Lio Performingcollections 2022

PERFO
P
RMING
COLLEC
ON
TIONS
1
2
PERFORMING
COLLECTIONS
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PERFORMING
COLLECTIONS
INTRODUCTION
08 PERFORMING COLLECTIONS
Joanna Zielińska
24 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE PERFORMANCE

IN THE COLLECTION?
A Conversation between Joanna Zielińska
and Bojana Kunst
50 COLLECTING DANCE
A Conversation between Lola Hinojosa and La Ribot
68 ENIGMATIC DEBRIS
Clémentine Deliss
CASE STUDIES
102 ARCHIVING LIVE PERFORMANCE ART:
THE CASE OF OTOBONG NKANGA
Lotte Bode
122 SOME THINGS LAST A LONG TIME: THE CASE OF

THE GREETINGS FROM JERUSALEM AVENUE
BY JOANNA RAJKOWSKA FROM THE
COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
IN WARSAW
4 Zofia Czartoryska
150 TRANSFER OF RESPONSIBILITY AND KNOWLEDGE
Chantal Kleinmeulman
178 HOW TO DESCRIBE WHAT A MIRROR LOOKS LIKE?

ON RIA PACQUÉE’S MADAME AND IT
Persis Bekkering
200 (DIS)APPEARING WITHOUT A TRACE:

A CASE STUDY OF MARÍA TERESA HINCAPIÉ
Claudia Segura
222 WHAT A MUSEUM CAN (NOT) DO: PERFORMING

COLLECTIVE METHODOLOGIES WITH CIRCO
INTERIOR BRUTO
Myriam Rubio
250 VARIATION ON THE UNACCOUNTED: A TRIPTYCH,

BY MAPA TEATRO
José A. Sánchez
276 FRAGMENTS OF A CO-OP FESTIVAL

Amira Akbıyıkoğlu
298 OHO – BETWEEN THE MAGIC OF DIGITISATION

AND FINANCIAL LITERACY
Igor Španjol
314 GLOSSARY OF TERMS
324 ABOUT THE AUTHORS
5
6
INTRODUCTION
7
PERFORMING
COLLECTIONS
Joanna Zielińska
8
In recent decades, the visual arts have witnessed an unprecedented
development of performative practices. This has brought about both
a heated academic and institutional debate about the notion of perfor-
mance and the phenomenon of performativity – in relation both to ways
of presenting performance in the exhibition space and to the problem of
creating museum collections made up of performance works.
The issue of how to collect performance is at the heart of this
publication. Another important question the authors of the study ad-
dress and aim to answer is why museums should collect performance.
What is the content of the book?
The publication Performing Collections, compiled in three parts, brings

together the results of the many years of research work of the collec-
tion curators and performance scholars associated with the museum
confederation L’Internationale.
The first part of the book contains introductory texts on the
subject of collecting contemporary performance, written from a broad
research perspective, situating the phenomenon in a historical context,
in relation to a museum genealogy, and also situating it at the interface
of other disciplines such as theatre, the performing arts, contemporary
choreography, anthropology and film. This section of the book presents
a variety of research perspectives spanning diverse geographical
9 Performing Collections
areas. Although the publication aims at diversity, it does not aspire
to global mapping of collecting practices, constituting rather a pres-
entation of specific interests and research practices within the area of
confederation.
The second part of the publication includes case studies result-
ing from the long-term museological research conducted on contem-
porary collections within the confederation L’Internationale. The selec-
tion of case studies was based on interviews with artists and the heat-
ed discussions and encounters that took place, among others, during a
symposium organised in 2019 in Istanbul in relation to collecting perfor-
mance by our partner institution SALT.
The research criteria for the case studies are the diversity and
complexity of the individual practices, which in extreme cases make it
impossible to include them in collections on a traditional basis. The aim
of the research was not only to analyse specific performances but also
to look at how it is possible to incorporate selected works into muse-
um resources respecting their contextuality, complexity and need for
activation, which frequently refer to the notion of a specific body as a
repository of memory. Some artists have left clear instructions for han-
dling the work, and, in some cases, expert knowledge is needed to cre-
ate an appropriate protocol. The information gathered in relation to
these specifics provided some important clues as to how our working
method could evolve.
The third part of the publication – Glossary of Terms – is an at-
tempt to provide a handy reference list of interesting phenomena and
terms describing the methodology of working on archives and collec-
tions of performative works cited in specific case studies. Here, the au-
thors look at general cultural phenomena and philosophical concepts
such as Modernisation or Ideology, or selected terms describing indi-
vidual artistic practices such as the Breathing Archive, Anatolian Kitsch
or Prototype. The definitions collected in the Glossary of Terms make
up a handy go-to source to help map publications in terms of language.
Indeed, one of the major conclusions of this publication is that there is
an evident need for a new language and adequate way of describing
performative practices that continually elude traditional strategies of
collecting and preserving artworks.
When did it all start?
One important reference point for Performing Collections is the tem-

poral caesura of the 1990s. The decade of the 1990s and the beginning
of the twentieth century in the visual arts are variously described by
scholars of the subject as: the performative turn (after Bishop 2019),
the relational turn (after Bourriaud 2002) or the experiential turn
(after Hantelmann 2014). Whatever the terminology, this was a form-
ative watershed for performative practices, which influenced their
contemporary development in the visual arts. The philosopher Boris
Groys explicitly refers to this phenomenon as the theatricalisation of
the exhibition space:
Nowadays, one speaks time and again about the theatralization

of the museum. Indeed, in our time people come to exhibition
openings in the same way as they went to opera and theatre
premieres in the past. This theatralization of the museum is of-
ten criticised because it might be seen as a sign of the muse-
um’s involvement in the contemporary entertainment industry.
However, there is a crucial difference between the installation
space and the theatrical space. In the theatre, spectators remain
in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum,
they enter the stage and find themselves inside the spectacle.
Thus, the contemporary museum realises the modernist dream
that the theatre itself was never able to fully realise – of a thea-
tre in which there is no clear boundary between the stage and
the space of the audience. (Groys 2013)
A significant event at the turn of the 1990s was the arrival of
contemporary choreography and conceptual dance in the space of in-
stitutional art. Let us remember that the development of new artis-
tic practices was a natural consequence of the transformations taking
place in the decades preceding the 1990s, where the notions of art-
work, exhibition space and the audience had been systematically rede-
fined. These processes ultimately led to the hybridisation of forms, the
phenomenon of the post-medium condition in the visual arts (Krauss
1999) and the proliferation of practices opening up art institutions to
the phenomenon of performativity. Performance researcher, philoso-
pher and playwright Bojana Kunst, in her talk “What Does It Mean To
Have Performance In The Collection?”, draws attention to the highly
significant phenomenon of internationalism, which, after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, redefined the ways in which performance practices were
produced and exchanged in the context of the broadly conceived East
and West. Kunst writes:
Suddenly there is a ‘discovery’ of different ‘contemporary histo-

ries’ in Europe. The rise of co-production platforms, networks,
co-production festivals and the internationalisation of perfor-
mance production in general are related to this widening of
common European cultural space, and to the flows of capital
through which the models of European cultural production have
also changed considerably.
Performance and Performativity
Performativity itself extends the notion of performance. It is a fea-

ture that stimulates a response and can be attributed to an object or
phenomenon regardless of whether it is actually a performance. As
Dorothea von Hantelmann writes in her essay on the experiential turn:
To speak about the performative in relation to art is not about
defining a new class of artworks. Rather, it involves outlining a
specific level of the production of meaning that basically exists
in every artwork, although it is not always consciously shaped
or dealt with, namely, its reality-producing dimension. In this
sense, a specific methodological orientation goes along with the
performative, creating a different perspective on what produc-
es meaning in an artwork. What the notion of the performative
puts in perspective is the contingent and elusive realm of impact
and effect that art brings about both situationally – that is, in a
given spatial and discursive context – and relationally, that is, as
regards the viewer or the public. It recognizes the productive,
reality-producing dimension of artworks and brings them into
the discourse. Consequently, we can ask: What kind of situation
does an artwork produce? How does it situate its viewers? What
kind of values, conventions, ideologies, and meanings are in-
scribed into this situation? (Hantelmann 2014)
From this perspective, then, what seems important is not so

