea that drives the artistic experimentation in PerformArquivo is to take up the picture books and/or single images as such program/score and thereby setting in motion the clusters of a diverse set of objects and their (potential) uses, speech acts, texts, doings, sounds, conventions, affects, bodies, gestures, images and imaginaries, subjects, architecture, skills, routinised behaviours, tacit and consciously employed knowledges – and the relationships created between all those elements. This method approaches the act of seeing as an event or performative act, which not only emphasises the continuous remaking aspect of seeing and archiving, which, as Rebecca Schneider reminds me when addressing the repetition in performance, is repetition in variance (Schneider, 2001; see also Rose, 2011, p. 731). Slippages or something unexpected might occur. In PerformArquivo I sought to emphasise such recursiveness of the archival practice when mobilising materials and devices such as semi-transparent papers, pins and projectors, to provoke, to vary, the ingrained assumption of the opacity and permanence of archival documents/meanings.
Different exercises of a performative program character were set in play to score ‘seeing an image’: projecting an image onto my body, tracing, fragmenting and reassembling images on semi-transparent papers, re-enacting an image. The enactment and repetition of a performative act, its circumscription or delimitation in a scenic or particular context, can highlight what often goes unnoticed and routinised in the performative act and thus open up possibilities for critical questioning.
Reflection-in-practice
In a process of thinking-doing, I engaged in artistic production with the picture books, in a continuous mode of reflection-in-action (Schön, 1991). In this reflective professional mode, my thinking about what I am doing goes hand in hand with my doing. Reflection-in-action is developing a “feel for” something and a special attention to the spontaneous involvement of tacit knowledge and skills in an ongoing situation or performance. By surfacing those tacit and routinised practices, they can open up to restructuring in subsequent action (Schön, p. 50;54). It is a restructuring of ‘seeing an image’ that will occur through noticing - and noting – thoughts, actions, affects and emotions. It is through the embodied register that I notice the shifts, surprises, ripples and tensions, the laughter and release in the process. Surfacing tacit and routinised knowledges and opening them up for restructuring through reflection-in-action is an important pillar of what the doing of the performative program as an anarchival approach seeks to do.
strategies
...superimposing
...juxtaposing
… tracing
...disassembling
...fragmenting
... zooming in/out
...regrouping
...re-enacting an image
… re-enacting seeing an image
...repeating, repeating, repeating
...seeing collectively from different social positions
...narrating an image
… narrating the act of seeing
...entering an image through someone else’s narration
...projecting onto
... gesturing towards/against
To mobilise the performative program as a form of study and critical engagement of reflection-in-action, I chose a set of conceptual and material strategies that can be related and move around, issuing countless possibilities.
A performative-archival practice
The performative-archival practice, as I suggest here, is a mode of archival engagement that combines artistic experimentation with critical inquiry, that seeks to unlearn the imperial and historicist authority of archives and archival methodologies. Rooted in a decolonial and postcolonial understanding of unlearning, this practice aims to challenge the hegemonic structures within archival research by engaging with archives as sites of contested historical production. Through performative, video-, photography- and visual arts-based methods such as re-enactment, tracing, projection, and narrative re-assemblage, the performative-archival practitioner enacts archival documents as performative programs or scores that invite creative exploration of the archival documents in an “undisciplined” manner. Such approach foregrounds the creative, embodied, subjective, affective and collaborative dimensions of engaging with archival materials. By “doing the archive” in a reflexive manner, the performative-archival practice incentivises a continuous reimagining of what we come to know through the archive.