(an) archive: what are the tensions/in-tentions of the archive in the body? Can the anarchive be contained in the body? Is the anarchive a process to disentangle the archives that belong to a body? What kind of archive is useful for a performer/practitioner? Can a repertory of traces and gestures be anarchived? These questions mark the next phase of this research, following its own impulses and intuitions. It is still a theoretical ongoing process that has an empirical approach.
The mise-en-corps can be presented as an act of transference and agency inquiring on the relations between gesture, repertoire, interpretation/transcription/translation, and the public sphere. In that sense, there is a space for “interpretation” of memories, subjectivities that locate people, and oneself as an oral historian. This interpretation results from a process of transcription that can help visualize things through the translation of voice, sound, silence, and gesture. According to this, following Otálvaro-Hormillosa’s (2019, 64) notion of gestural archives and the act of transfer (Taylor, 2003) of the narratives of an encapsulated memory, a specific moment of herstory from what one could both learn about and learn with. Interpretation is a performative act where agency can be problematic in terms of power relationships awareness. However, Otálvaro-Hormillosa refers to “Jennifer Brody’s discussion of the performative nature of reading visual artworks as acts of translation” to solve her ethical question, making decisions on behalf of the factor of her “reading-and-doing desire” (2019, 64). Prakash refers to Taylor in her fundamental question that is relevant again: “Whose memories ‘disappear’ if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?” (par. 3).
This shows how the relationships with the archive are multiple. On one hand, for the performer’s interpretation of their own embodied archive and the dissemination of the work, on the other. The concept of (an)archiving is provocative for my work because of the need for the unsettlement of aesthetic, academic, and cultural regimes. Moreover, it (dis)integrates the nature of what is likely to be contained or encapsulated either in a video, in writing, or the archive.
Fall 2021
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