much the artwork itself, but the context in which it was created and
the reactions it evoked when activated. In Amelia Jones’ take, the con-
cept of performativity also contributes to the openness of the inter-
pretation of an artwork understood as a process. Performativity ena-
bles the reinterpretation and revision of discourses, artistic practices
and artworks. A critical strategy developed through multiple readings
of a single work introduces into contemporary art discourse the phe-
nomena of ambivalence, confusion and subversion and a non-norma-
tive interpretation of artworks, collections and archives (Jones 1999).
Performativity can also be understood directly as a curatorial method
and as a concept capable of introducing specific research threads into
museum curatorial work.
The use of the term ‘performance’ in the book is itself ambigu-
ous and multidimensional, consistently reflecting the fluid nature of the
phenomenon. It reflects an attempt to understand performance from a
transdisciplinary perspective – at the intersection of the performing arts,
theatre, literature, film and anthropology. The authors of the individual
texts, often coming from different disciplines in the humanities, refer to
various genealogies of performance, as well as to various historical ap-
proaches to the topic. Bojana Kunst speaks of performance as a process,
and the ‘work of many’, something that ‘belongs to the many’.
When I talk about performance, I refer to the whole series of

practices, collective and collaborative methods, economies and
dispositive of rehearsals, production modes, contextualisations
and disseminations of performance, to the whole biospheres of
working, which constitute the event of the performance. In this
way, performance lingers in-between all this – embodied work,
rehearsals, economies of collaboration and working methods,
dramaturgical framing and economies of dissemination. At the
same time, performance is entangled with reception; it belongs
to the scene, and performance is also a situation.
Contextuality
The publication Performing Collections is intended to broaden the re-

search field on the phenomenon of collecting performance while de-
veloping the language of discourse with which we can describe new
phenomena in art that do not fit the traditional definition of a museum.
Boris Groys writes critically about the traditional museum as a kind of
time capsule:
Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow

of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were
created to select certain objects – the artworks, take them out
of private and public use, and therefore immunise them against
the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became
huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and ex-
hibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of
past religions or status objects of past lifestyles. (Groys 2013)
The work on the book has revealed the dispersion and lack of
systematic museum research about the phenomenon of collecting per-
formance. Many performance works that are part of the collections of
institutions affiliated with L’Internationale have an extremely complex
history, often waiting to be newly qualified, described and supplement-
ed by additional documentation and interviews with artists and wit-
nesses. In a restrictive and non-inclusive collecting policy, there is of-
ten a lack of openness and the goodwill to include performative works
in collections, as their ephemeral nature often escapes the logic of a
museum.
The most heated debate around performance collecting began
when Western art institutions that have collections became aware of
the deficiencies that exist in historical collections. The consistent ex-
clusion of performance works from collections or their inclusion in an
incomplete form led to the phenomenon of incompleteness. Museum
collections also have to deal with institutional constraints in the context
of collecting art that requires a different kind of work, care and atten-
tion. Moreover, performative works are not easily ‘isolated’ from their
environment and context; they are often socially and politically linked
to specific communities and places. The question of the contextuality
and site-specific nature of performance is fundamental to understand-
ing performative work. The issue of performance linked to a specific
body or group of bodies, to a specific time, place or situation appears
in virtually all the texts cited in this publication. The choreographer and
visual artist La Ribot in a conversation titled “Collecting Dance”
describes her experience of working in white cube and black box spac-
es, drawing attention to the complex concept of the ‘roaming con-
text’ and the body as archive. La Ribot refers to the idea of the ‘original
body’ being equivalent to the primary form. One answer to the ques-
tion of why institutions should collect performance is therefore a ques-
tion of enriching the collection with context, which enhances the sense
of community that plays a key role in understanding the role of the con-
temporary museum.
Breathing and Oxygenation or the Metabolism of the Contemporary

Collection
In describing her artistic practice and vision of the institution of the fu-
ture, visual artist Otobong Nkanga repeatedly talks about the idea of
oxygenating collections and the breathing archive. Clémentine Deliss
proposes a vision of a metabolic museum finding its continuation in the
latest Metabolic Museum-University project. The researcher draws at-
tention to the energetic potential of the museum as an institution in
process, producing new taxonomies, engaged in processes of decoloni-
sation, constantly in dialogue with artists and professionals from differ-
ent disciplines.
Bojana Kunst also links performative practices to decolonising
strategies.
Many discussions today concern the role of the museums in the

history of imperial plunder. Ariella Azoulay writes how museums
are part of the construction of imperial citizenship, where pres-
ervation of the past is part of the vast enterprise of destruction
conducted at the expense of the destroyed world. In the pro-
cess of preservation, the past consists of discrete documents
and objects, and this methodology of separation and extrac-
tion is one of the imperial operations of power executed over
the objects belonging to the living world. That the museum is
now open to being a space of live performances can also be ap-
proached from this perspective – with how art institutions in the
West themselves confront their own past, with their own entan-
glement in violent history. Every collection is embroiled in a mul-
tiplicity of living worlds. From this perspective, the arrival of the
performance (and the body) in the museum can challenge the
institution’s isolation from the living world and dedicate itself
rather to the entanglements of living kinship and genealogies,
to embodied experiences and poetics of communities, to invis-
ible and contradictory histories. Otherwise, it is only another
continuation of imperial methods.
Collecting is more than just a way of transmitting knowledge; it

is also a strategy for recording history. The common perception is that
practices excluded from museum collections and archives are doomed
to be erased. The collecting of performance brings new qualities to mu-
seum practices in the same way that it transforms institutions’ artistic
programmes by placing emphasis on the relationship with the audience
and educational processes; in doing so, it develops imagination, draw-
ing on experience (situated knowledge) and encouraging empathy as
well as enhancing democratisation.
Contemporary museums are at an inflection point of transfor-
mation. From a static model focused on the preservation and conser-
vation of individual objects, often carefully isolated from their context,
they are having to transform themselves into performing institutions,
nurturing an extended relationship with their audiences and surround-
ings. Technological developments combined with the digitisation of
collections have brought further changes in the museum paradigm.
The way in which the collective body – the audience, the artists and the
performers – functions in the space of the technologised museum has
changed. The new type of institution requires a different engagement
from all these participants and compels a different economy of work
and production.
Naturally, in a changing institution, the approach to collecting
must also change, which involves a different understanding of the con-
cept of ownership, the role of documentation, digitisation processes
and conservation processes in general.
In the context of this new type of institution, Bojana Kunst asks:
What labour is needed to have a performance collection? Should

we – besides the restorers – also employ performers? How do
we transport a performance collection? Should we develop kin-
ships between different biospheres and scenes where the works
are shared? How to keep performance alive as a relational field,
not as a nostalgic repetition? All these questions we can also
ask about objects, and that is why a performance collection is
so interesting. And how to keep these collections in such a way
that they would belong to all, and would continuously change
in order not to succumb to exclusionary authorship? Especially if
we keep in mind that the performance is a process and work of
many; it belongs to the many.
Where Is the Work, or a New Working Methodology?
In times of transformation, a fundamental question remains to be

