I attempt to grow an artistic-archival methodology that I engage in as individual research practice and share workshop settings. This artistic-archival methodology incorporates visual, material, performative, textual and embodied modes of knowledge production. The point of departure are always the archival materials. I have come to think about them as “scores”, “programs” or “triggers for creative processes”.
Performance artist Eleanor Fabião uses the term performative program to an “encounter of bodies with the matter of the world and other bodies” (Fabião, 2013, p. 2013, translation by me). Those enconters contain objects, dialogues, bodies, affects, images, sounds, etc. As such they can be understood as social programs, structuring consciously or unconsciously social interactions, experiences, encounters (Fabião, 2013). The practicing or enacting of the performative program “creates bodies and relationships between them; it triggers negotiations of belonging; it activates affective circulations unthinkable before the formulation and execution of the program” (Fabião, 2013, p. 4).
Fabião defines the program as the enunciation of the performance: a set of previously stipulated, clearly articulated and conceptually polished actions to be performed by the artist, the audience or both without previous rehearsal. The program is what enables, guides and moves the experimentation. Here the program approximates the notion of the score. I use the score that may be written, thought, spoken, or quite simply an object or image, as a “tool of information, image and inspiration, which acts as a source what you will see, but whose shape may be very different from the final realisation” (Burrows, 2010, p. 141). Taking up the archival documents as such a score that sets in motion the creation of bodies and relationships between them, embracing a diverse set of objects, speech acts, sounds, affects, bodies, images, etc. is the basic idea that drives the artistic experimentation. Performance, as an artistic modality, can function as a bracketing of the performative and social program enacted and therefore opens it up for interrogation and critical engagement.
While the idea of the score or program is borrowed from performance, it resonates with the visual practice too. Think about the score “see this image”. It allows me to explore what are the objects, affects, dialogues, imaginaries, etc. that are part of this encounter between subject and image bound together by the program. This idea or question then drives then my visual practice. I consider the making of these images as crucial mode of knowledge production in themselves rather than just an illustration. Researching the images through image-making and through manipulation allows me to reflect on practices of showing and seeing, otherwise hindered in working solely language-based (Berger, 1972; Mirzoeff, 2011).
I am also interested in the material affordances of the picture books. The reflections about how the particular materiality as bound picture books is involved in the acts of seeing led to the creation of the card set “Seeing through”. Bound as books there is certain linearity of seeing suggested and a collective reception of the book requires coming close to each other in a rather intimate home setting. Reflecting on the embodied engagement that the picture books enable I attempted to create a card set that would work through its material affordances itself, too.
One of the key materials that I work with a re semi-transparent papers and pins. Together they create a dispositif that links one or various activations – materialized in superimposed layers – to an image. Image and activation(s) become hinged. The idea is that in the workshops offered around this artistic-archival methodology many layers are being created that allow for a plurality in engagements and positioning towards the materials. One image might then be accessed through various layers that are divergent and potentially in tension.
In the digital archive the “ties across the archive” take over that function of binding or hinging different layers of the same images to each other. The semi-transparent papers can be a response to the score of the image or other archival material and/or can turn into scores themselves. The latter might invite the viewer/reader into an activity with that image.
strategies
...superimposing
...juxtaposing
...re-enacting
...disassembling
...repeating, repeating, repeating
...seeing collectively from different social positions
...fragmenting
... zooming in/out
...narrating
...projecting
... embodying
...entering an image through someone else's perspective
...regrouping
... gesturing towards/against
