As part of my current research on Audio Arts Archive I would like to facilitate a reading session on the notion of the performative and affective archive. I will propose a series of texts that reflects about performativity within the context of contemporary creative archives. The reading group will be a preparatory stage for the event “From transcription to transduction: Joseph Beuys revisited” a collaboration with CARC PhD students - Kingston University, and Tate Archive. This will consist of a workshop led by Lucia Farinati focused on recordings of the lecture/performance by Joseph Beuys at the ICA in 1974 during the exhibition Art into Society - Society into Art.
Recording and listening back to recorded speech has been a key form of engagement with Audio Arts magazine since the outset of the project in 1973 by artist Bill Furlong and collaborators. But what does change when the act of listening and playing back becomes a shared form of participation within the space of an archive? Participants will be invited to freely interact with the original (unpublished) recordings made by Audio Arts at the ICA in 1974. By producing in promptu transcripts, re-enacting original speeches and/or creating new sound works the workshop will scrutinize ideas of speech as social sculpture. The event explores the tension between inventory space and imagined space, asking what a creative use of the archive might be within the established parameters of preservation and access established by institutions such as Tate. By imagining and extending the life of the Audio Arts Archive beyond its inventory, the project attempts to establish a creative space for collaborative research through the contribution of new conversations and performative acts. The underlying questions of the project are: how can an archive be defined in relation to an artists’ practice? How is an archive active rather than the ultimate trace of previous activity?
Preliminary references for the reading group
Jones, Amelia. 2013. Unpredictable temporalities: The body and performance in (art) history in Borggreen, Gunhild, and Rune Gade eds. 2013. Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen: 53-72.
Pollock, Della. 1998. Performing writing in Phelan, Peggy, and Jill Lane. 1998. The ends of performance. NYU Press: 73-103
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical re-enactment. Routledge Ltd, in Jones, Amelia, and Heathfield, Adrian, eds. 2014. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd: 137-150
Tamboukou, Maria. 2016. Feeling narrative in the archive: The question of serendipity. Qualitative Research 16 (2): 151-66.
Vidiella, Judit. 2015. Embodied archives as contact zones. Efímera Revista 5 (6): 16-23.
Lucia Farinati is a PhD candidate at the School of Art, Kingston University. She has recently co-published The Force of Listening, a book that explores the role of listening in the contemporary intersection of art and activism, Errant Bodies Press, 2017.
30
Friday 18 May 2018
5-6pm
A Reading Group On Performative and Affective Archives. Part One:
Lucia Farinati
............................................................................................................................