solved: how to archive the processes and oxygenate the works, bearing
in mind that there is never a single objective history.
What form should a new methodology for working on a collec-
tion of performative works take? The case studies described in the pub-
lication Performing Collections propose different approaches to the sub-
ject, suggesting several systemic solutions.
It is certainly not possible to create a single standardised proto-
col of conduct; nevertheless, collaboration with artists and witnesses
of events is crucial to the development of the final shape of the work,
which in some cases requires activation and work with the audience.
From a museological point of view, the case of re-performing
historical material is fascinating. In some cases, however, where the
historical process and context determined the form of the work, a sim-
ple digitised form feels like the best fit for archival material. Examples
of this are the phenomena described in the essays “Fragments of a Co-
Op Festival” by Amira Akbıyıkoğlu and “OHO – Between the Magic of
Digitisation and Financial Literacy” by Igor Španjol. In this context, it
becomes crucial to include in the archive the oral accounts of witness-
es and to develop the broadest possible context for the phenomenon.
What these cases have in common is the notion of collective work, of-
ten with the whole community involved in the creative process. In the
context of the 1990s, one concept frequently mentioned is the notion
of the laboratory, developed by the artist María Teresa Hincapié, whose
complex case is described in Claudia Segura’s essay: “(Dis)Appearing
Without a Trace: A Case Study of María Teresa Hincapié”. The ques-
tion arises whether it is possible to create a laboratory within an archi-
val space. Hincapié did not think that her works could be re-performed
by other bodies, but inspired by the practice of Jerzy Grotowski, she
dreamt of a laboratory and a place for the exchange of knowledge.
Myriam Rubio, in her essay “What a Museum Can (Not) Do: Welcome
to the Circo Interior Bruto”, also invokes the concept of the collective
work and the laboratory, which at times becomes an attempt to de-
scribe a performative work that is by its nature a non-material, ephem-
eral process. José A. Sánchez, in “Variation on the Unaccounted: A
Triptych, by Mapa Teatro”, attempts to create a museum protocol
which could be employed to reproduce the works of the Bogotá-based
theatre group Mapa Teatro. Here, the author raises the important
theme of re-performing the work in different forms outside the histor-
ical and social context related to themes of violence and trauma. The
essays “Some Things Last a Long Time ...” by Zofia Czartoryska and
“Transfer of Responsibility and Knowledge” by Chantal Kleinmeulman
bring in the concept of the prop, the actor-object, the non-human per-
former. In turn, Joanna Rajkowska’s sculpture of a palm tree in the pub-
lic space of Warsaw can be considered an active object that is the sub-
ject of many spontaneous actions in the urban space. Here, the public
– or rather the users of the urban space – play a crucial role in the crea-
tion of the performance and the archive itself. The way that the object is
used can, however, sometimes go against the recommendations of the
conservator, as is the case with the installation 1. Werksatz (1963–69) by
Franz Erhard Walther, described by Kleinmeulman. The artist even pro-
duced a ‘storage form’ of the artwork, although in its original form, it
was activated by the public. In this case, with the involvement of a num-
ber of skilled professionals, it was possible to create a prop that allows
the work to be activated without risking damage. The author of the
text emphasises the important role of museum educators in the pro-
cess. The transfer of knowledge from body to body seems to be one of
the essential practices in the process of collecting performance and be-
comes a prerequisite for keeping a performance work alive. For these
purposes, Otobong Nkanga has developed the concept of the breath-
ing archive. The artist considers orality and body memory necessary
conditions for the existence of an artwork. Through ‘oxygenation’, the
exchange of bodies, histories and knowledge, the artwork can come
into being in the museum collection.
This kind of fluidity makes it possible to maintain a link between
past and present. Oral transmission, which is an essential part of the
whole process, is also a form of ‘preservation’ of the work. One cannot
overestimate here the role of fiction, the transmission of a witness to
an event. Persis Bekkering, in her ficto-critical essay “How to Describe
What a Mirror Looks Like? On Ria Pacquee’s Madame and It”, describes
the case of the performer Ria Pacquee building a singular relationship
between witness accounts (often documenting her performances), fic-
tion and documentation. Another important issue addressed in many
of the texts published in the book is the question of disappearance,
documentation and visual translation, i.e. the transcription of the per-
formative act into a photographic, film or installation record. The col-
lected case studies form an unusually complex picture that helps in
understanding the nature of collections consisting of performances.
Nevertheless, it is not possible to create serious performance art collec-
tions without institutional changes.
Conclusions
The traditional, static model of the Western museum reproduces co-

lonial strategies of isolating and preserving objects. Performances are
alive. They combine the local and the geographically distant. They have
intimacy and emotion, and are sensitive to temperature and time of
day, but in a very different way to traditional art objects. How can a mu-
seum go about collecting such sensitive, ephemeral works?
Who will be responsible for the hierarchy of such a living,
time-changing collection and how can it stand the test of time? A new
type of ‘breathing’ institution needs to develop an entirely new meth-
odology based on the concept of embodied knowledge – involving an
understanding of the power of the performative work. It is impera-
tive to engage with places and people, caring practices and indigenous
knowledge based on oral transmissions. In this context, an education-
al and mediating role is also essential, while maintaining the continuity
of research. The fluidity and evolution of the performative work must
be contrasted with the staid solemnity of the traditional collection.
The book Performing Collections not only provides guidance on how to
handle living works, it also hints at what form the art institution should
take in the future.
REFERENCE LIST
Bishop, C. 2019, “The Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and
Audience Attention”, in Performance Works, Mousse Publishing, U-jazdowski,
Warsaw, pp. 36–67.
Bourriaud, N. 2002, Relational Aesthetics, Documents sur l’art, Les Presses du
réel 2002, viewed 2 August 2022, https://kvelv.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/
bourriaud-nicolas-relational-aesthetics-kap-space-time-exchange-factors.pdf.
Groys, B. 2013, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and
Gesamtkunstwerk”, e-flux, December, viewed 2 August 2022,
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/50/59974/entering-the-flow-museum-
between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/.
Hantelmann von, D. 2014, “The Experiential Turn”, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, web log post, viewed 2 August 2022, https://walkerart.org/
collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn/.
Jones, A. and Stephenson, A. 1999, “Stuff: a Performance”, in Performing the
Body/Performing the Text, Taylor & Francis, New York.
Krauss, R. 1999, Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post/medium
Condition, Thames & Hudson, New York.
23
WHAT DOES
IT MEAN TO
HAVE PERFOR
MANCE
IN THE
COLLECTION?
A Conversation between
Joanna Zielińska and Bojana Kunst
24
Joanna Zielińska: How did performance change in the 1990s and what
influenced the emergence of new performative forms, and the trans-
formation of performance into more nomadic forms?
Bojana Kunst: There is no coincidence that we are starting this

talk about the transformation of performance into a more no-
madic form at the beginning of the 1990s. I would like to con-
nect this to the specific historical conditions around the fall of
the Berlin Wall, more precisely with the end of communism,
which strongly influenced the development of European cul-
tural politics in the 1990s. At the same time, this opening to the
‘East’ is expanding the processes that started already in the
late 1980s when southern Europe joined the European Union,
like Portugal and Spain (1986), which together with the Flemish
wave influenced the development of the performance scene in
Europe – suddenly there is a ‘discovery’ of different ‘contempo-
rary histories’ in Europe. The rise of co-production platforms,
networks, co-production festivals and the internationalisation
of performance production in general are related to this wid-
ening of common European cultural space, and to the flows
of capital through which the models of European cultural pro-
duction also changed considerably. I remember an anecdote
from André Lepecki, who was at that time a dramaturge of Vera
25 What Does It Mean to Have...

