Author: Guest Author

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Which Life of an afterlife? By Felipe Ribeiro

In this essay, our visiting researcher Felipe Ribeiro, challenges the tendency to view performance art primarily through its afterlives—documentation, restaging, or institutional preservation—and instead advocates for recognizing its endured life as a continuous, open-ended process shaped by accumulation, incompletion, and relationality. Using the evolving project Common Ground as a case study, the author proposes performance as a living, transformative practice that resists fixation and invites ongoing negotiation, collective participation, and speculative engagement. Rather than treating performance as something that ends and is later remembered, the text calls for practices that sustain its vitality and presence across time and contexts.

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Coalescing Practices in Conservation and Performance, by Nicole Savoy

Once again, we invited Nicole Savoy, an alumna of the Hochschule der Künste Bern, Conservation of Modern Materials and Media, to report on our research festival. Nicole offers a conservator’s perspective on the performance conservation methods explored during the event, both traditional and radical. See also Nicole's previous reports on our third and second colloquium as well as her earlier review of our conversation with Claire Bishop.

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Conserving Performance by Performing Networks of Care, by Friederike Schäfer

Art historian and postdoctoral researcher Friederike Schäfer reflects on the fifth day of our research festival and exhibition, Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation (September 14–29, 2024). This event invited discussions among artists, activists, conservators, and cultural workers across sectors, with the thematic focus "Collecting and Preserving as an Act of Care."

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Collecting and Preserving Performance Art in Brazil: Establishing Protocols for Musealization in Public Museums, by Fernanda Werneck Côrtes and Anna Paula da Silva

The acquisition of performance art by museums in Brazil faces challenges due to its ephemeral nature, requiring living bodies, financial resources, and extensive documentation. To address this, the Musealization of Art (mARTE) research group has launched a project to create protocols that guide Brazilian public museums in acquiring and preserving performance art, focusing on cataloging, conservation, legal aspects, and activation history.

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Not, Yet: When Our Art is in Our Hands – Rebecca Schneider and Hanna Hölling

When we ask about how to conserve performance-based art, what are we asking? If we think of performance as itself a mode of conservation, what are we thinking? What is at stake in conserving changeability? Variability by design is as old as storytelling and the “changing same,” to quote Amiri Baraka, is a powerful mode of survivance. Thinking with hands, in this antiphonal call and response, a talking-with, Rebecca Schneider and Hanna Hölling consider what performance might teach us about endurance, duration, fungibility and the “not, yet.” What are the conditions in which the “not, yet” can thrive?

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Charisma and Desire: Pip Laurenson on the Conservation of Performance Art

Pip Laurenson explores the evolving role and authority of the artist, particularly how this role shifts after the artist’s death. Performance-based artworks have transformed the practices of museums professionals, compelling them to recognize and make more visible the networks of people and technologies outside the museum that are crucial for the continued performance of these works. However, as Laurenson demonstrates, despite this shift potentially decentering the artist, the artist remains persistently foregrounded for a range of practical, systemic, and political reasons. Laurenson examines the production of performance through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire, which provides insight into how a performance emerges as a fluid assemblage of socio-material relations. By employing the historical concept of charisma, she further investigates how the artist’s role continues to influence the transmission of ideas central to the conservation of performance art.

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Sara Wookey: Dance is Hard to See – Transmitting Trio A (1966) and other Acts of Preservation

Sara Wookey, a dance artist, choreographer and scholar, reflects on Yvonne Rainer’s work Trio A (1966) through the lens of bodily and verbal transmission, methods of remembering and material pedagogical tools. She also discusses her own work, Punt.Point, which entered the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2018. In the pursuit of reactivating and preserving dance and expanded choreographic practices in the art museum, what might be missing in the performance archive and in the recording of the transmission processes?