Archive Discourse and Mediality

Which documents and statements, traces and medial artefacts can the history (or histories) of the performative arts in general use? This fundamental question is asked with considerations of archive practice – collecting, organising and storing – in the age of digital media in mind. It recalls a concept of archiving developed by Michel Foucault. His vision of archive was not the state institution with its legal task but as the basic prerequisite for historiography in a system of discursive practices.

In Foucault’s archaeological concept, the archive’s role as an aspect of discursive practices is extended to become a special kind of historiography, a characteristic of which it is to be constantly re-written:

Current reflections on the archive combine demands for ‘fluid access’ to past events with questions of media theory. The authentication strategies that denote statements and images as documents are questioned and supplemented by aspects of contemporary practices in and on the archive. The documents or traces – both terms must be more precisely defined in the light of media theory – of performances are perceived as medial transformations, and the technical, aesthetic and discursive circumstances under which they take place must be considered. Their medial nature is no longer overlooked as simply the necessary premise for use but is perceived as the very precondition for making contemporary interpretations and contextualisation.

Reflecting on mediality in this way goes beyond the specifics of archives for performance art or dance (or other forms of performance) and relates to far-reaching questions of the possibility of and circumstances under which movement can be stored in various media. What is stored as movement (and in what way) in photographs, film and digital media? What are the resulting artefacts and what distinguishes them from the texts and musical scores which audiovisual media have followed, but by no means replaced, as forms of data storage?    

Treatment of the audiovisual ‘recordings’ of a performance archive – both in work on and in the archive – should take into account the discourse of the documentary or the photographic as reflections on the relationship between object and image.