Mantero, a choreographer from Portugal. Somewhere at the
beginning of the 1990s, a consortium of three European produc-
ers approached Mantero about making a group piece and asked
her to work with a dramaturge from the north. ‘Why do I need
a dramaturge and why should she or he be from the north of
Europe?,’ Mantero asked them (deLahunta 2000). This anecdote
tells us not only about the heightened need for mediation which
influenced the establishment of the dramaturge and later also
curator in performance, but also about a complex political and
economic dimension of privilege of knowledge which goes to-
gether with the development of new forms of production and in-
ternationalisation, as well as with the new flows of capital in the
European Union. The dramaturge from the north (we can also
say from the west) stood there as a kind of ‘guarantee’ for a suc-
cessful production, for a fruitful entrance into the market from
the outskirts of Europe, and maybe also to be a guarantee that
the work will not be a delayed repetition of work already seen
in the ‘progressive west’, that it will receive proper contextual-
isation and that there will be a cultural value added to the com-
mon social market – a guarantee for the work becoming public
in an international sense. However, this anecdote also expresses
some real difficulties and complexities of the mediation at that
time, where the joy of discovery of the European East was fast
replaced with the disappointment of déjà-vu, or the lack of the
contemporaneity of the works. Nomadic internationalisation of
performance has had ambivalent consequences: on one side, it
has opened the potential for the new forms of production, more
possibility for intercultural exchange, influencing the democra-
tisation and opening of performance practices, and in this sense
contributed to the experimental character of many works. But,
on the other side, there was a problem of recognising different
histories and values, and very little understanding of the speci-
ficity of questions and localities where and how the performanc-
es were made. This was by example also part of discussions in
the IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing
Arts), which was an important co-production network at that
time, but laden with cultural prejudices about others, with mis-
understandings and yearnings for the discovery of the new. I’m
speaking especially about the first half of the 1990s, which were
also strongly marked with the war in the former Yugoslavia.
In the 1990s, more elaborate and numerous co-produc-
tion networks among European theatres started to form, but
interestingly, only a few authors stayed with this common mar-
ket when initial interest in the East faded, and it seems that the
cultural field is still marked by the misunderstandings of what is
going on in between Western and Eastern Europe. The develop-
ments in European cultural politics were supporting the creation
of many different networks, which were not seen only as pos-
sibilities for production but also as discursive and even political
platforms sometimes. But this internationalisation also brought
a specific professionalisation to the production modes. All the
organisations developed the same modes of production and dis-
tribution of the performance they had to further professional-
ise themselves, and only in this way could they be eligible for EU
monetary support and be part of the flow of cultural exchange;
they had to succumb to the same model of management.
Mladen Stilinović addressed this in his distinctive way in his well-
known text from 1992 ‘In Praise of Laziness’, where he claims
that art in the West cannot exist because artists from the West
are not lazy. The artists on the East, he writes, could be lazy be-
cause the whole system of insignificant factors did not exist,
they had time to do their art, and on the other side the artists
from the West are rather producers of something. This provoca-
tive text discloses all the symptoms of the situation, with which

Radouan Mriziga, 7, 2018.
Courtesy of Marc Domage
and Something Great
we are also confronted today: precarity of production, contin-
uous acceleration and nomadism, the culture of creating pro-
jects. At the same time, it is provocatively re-affirming a rich his-
tory of collaboration and making of art in the East, which was
not the focus in the 1990s, because the desires and promises of
new economies were much stronger.
JZ: How did the idea of internationalisation and the idea of work-in-
progress actually change performative strategies? Do you think it in-
fluenced the nature of performances and somehow challenged the
idea of staged performance and different production modes? Maybe
some performances have become less connected to the body of the
artist?
BK: I think it had a strong influence, which, however, was only
detected in reverse, but also sometimes reflected inside the
performances (for example, the performance of Saša Asentić:
My Private Bio-politics from 2011). I’m speaking here especially
about the independent production of performances, which is
made as part of the non-governmental sector and is econom-
ically dependent on public subsidies and international co-pro-
duction budgets (cultural networks, foundations, etc.). What
is interesting for me is how this embrace of democratisation
in performance, experimentation and plurality of working pro-
cesses, paradoxically goes hand in hand with specific economic
forms of production, which in opposition to the openness of ar-
tistic form are more and more becoming similar. The common
feeling of everything is possible (in relation of experimentation
and working process), which was the feeling at the start of the
1990s, was at the end of the decade already transformed into
the preparation of project applications, organised through eco-
nomic parameters, but still somehow paradoxically hiding the
promise of the future, attracting young players on the field to

compete for a public money. At the same time, internationalisa-
tion demanded a specific mode of production, where the econ-
omy (the budget) is conditioning its internationalisation, how
the work is done and circulated. I remember a joke among col-
leagues about solo works in dance, that solos are a perfect form
of dance because they are cheap to tour and can be shared on
the international market. But it is true, the most nomadic are
the smaller works, which are easier to tour and present; they are
suited to the festival form, but this on the other side again con-
tributes to the neoliberal understanding of freedom, which is
mostly individualised and atomised, circulating around examples
and repetitions of the self. So, in a way, new flows of money
and economy of production, which came as part of international
production, were not only offering possibilities for internation-
alisation and exchange, but also limiting the very possibilities of
performance. BADco., for example, is a performance collective
from Zagreb, who was very aware of the paradoxes of such a
performance economy, insisting on the collective structure of
performance, which was always developed with the dense and
engaged relation to the locality of the space.1 Another system is
a network of residencies, through which the artists and some-
times groups (but not so often) could work in different environ-
ments, even co-produce the performance through the network
of residencies. This has many positive sides: the artists can be
in constant exchange, work internationally; but on the other
side, it gives priority to the nomadic life and travel, which can
fast become an economic form of survival, especially with rising
precarity among artists and the difficulties in continuing their
practice, not to mention how at the same time the whole field
became very unsustainable in the ecological sense. In a way, in-
ternationalisation even strengthens the border between smaller
non-governmental organisations and institutionally strong the-
atres (like national institutions, big theatre companies), which
are still working inside the framework of state representation or
gestures of state or private capital supporting international ex-
change. I’m not sure if the performances are less connected to
the body of the artists; I would say quite the opposite happened.
Nowadays dance performances are the most numerous inside
the flow of nomadic internationalisation. At the same time, of-
ten, the body of the performance worker becomes the body of a
nomadic and precarious labourer behind the practice, an invisible
working and labouring force of production, dissemination, appli-
cation and showing, a body which has to master many appear-
ances and due to the demands of its economy, a lonely body,
rarely as a collective body. Not to mention that this kind of pro-
duction is unsustainable and privileges mostly able bodies.
JZ: The idea of nomadic performance is not so much connected to the

exhibition space and institutional programming, but to the format
of festivals, and is also embedded in the tradition of performance art
from the 1960s and 1970s, if we are talking about solo performances
which rely strongly on the body of a performance artist. So, I wanted
to ask you how this transformed into something which was more con-
nected to the exhibition space and durational performances happen-
ing inside of the institutions?
BK: The first approach to this question would maybe to go back

to dance performances and the way in which they entered in-
stitutions, which was very widely discussed in the last decade.
Besides many theoretical questions, which are also circulating
around performativity of the exhibition space, the status of the
museum as a place of live encounter, the intermediality which
challenges the established forms of presentation and the dura-
tion and temporality of the museum, there was also something

Aydin Teker, aKabi, 2008. Courtesy of Levent Öget
and Something Great
else at work, which is related to the production and economy of
those performances. Let’s say some of these works overcome
the solo condition exactly with their entrance to the museum –
with this they became the work of many, almost a serial inter-
connected work which is only possible through the relations be-
tween different histories and practices. I’m thinking here about
Boris Charmatz work of 20 Dancers for the 20th Century and his
whole speculative proposal about the dance museum, Xavier Le
Roy’s Retrospective , but also about the work of Mateja Bučar,
Keith Hennessy, or Okwumi Okwapasili; all these works entered
the museum as a space of discovering series of genealogies and
interconnections. These genealogies and interconnections are
conditions of the live event, reconnecting the specific histories
and expressions (like in the case of dance performances), and
destabilising the very meanings of histories and continuations
around which specific institutions were organised and estab-
lished (like decolonial works, parallel narrations). This is a differ-
ent situation than from the 1960s and 1970s, when the question
of the artist’s body in performance art was destabilising the re-
lationship between object and subject, but not unsettling the
social, economic and political relations outside the institution
itself. This can be well seen in the gradual disempowerment of
institutional critique and museums’ capitalisation of it. It is of
course difficult to say how this will develop and for sure it is a
danger that the performance in the museum will only strength-
en the capitalisation of its liveness, but I have some hope here.
It is impossible to overlook the reality of bodies today, immense
inequalities and dispossession of bodies, the way in which bod-
ies stand for other bodies, how they are entangled with others
in their vulnerability.
But there is also another answer to your question and
has something to do with the 1990s and with the fact that we
started this talk with the discussion about the East and West.
Speaking from the perspective of the former East, the shift
happens throughout the 1990s, which brought institutions
from visual art and performance practices in proximity, since
they were both resisting and fighting the danger of the erasure
of the ‘Eastern’ histories of contemporary art forms and move-
ments, fighting against their de-politicisation, de-contextual-
isation and division from the social and economic context and
material conditions. In a way, the historicisation of your own
practice, the interconnectedness of your own practice with the
practice of others, became an important artistic and theoret-
ical practice in visual art institutions, but also in performanc-
es, and this happened approximately at the same time. This
was for example the focus of many performance magazines
in ex-Yugoslavian space (Maska, Frakcija, Teorija koja hoda),
but also visual art institutions, like key exhibitions of Zdenka
Badovinac in Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (“Body and the East,”
“Seven Sins,” “Interrupted Histories”). The institutions in the
visual art field and performances (done mostly in the non-gov-
ernmental sector) in that way developed around the same po-
litical urgency and interest, which was the resistance towards
oblivion and erasure, and politicisation of memory; they were
actually doing the work of decolonisation. They were exhibiting,
producing works and establishing discursive platforms to chal-
lenge the ideologically problematic transition to capitalism, wild
privatisation and erasure of the varieties of emancipatory past
in these environments. At the same time, they detected how
the acceleration and generalisation of the mode of production
erased established collaborative forms, modes of work and la-
bouring practices of collectivity, collaboration and communal
work. I think that what brought them together was an articula-
tion of a political interest, which resisted a simple understanding

