How do I archive a performance which is not mine?

Category : Argumenta

How do I archive a performance which is not mine. How do they perform an archive is an archive/installation/sculpture/performance with pictures coming from the documentation of Medea’s Visions, a performance by Alessia Siniscalchi and Kulturscio’k live art collective.

The archive is engraved in blocks of printed papers/photographs bound with a plastic ribbon coming from an on-line low cost printer. The ribbon is fragile and can be easily broken. Blocks have different sizes and weights. In the first display, at la Ménagerie de Verre, Paris, blocks were disposed in its library shelfs and on the floor of corridors and passages between the stage and the foyer. Included, a screening of Medea’s Visions performers portraits.

In the second display, at Bellini theater, in Naples, a group of dancers and actors perform the archive before and after the Medea’s Visions. They start from a pile installed in the theatre : in the first leg the sculpture/performance held in a public space in the city and then moves towards the foyer until the beginning of the show. In the foyer, a sound installation by Phil St. George underlines actions and movements. Dancers can also say lines from Medea’s Visions and lines written for the archive performance : How do I ? – Storage – Death – Come faccio? Their bodies are archives. The main written mouvement is to throw blocks down in order to produce a noise of heavy weight hitting the floor. Some of the blocks are later used as pieces into the narrative of Medea’s Visions, going in it at of the end of archive performance and then coming back to it the when actors and dancers end their show and quit its space. Initial pile is eventually recreated.

The archive is present :

Eroding the archive Weighing its compactness Crumbling and corrupting Interrogating Activating Jouer / déjouer To perform Inside out Stacks blocks How to How do I How do they The archive is everything and nothing The archive is accessible and inaccessible The archive dissolves or compact itself again It expands The archive is space. To archive is the beginning. How many pictures. How do I store. What’s the meaning. How do I archive a performance which is not mine. Archive is all. Archive is nothing.