Lively Archives: Activating Performance Archives and the Performativity of Archival Methods

The one-day Lively Archives workshop opened up the archival methods of four artists and researchers from the history of the biennial programs at If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam. Led by Hoetger together with If I Can’t Dance curator of archive Anik Fournier, the session drew special attention to how the projects unfold the multi-faceted contours of liveness and the live encounter, as well as, by extension, the relational and embodied lives of archives. The four projects from the If I Can’t Dance archive looked at included: the speculative-fiction approach of Basque artist Isidoro Valcárel Medina in his 18 Pictures, 18 Stories (Edition IV – Affect; 2010-12); curator Grant Watson’s method of using the interview format to register embodied queer histories in his ongoing How We Behave project (Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication; 2013-14); the role of storytelling in the transmission of inter-generational trauma through Lebanese diasporic communities in Mounira Al Solh’s Freedom is a Habit I’m Trying to Learn (Edition VII – Social Movement; 2017-18); and, finally, the ‘auto-anarchiving’ strategies of the Gift Science Archive database, a dynamic structure developed to archive the relational nature of painter and body artist Sands Murray-Wassink’s artistic practice (Edition VIII – Ritual and Display; 2019-21).

During the workshop participants were invited to dig into the material and methods of the four case studies with Fournier and Hoetger, and to critically consider how they might be mobilized and made to intersect with other archival methods, bodies of performance work, and institutional contexts within the arts and humanities more broadly.