of their contemporaneity and demanded re-politicisation of
their past. This opens the space for the more radical experimen-
tation with the aesthetic forms but also with the institutional
contexts of showing, staging and exhibiting.
I can finish this answer with a concrete example. Rok
Vevar, Slovenian performance theoretician and dance histori-
an, collected for more than a decade the documents from the
history of Slovenian contemporary dance and created an im-
mense archive in his living room, collecting for many years an
archive of practices, which would otherwise disappear. His ar-
chive found its home in +MSUM (Museum of Contemporary
Art Metelkova) in 2018 (and not in SLOGI, Slovenian Theatre
Institute – Museum, which would be at the first sight more suit-
able in this case).2 This is not coincidence, but an expression of
the common political interest for the emancipatory and living
politics of memory, working inside networks of genealogies
and alliances. One such alliance is by example the next project
of this collection, the establishment of the Balkan digital dance
base under the umbrella of Nomad Dance Academy. But a room
with the dance collection in the museum is also a kind of dura-
tional performance; it is to be seen in the future how it will be
used as space for experimentation, contributing to the possibili-
ty of a different approach to the collection in general.
JZ: I looked into the collections of different museums, through our

L’Internationale network, and I find out that these collections don’t re-
ally represent the history of performance, especially if we are thinking
about more experimental ways of collecting performance – not only
by means of photography and video documentation. You can barely
find any examples in the major collections in Europe of what I would
call relevant examples of what we‘re talking about right now: the
1990s transformation, and how performance became institutionalised
Rok Vevar, the Temporary Slovene Dance
Archive, 2012. Courtesy of Moderna galerija,
Ljubljana, Dejan Habicht

Rok Vevar, the Temporary Slovene Dance
Archive, 2012. Courtesy of Moderna galerija,
Ljubljana, Dejan Habicht
39
in the 2000s. So, I would be curious to know your take on the idea of
collecting performance. How to collect ephemeral art and, moreover,
how to include it in the museum collection?
BZ: Maybe we have to first start with the question of what do

we mean when we talk about performance, and then go to the
practice of collecting. When I speak about it, I don’t necessari-
ly link it to the genealogy of performance art, where questions
of documentation were part of it from its start, and in an inter-
esting way unsettled the relationships between the very act
and its repetition; this would be one line of discussion, which
is in already elaborated in visual arts. When I talk about perfor-
mance, I refer to the whole series of practices, collective and
collaborative methods, economies and dispositive of rehears-
als, production modes, contextualisations and disseminations of
performance, to the whole biospheres of working, which consti-
tute the event of the performance. In this way, performance is
lingering in-between all this – embodied work, rehearsals, econ-
omies of collaboration and working methods, dramaturgical
framing and economies of dissemination. At the same time, per-
formance is entangled with reception, it belongs to the scene,
and performance is also a situation. Why is this distinction im-
portant? I don’t want to say that there are not a lot of similari-
ties and crossings between visual art genealogy of performance
art and performance. But this observation helps us to link per-
formance to the specific labouring practices and experiences,
to the set of economies and dispositives, which can have a dif-
ferent articulation and different materiality from the live event
in visual art. Intermediality is not so much an aesthetic question,
but the transition and mutual influence of working processes
and practices of collaboration, which is also changing the way in
which the institutional environment is organised.
So, the ephemerality of performance is paradoxical; per-
formance is ephemeral because it is embodied and material,
because it is made as series of alliances and relationalities with
the human and more than human agents, and collecting has to
somehow be prepared to dive into these entanglements, not to
be satisfied with the enlistment and preservation of that what
stays after the event. What stays afterwards is namely often
framed with the institutional power of visibility. Performance is
a particular situation (together with the audience), entangled
with the specific environment, which spills over such visibility.
Much more interesting is what stays in opacity, half or non-visi-
ble, as a rumour or noise, silent, obscure, sticky. Here, different
methods coming from the performance process can be very
helpful: from imagination, speculation, collective re-articulation,
collective narration, practices of embodiment, bodily archives,
collective repetition, etc.
When the dance performance entered the museum and
became part of the exhibition, this was not just any dance. It
was a dance performance which was unsettling its own proce-
dures of making and its own media specificity, changing its ways
of collaborating, producing and working. At the same time,
when a museum is becoming a space of performance, this un-
settles its own economic, labouring and working procedures,
unsettling the very procedures of how it is producing value and
how it belongs to the environment. Only from this perspective,
does the question about the collection of performance become
interesting, not only because it questions the very notion of
the collection, but also because it changes the procedures and
modes of working, shifting its practices of making a collection.
JZ: We should also mention that digitisation has become an important

phenomenon in the 1990s.

BK: Yes, but I think there is still much work to do with it. The
visual art field has many difficulties in exhibiting and archiving
digital art that developed in the last decades, from addressing
the fast obsolescence of technology to the misunderstanding of
structural, processual and labouring methods in this field – how
to grasp collective processes and their alternative politics of use
and how to exhibit them. It is interesting that we have the same
problem with ephemerality in digital art, where it arises from
the technological obsolescence, and in performance and the-
atre, where it belongs to the immediate disappearance of the
condensed time of event. In both cases, there is a danger that
this will be transformed into the melancholic impulse for repe-
tition and invariability. At the same time, the repetition of the
theatre and dance repertoire is also a kind of melancholic col-
lection, which serves often as a normative confirmation of what
should constitute dance and performance in a particular cultur-
al environment This is a collection structured around hierarchy,
which originates from the established institutional procedures
of separation and exclusion. But all institutions in their core
are imaginary, in the sense that they are all invented, they are
not given for once and for all. Institutions are invented as so-
cial arrangements also to retell specific histories. In this way the
collection, if taken seriously, is shaking, unsettling exactly this
imaginary core – what does it mean to be an institution, a mu-
seum, an archive, what does it mean to retell and repeat. If the
digitalisation of collections is participating in melancholic repe-
tition, then it does not really change the ways collecting can be
done, it does not open up different, multiple and diverse allianc-
es with the past.
In theatre there are already many institutions of col-
lecting, mostly theatre museums. The theatre museum in
Ljubljana is collecting documents and programmes of all the
performances happening in state and city theatres, prepar-
ing yearbooks, organising exhibitions (about actors, direc-
tors, etc.) and organising symposiums, etc. However, at the
same time, the private dance collection I spoke about found
its place in the museum for contemporary art, and many of the
performances made outside state institutions are not part of
these collections. Some of the most important re-enactments
and attempts to rethink the historical past in Slovenia were
done outside of this theatre museum (like a series of re-enact-
ments done by Maska from 2010). On the other side, when the
Flemish wave of performance started in the 1980s, the Flemish
theatre institute became an important part of it, participating
with alternative practices of collecting, building discursive for-
mats and expressions.3 The same goes for the theatre maga-
zines dedicated to contemporary production, which exist in
the post-Yugoslavian territory, continuously experimenting
and trying out methods of historisation, archiving and collect-
ing. So, there is a whole field of practice and knowledge al-
ready existing which has to be taken into consideration when
we would like to develop the collections of performances in
the museums.
At the same time, the interest in collecting performance
comes not only because of interest in the disappearing past, but
because of the need for the continuation of the present.
JZ: What do you mean by that?
BK: It is not only ephemerality which causes the difficulty to

