On Tuesday, May 24, at 2:00 p.m. CEST, Drs. Hanna B. Hölling and Jules Pelta Feldman of the Swiss National Science Foundation project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge will present the keynote lecture at the “New School” seminar of Berlin-based performance collection Something Great. Their talk, The Afterlives of Performance, will introduce wide-ranging perspectives, from the theoretical to the pop-cultural, on the conservation of performance art. The talk will be followed by a conversation with Mariama Diagne (Post Doctoral Researcher, SFB 1512 Intervening Arts, Freie Universität Berlin) and Shelley Lasica (Choreographer & Artist, Precarious Movements), moderated by Felipe Ribeiro (Associate Professor of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). The audience will also have the chance to contribute questions and comments.
The webinar is free to attend; registration is required here.
Abstract: The Afterlives of Performance
Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Performance works—ephemeral, sensitive to site, embedded in history, and often tied to the body of the artist—have long been considered beyond the reach of conservation and restoration. In this presentation, Hanna B. Hölling and Jules Pelta Feldman will introduce the theoretical and practical fundaments of the conservation of performance. Reaching beyond the documentation-based archive, conservation offers a variety of modalities for approaching the long-term care of performance – both inside and outside collections – and their afterlives. Among the questions asked will be, what is performance when examined through the lens of conservation, and how does conservation change in the face of performative forms. Drawing from their current research, Hölling and Pelta Feldman will include examples of established as well as experimental approaches to performance conservation, and also consider the ways in which performance itself serves as a form of conservation.
Featured image: Still from Pippin Barr, The Artist is Present, 2011.
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 