Restoring History, Recreating the Past

The use of archives in performance-lectures by contemporary artists

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15756852

Keywords:

Archive, Performance-lecture, Performative narrative, Artistic research, Counter-narrative

Abstract

This essay explores the notion of a performative dimension of the archive, activated by artists who present performance-lectures through the weaving of narratives using photographs, films, documents, letters, fragments of diaries, and other memorabilia. In conjunction with these materials, artists such as Egyptian Heba Y. Amin, Brazilian Mabe Bethônico and Portuguese Joana Craveiro employ spoken word to speculate through archival gaps, producing alternative readings of historical events. Positioned at the intersection of art, history, and literature, these artists draw on their discoveries to reflect on the notions of narrative, power, and memory. By intertwining archival research with performance, they create spaces where the past is questioned and reinterpreted, opening up new possibilities for contesting hegemonic discourses. By examining Amin, Bethônico and Craveiro’s works, I aim to illuminate how their performance-lectures reveal the performative potential embedded in archival materials, underscoring the need to revisit and reimagine our historical narratives.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Gabriela Sá, PPGArtes, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil

Gabriela Sá is a Brazilian artist and researcher currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where she also completed her MA. She is also a curator at the Photography Festival of Tiradentes, one of Brazil’s largest festivals dedicated to photography and related media. In her artistic practice, Sá works with photography, moving images, texts, performances and installations, investigating possible intersections between memory and oblivion, history and fiction, the real and the imaginary.

References

Amin, Heba. “The General’s Stork” In The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no. 61–62 (2021a): 14–35.

Amin, Heba and Anthony Downey. “Drone Technologies and the Future of Surveillance in the Middle East: Heba Y. Amin & Anthony Downey in conversation”. (2021b). Accessed September 10, 2024, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/drone-technologies-future-of-surveillance-middle-east/.

Austin, John Langshaw. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London and New York: Verso, 2019.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History”. In Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 389–400, 2006.

Bethônico, Mabe. Mabe Bethônico | 20th Sesc_Videobrasil Festival of Contemporary Art, 2017a. Accessed July 10, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffm BGU4u.

Bethônico, Mabe. “Perguntas para Mabe Bethônico. Respostas para Ana Pato”. In Anais do IV Seminário Internacional Arquivos de Museus e Pesquisa: a formação interdisciplinar do documentalista e do conservador, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, MAC-USP, 211–219, 2017b.

Bethônico, Mabe and Radu Lilea. STONES, WORDS, IMAGES. Design/Arts/Culture, v. 3, nº2, 80–88, 2023. https://doi.org/10.12681/dac.32025

Borggreen, Gunhild, and Rune Gade, eds. Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013.

Callahan, Sara. Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

Catalão, Marco. “Uma genealogia para a palestra-performance”. In Urdimento, v.1, n.28, p. 4-14, 2017.

Craveiro, Joana. “A Live/Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories. Performing Narratives, Testimonies and Archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Roehampton, London, 2017.

Craveiro, Joana. “A Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories: Performing Oral Histories of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution”. In Memory, subjectivities, and representation : approaches to oral history in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain, edited by Benmayor, Rina, Cardenal de la Nuez, María Eugenia, and Pilar Domínguez, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 207-229.

Downey, Anthony. “Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity: Critical Archives and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art” In Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey,. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2015.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shanne B. Lillis, New York & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Estética do Performativo. Translated by Manuela Gomes. Lisbon: Orfeu Negro, 2019.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The transformative power of performance: a new aesthetics, Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008, 25.

Frank, Rike. “When Form Starts Talking: On Lecture-Performances” In Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, no. 33 (Summer 2013): 4–15.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. “The order of discourse”. In Untying the text: A Post-structuralist reader. Edited by Robert Young, 51–78. Routledge & Kegan Paul: New York, London and Henley, 1981.

Hammonds, Chris, ed. A Short History of Performance: Part II – The Lecture as a Work of Art, London: Whitechapel, 2003.

Ladnar, Daniel. “The Lecture Performance: Contexts of Lecturing and Performing”. Doctoral dissertation, Aberystwyth University, 2013.

Mbembe, Achille. Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. 2015.

Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reice, and Razia Saleh, 19–26. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2002.

Pato, Ana. “Negotiating the invisible”. In Mabe Bethônico: documents – making public the construction of memory, edited by Ana Pato and Mabe Bethônico. Belo Horizonte: Videobrasil, 2017.

Rainer, Lucia. “On the Threshold of Knowing: Lectures and Performances in Art and Academia”, transcript Verlag, 2017.

Ravetti, Graciela. “Narrativas performáticas” In Performance, exílio, fronteiras. Errâncias territoriais e textuais, edited by Márcia Arbex and Graciela Ravetti, 46-68, Belo Horizonte: FALE/UFMG, 2002.

Downloads

Published

01.07.2025

How to Cite

Sá, G. (2025). Restoring History, Recreating the Past: The use of archives in performance-lectures by contemporary artists. Archivo Papers, 5, 103–121. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15756852