collect the performances, but also their economy, how perfor-
mances are made and produced. With the internationalisation
of the performance market and acceleration of the economy of
production, performances are even more rapidly replaced with

the new ones; there is always a demand from the market for the
new works to be shown. Rare is the situation that performance
can last for a year and rare are the artists who have the privilege
(and economy) to repeat their works. Therefore, performance
collection can also be approached from this perspective, as a
way to develop alliances with the close and actually not so dis-
tant time, with the time in which we are still living and remem-
bering as fellow passengers, as contemporary. Here, again, we
have this collection of more than one, being many, and through
collections maybe it is then possible to disclose how the prac-
tices and modes of working are related with the fellow passen-
gers from the past. Here, it is especially important to recognise
how different economies and unequal geopolitical visibilities in-
fluence the disappearance of performance, and how there is an
obligation to always leave the collection radically open for the
practices of kinship between invisible articulations; only in this
way can a collection be diverse and non-hierarchically organised.
I was recently speaking with Julia Asperska, who works
as a collection manager in the Something Great organisation.4
They are now involved together with several universities into
a larger research project on performance collecting. For me, it
is interesting that Asperska poses this question as a producer,
based on her experience in the international field, where works
are disappearing with speed and there is always demand for a
new production. They are now trying to form a performance col-
lection of older works, especially those who have had a special
significance for the context where they were done, and search-
ing for ways this collection can be made visible. They are build-
ing the collection of past performances and offer it to museums,
theatres and festivals as a chance to show the work or part of
the work, offering the possibility to the artists to restage, to
keep the props. They are developing a network of practices of
how it is possible to continue with the present, and not with
the past, since these experiences are mostly not older than a
decade. In this way, they are somehow decelerating the time of
their loss, which I find a very interesting proposal, and somehow
in agreement with the ecological thinking about extinction and
the way to build more sustainable production. At the same time,
we know that the loss of performance is not only ontological,
but it is also happening due to political and economic reasons:
some works are lost faster than the others, some scenes disap-
pear faster and more violently than others, because of the politi-
cal circumstances, the unequal distribution of sources, privatisa-
tion, etc. A performance collection should focus exactly on such
dimensions of performance disappearance.
JZ: It’s interesting to speak about this, because we have to think about
what it means for museums to collect. Museum collecting strategies
are still based on the idea of preservation.
BK: I agree.
JZ: We have to consider whether this idea of preservation makes sense

nowadays, when we have digital art and everything that is happening
beyond the physicality of objects. There is a question as to whether it
is still possible to follow up this strategy of preservation. In my opin-
ion, it has become obsolete. Can we think of alternative and more sus-
tainable ways of collecting performance? The cause is the character
of this ephemeral art: we cannot look at performance the way that
we might look at objects and other collectible material items. It is also
interesting from the perspective of a collection to consider how mu-
seums can challenge these strategies, right now. Basically, to invent
many kinds of collections or maybe a different format of institution.

BK: To reinvent a collection it is necessary to unsettle the very
institution itself, to unsettle the organisation of its values. In
this sense, performance collection should not be just an addi-
tion, but a reinvention of the very structure of the institution
and its value production. Many discussions today concern the
role of the museums in the history of imperial plunder. Ariella
Azoulay writes how museums are part of the construction of im-
perial citizenship, where preservation of the past is part of the
vast enterprise of destruction conducted at the expense of the
destroyed world. In the process of preservation, the past con-
sists of discrete documents and objects, and this methodology
of separation and extraction is one of the imperial operations of
power executed over the objects belonging to the living world.
That the museum is now open to being a space of live perfor-
mances can also be approached from this perspective – with
how art institutions in the West are also confronting themselves
with their own past, with their own entanglement in violent his-
tory. Every collection is entangled with the multiplicity of living
worlds. From this perspective the entrance of the performance
(and the body) in the museum can challenge the isolation from
the living world, and dedicate itself rather to the entanglements
of living kinship and genealogies, to embodied experiences and
poetics of communities, to invisible and contradictory histories.
Otherwise, it is only another continuation of imperial methods.
Performance also helps us to recognise how all the objects of a
collection are part of unequal and multiple living histories (past
or present). A collection is a mesh of interconnections which has
to be shared, and not a distinct preservation which has to be
maintained.
From this perspective, a performance collection is an in-
teresting problem, because it can contribute to creating various
and multi-layered values, under the condition that of course it
unsettles its own condition – separation, preservation and ex-
clusion. At the same time, performance collection demands dif-
ferent knowledge and labour, a rethinking of what it means to
restore performance, how to work with a living and temporal
archive, how to take care of the durational practices, etc.
What labour is needed to have a performance collection?
Should we, besides the restaurateurs, employ performers? How
do we transport a performance collection, and should we devel-
op kinships between different biospheres and scenes where the
works are shared? How to keep performance alive as a relation-
al field, not as a nostalgic repetition? All these questions we can
also ask about objects, and that is why a performance collection
is so interesting. And how to keep these collections in the way
that they would belong to all, and will continuously change so
that they would not succumb to exclusionary authorship, espe-
cially if we keep in mind that the performance is a process and
work of many; it belongs to the many.
JZ: In my research, I’m trying to look for different ways of collecting

performance; for example, I’m introducing narrative fiction that can
serve the idea of archiving performances, including emotions and re-
actions of witnesses. The search for an experiential way of archiving is
linked to the idea of creating a new type of archive. What do you think
about the idea of a performance museum? Does this idea not take the
practice of collecting ephemeral art and process-based art to anoth-
er level? Maybe we can actually use a body, a physical body, a human
body, to preserve these performative works – to keep performance
alive.
BK: We return to the problem of what it means to keep perfor-

mances alive with your question. The problem is that the need
to keep them alive does not always serve the best intention,

and the history of theatre is full of these attempts, to keep per-
formance the same, to repeat it in the nostalgic and melanchol-
ic way. Nevertheless, when it is not understood as a preserva-
tion of value but as a space of experimentation and imagination
with the living archives and embodied histories, where attention
is given to what stays outside of the power of visibility, then it
can become interesting. What would this space be, where past
biospheres of the performance could live again? Maybe the mu-
seum would then be more like a permaculture garden, explor-
ing processes of reciprocity and renewal, lost in the exuberant
growth of memory and forgetting.
JZ: I realised that while we develop various performance strategies,

we need to develop a different vocabulary around collecting, and may-
be completely rethink the idea of museums.
BK: … and the notion of labour. This is often forgotten, the

fact that there is a specific history of labour in performance and
theatre, and that this labour is different from the labour in the
museum. The labour of collecting performance needs different
skills and we can find them also in the practice of performers.
ENDNOTES
1 See the website http://badco.hr/en/home/.

2 More about the collection at https://www.mg-lj.si/en/exhibitions/2288/zspa/.
3 Flemish theatre institute is now existing as Flemish art institute,
https://www.kunsten.be/en/.
4 See the website https://somethinggreat.de/Something-Great-Collection.
REFERENCE LIST
Azoulay, A. 2019, “Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism”, Verso, London.

deLahunta, S. 2000, “Dance Dramaturgy: Speculations and Reflections”.
Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 16, pp. 20–5.
Stilinović, M. 2014, The Praise of Laziness. Gato Negro Ediciones, Mexico City.

COLLECTING
DANCE
A Conversation with
La Ribot by Lola Hinojosa
50
Lola Hinojosa: You were trained in classical, modern and contempo-
rary dance; you were part of various companies and dance groups un-
til you began making solo work as La Ribot, where you do practically
everything from costumes and lighting to choreography. Do you con-
sider yourself a dancer, a choreographer, a visual artist, a perform-
er or does interdisciplinary work such as yours rather resist these
categories?
La Ribot: At the age of fourteen I began my training as a clas-

sical dancer and at 18 I decided that I wanted to dedicate my-
self professionally to dance. I went to study at the Rosella
Hightower School in the South of France and immediately real-
ised that it was not what I wanted to do at all, but I was still in-
terested in ballet, dance and everything related to staging, the
body and movement. Later, I studied modern American dance
(for example Martha Graham and José Limón techniques), and
travelled around Europe doing workshops and encountering
other techniques, teachers and schools. After a stint in New
York, I came back to Madrid in 1983 and continued studying.
I started doing my own thing as an author, and I started cho-
reographing. I worked with various collectives and groups until
I met Blanca Calvo in 1986, and we founded a company called
Bocanada Danza, with friends who were dancers, musicians,
51 Collecting Dance
scriptwriters and light technicians. It was an incredible moment
of experimentation.
In the 1990s, these practices ceased to be so interest-
ing to me and I began working alone in the studio and solo
on stage. I changed my name to La Ribot, which between the
figures of ‘La Carmen’ and ‘La Garbo’ was a divinely popular
name. At that time, I began developing ways of working that
stem from the visual arts. I was writing, drawing and working
alone. I applied visual arts techniques to the body and move-
ment: I used cutting, pasting, colouring, assembling, installing,
juxtaposing or fragmenting, as opposed to practices that were
typical to dance, such as repeating, copying or spinning. Then
something began to happen in that it became as dance-like as
it was visual arts-like, and a compact whole began to emerge.
What I was doing stopped depending only on music and the-
atre. The body, which is a vehicle of movement and choreo-
graphic language, began to be a plastic and conceptual object –
a political and poetic object. This was the origin of the work
Piezas distinguidas (Distinguished Pieces).
LH: Tell us about the Piezas distinguidas series.
La Ribot: The Piezas distinguidas were and are short or very

short pieces. They could be thought of as mobile poems, tab-
leaux vivants or haikus. I organise them into a fixed and scored
series and the series constitutes a show. At the start of the pro-
cess, I proposed to make 100 pieces throughout my life. Today,
in November 2021, I’m still working, and I am currently on Pieza
distinguida No 57. There are to date six series or shows, with a
few exceptions. There are some distinguished pieces, for exam-
ple, that lie outside the ‘short’ norm, since they are long, or out-
side the ‘live’ norm because they are videos. They are all pieces
that proposed an alternative to what was being done in contem-
porary dance at the time: they propose a fragmented, conceptu-
al, choreographic and plastic discourse. For that reason, I speak
of ‘presenting’ instead of representing, and of ‘exposing’ Piezas
distinguidas, not of dancing them. ‘The dance is thought not felt’
I would say.
The first stage of the Piezas distinguidas is influenced
by the plastic arts. I encountered references, like the sculp-
tor Marisa Merz for example, that are so personal, or Piero
Mazoni, with their certificates and works like Artist’s Shit
(1961), or the monochromes. In general, I am influenced by
the twentieth-century avant-gardes: Duchamp and his ready-
mades; Joan Brossa, who is always so funny and poetic; and
1960s and 1970s Conceptual Art, especially the New York coun-
tercultures. In the 1980s I began to be interested in Cindy
Sherman and her dismembered bodies and apparatuses of ter-
ror. At that time, and in the field of dance, I was interested in
Pina Bausch’s use and extensions of time with all those danc-
ers, who seemed so old to me.
LH: You worked on Piezas distinguidas for ten years, from 1993 to 2003,
and then you took a hiatus for ten years, picking it up again after that.
The first pieces were conceived for the space of the theatre; that is,
they were produced with the front-facing gaze of the spectator in
mind, with all the choreographic resources and lighting techniques
typical of the genre. Then, around the year 1998, you reconfigured Más
distinguidas (More Distinguished) so it could be adapted to very differ-
ent spaces, departing this time from the viewer’s relationship with the
wider space. It is in 2000, with Still Distinguished, that another staging
device emerges. Tell us about this transition, about dismantling the hi-
erarchies of the stage theatre.
53 Collecting Dance
La Ribot: The Piezas distinguidas that marked my career and
became so well known were concentrated with the first three
series in the 1990s. The first series, 13 Piezas distinguidas (1993–
94), is the most theatrical. At that time, I was still defining how
things are interrelated: the objectual with the theatrical, the
choreographic, the staging, the space, the spectator, etc. In
1997, I made a second series entitled Más distinguidas (More
Distinguished), which was more plastic, cinematic and the-
atrical, still using lights with a front-facing stage. Around this
time, the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne invited me to show them,
but we couldn’t use lights. So, I presented them without lights
and with the audience in front of me sitting on chairs scattered
across the space. I discovered that the audience shifts their
gaze as the context changes. From then on, I created general
lighting and maintained two versions of Más distinguidas: one
for theatres with a black background, and another, white ver-
sion, for exhibition halls, museums or garages. Both versions
are conceived for a front-facing audience and have a general
plane of light.
From 1997 to 2001, at the same time, Blanca and I were
planning Desviaciones (Deviations), a festival programme or-
ganised with José A Sánchez and by UVI-La Inesperada, a col-
lective of six choreographers from Madrid: Mónica Valenciano,
Olga Mesa, Elena Córdoba, Blanca Calvo, Ana Buitrago and
La Ribot. Together, we conceived of projects where we could
all present our work, exchange ideas, findings, questions and
issues, get to know each other and organise everything we
lacked: programmes, invitations to artists from Europe who did
not pass-through Madrid. We generated our own economy of
knowledge, money, debates and archive. In this context, we
created a space that was not only front-facing and theatrical,
but in which one could wander.
At the same time, I was doing Still Distinguished, the
third series of Piezas distinguidas. During this period, I was re-
flecting on the hierarchies of power between spectator, artist
and actor. For Still Distinguished, I developed a staging device
that was a kind of white horizontal surface where the viewer is
always with me, wandering around with me, following me and
sharing the space – power hierarchies are flattened out. The
spectator is able to see things they cannot see from their seat-
ing in the theatre and above all they take responsibility for what
they are seeing, and this gaze has an effect on the work. The
place in space and its movement are also part of the work and
have value for me.
On the other hand, as of 2002, I began working on cho-
reography projects with large groups, multitudes of people,
such as 40 Espontaneos (40 Spontaneous). I also made videos
and video installations, such as Despliegue (Unfolding, 2001) and
films such as Mariachi 17 (2009). By 2010, I had more resources
and the works were more ambitious. However, I maintained my
aesthetic, such as a human scale and a poverty of materials –
handmade objects, folding chairs, strong colours and written
texts – as well as the presence of women on stage and real or
mythical animals like mermaids.
While living in London, Lois Keidan invited me to present
the three Piezas distinguidas series together for the first time
for Live Culture at the Tate Modern, using the same staging de-
vice as Still Distinguished. This was a key event. In 2003, we did
it, and I presented Panoramix, with all the pieces in a row, which
lasted for three hours. Panoramix (1993–2003) is a multidiscipli-
nary manifesto: a compilation of ten years of work and a state-
ment on dance and contemporary art. I assumed that with this
the Distinguished Pieces project would end, because I did not
want to continue, but ten years later I returned to the theatre
55 Collecting Dance
La Ribot, Panoramix, 1993–2003.
Installation view at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Photo: Museo Reina Sofía
La Ribot, Panoramix, 1993–2003, 2003.
57 Collecting Dance
with PARAdistinguidas (Beyond Distinguished, 2011), a series
with five dancers, Ruth Childs and Anna Williams among us, and
twenty amateur extras. I am currently continuing with the pro-
ject, actually in 2017 – for the T.I.A retrospective in Berlin and
the Portrait at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2019 – I had to
restage Panoramix exactly as I performed it at the Reina Sofía
Museum and the Tate Modern in 2003: so, me by myself, naked
for the full three hours with all those people around me …
LH: The presence of your naked body has always been a staple in your
work in general, but especially in these short pieces. In most of these
works this body is presented to us on a flat surface, on the ground. It
is a body, we could say, that is scattered, disarmed, knocked over.
La Ribot: I have conceived several bodies: the intelligent body,

contemporary body, operator body.
The operator body is the body of all my video work. I al-
ways use a long sequence shot (the closest thing to live action)
and have the camera in hand as close to the body as possible.
This way of filming creates a vision that is sometimes objective
and at other times subjective. There is no hierarchy or fixed or-
der, and this allows me to change the perception of a space, but
also to transfer the experience of dance to the viewer. I share
this term with the choreographer Olga Mesa.
The contemporary body levels dance with contempo-
rary art. It was the name I gave to contemporary dance at the
Geneva school HEAD in 2004, because my students did not want
to come to my dance classes.
The intelligent body is the name I give to the body of all
those who do not have specific training in dance. This concept
has allowed me to extend access to contemporary dance to ex-
tras, people of all capacities, ages, those with very different ed-
ucational backgrounds and to all my students. The intelligent
body, which we all have, measures danger, looks for possibilities
and has memory – it knows how to repeat. It is wonderful and
must be recovered!
I can see this fragmented and disarmed body that you
mention, and it is important if it is equated with that of the
viewer. What happened in the Still Distinguished series is that
the horizontality was constructed in it, and so were the frag-
mented, broken, scattered, thrown and, above all, installed bod-
ies. The horizontality was the surface of the ground where bod-
ies and objects, both mine and those of the spectator, are at the
same level. Everything can continue in motion as long as we are
all concentrated and connected in that limitless horizontality.
LH: From early on, almost at the beginning of the Piezas distinguidas
project, the concept of the ‘distinguished owner’ appeared. You had
the idea of selling works for which there is no art market, precisely be-
cause they are ephemeral pieces devoid of any objectual dimensions
and can only be staged. Was this a symbolic gesture or was there a
real attempt to enter the art market? What questions did this idea of
ownership provoke for you at the time?
La Ribot: Well, that was related to changes to the Bocanada

group and the loneliness of the artist that I was becoming
out of necessity. In 1993, when I first planned to produce 100
Distinguished Pieces, it may have seemed like a symbolic ges-
ture, but it wasn’t. These economic transactions allowed me
to keep making, producing and continuing to work on a small
but real scale. There was obviously no market though. Who
were the first owners? People close to me: friends, choreog-
raphers like Olga Mesa, Mathilde Monnier, Ion Munduate,
Jérôme Bel and Juan Domínguez and painters, singers, art
59 Collecting Dance
La Ribot, S-Liquid, 2000, 2003.
lovers and my gallerist at the time, Soledad Lorenzo. After a
while I couldn’t keep going. By the year 2000, I’d created thir-
ty-four Distinguished Pieces and there were twenty-seven ‘dis-
tinguished proprietors’. I had learnt a few things throughout
this process. I didn’t want to perform them, and I stopped sell-
ing them. The ‘distinguished proprietors’ became like angels.
Angels who argued about the ephemeral, the nature of the
possible object, what belonged to them or not and what they
could do with this ‘property’.
During those years, the ephemeral as a possible object
was a fun, interesting, strange and new question, on a very
small scale and without a market. Later, there were artists like
Tino Sehgal, and Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci who knew the
Distinguished Pieces, because they were colleagues of mine or
friends at the time and they developed this for the art market,
finding new ways to ‘preserve’ or talk about the live and give it
value. Wonderful!
LH: Regarding the pieces that are part of the Reina Sofía Museum’s
Performing Arts Collection, Another pá amb tomaquet (2002) is a work
produced with the camera, which generates a materiality. This is the
classic format by which museums have collected dance pieces and,
ultimately, all live arts. However, S Liquide (2000) is totally different:
there is no materiality or objectivity whatsoever to store. The muse-
um as an institution not only collects, but also conserves for future
generations. In the instructions for S Liquide, you have established
the dancers who can interpret this piece: La Ribot, Anna Williams and
Ruth Childs, but I was wondering if you imagine that the piece might
be preserved through transmission to other bodies. Here, we delve
into the debate of the body as an archive. Could the museum preserve
these pieces beyond these people, perhaps through oral transmission
or written instructions, or should the piece simply cease to exist?
61 Collecting Dance
Laughing Hole, 2006, 2013.
Installation view at Ruhrtriennale, Essen.
Courtesy of La Ribot. Photo: Ursula Kaufmann
63 Collecting Dance
La Ribot: The Reina Sofía Museum is the first and only museum
that has a Pieza distinguida. That is exceptional because there
will be no other. In the case of S liquide, other people could per-
form it, but I prefer it if those who have been close to me per-
form it, because it has to do with that notion. My body: I am orig-
inal. Anna Williams is original. Ruth Childs is original. Everyone
who could do it would also be original. How to preserve the orig-
inal live? How to make that an archive? What is an archive? Why
do we archive it? What is choreographic writing? The archive of
what I do are the dancers, performers and extras. That is, they
are all the bodies with whom I work. The most powerful archive
is the one that acts and the one that persists through memory. It
is energy and concentration. Anna Williams and Ruth Childs have
both worked with me; therefore, it is natural and instinctive to
me that they would be the archives, as I am the archive.
What lives, dies; it is ephemeral. So how to preserve that
archive? It is a question that is not resolved. Although S liquide
belongs to the Museum and the Museum is a ‘distinguished
owner’, the issue is not resolved. The acquisition opens up this
question. I would like to give value to dancing bodies. This is my
dance vindication.
LH: Laughing Hole is a work of yours that is perhaps most committed

to the historical-political context in which it was created. Yet there is
something timeless about it. The version in Castilian Spanish emerged
from an invitation from Mapa teatro: Laboratorio de artistas to take it
to its space in Colombia. This is a space that is very well known for its
relationship with expanded theatre works that speak of the violence
in Colombia. Would you say that Laughing Hole established a relation-
ship or dialogue with the context where it was staged and therefore
acquired new layers of meaning, or rather that the work escapes any
attempt to contextualise it?
La Ribot, Laughing Hole, 2006.
Installation view at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.
Courtesy of La Ribot
65 Collecting Dance
La Ribot: It contextualises itself; some of the words that popu-
late the posters in the piece appear and are added for a specif-
ic moment or they remain forever; it depends. There are three
versions: one in English, one in Japanese and one in Spanish.
I translated the Spanish version in Bogotá on the invitation of
Mapa Teatro. Laughing Hole in Bogotá had a huge impact on us.
This was obviously related to the context in which we found
ourselves. We also made it last for eight hours and it was bru-
tal to feel and see how the words resonated in the bodies and
in the city. For the translation I spent a week there prior to per-
forming. I sat down at ‘La Casa’, and the first person that passed
by helped me to translate. Words from the Colombian context
were gradually incorporated in this way, which was a very inter-
esting process. For example: estrato (stratum). A stratum is a
way of dividing the city into social classes, they call it estratos.
Depending on what stratum you are in, life happens one way or
another, socially and politically speaking.
Then they invited us to Japan, to the Aichi Triennale,
where we decided to translate the entire work. New words
with a social and political relevance in Japan thus appeared in
the translation. For example: ‘peeping’, which means spying
through a hole; spying on your neighbours. It’s something the
Japanese do; I had no idea. Fantastic. So ‘peeping’ becomes a
native word, which I conjugated with all the others.
The work is full of life, very vivid and moving, in move-
ment. Some of those native words have appeared or disap-
peared over the seventeen years that the work has toured
around the world. It has a life that is impossible to fix. There
have been words in Catalan, Zulu and German. All the lan-
guages and words that appeared in this work have remained
in my heart, in my memory and across my retina.
LH: What do you think has changed since the early 1990s regarding is-
sues such as collecting the performative, dance as an archive or the
ideas around transmission and repetition? Are there younger artists
and dancers who take these concepts for granted, or has the issue not
changed so much in the last thirty years?
La Ribot: This question is always pertinent. Are we changing

our perception or our view of things with what we do? Do we
change something or allow something to remain the same?
Contemporary dance is a contemporary art and it has become
more accessible over the last thirty years. Contemporary dance
is now present in art schools, universities, museums, galleries
and it also remains in theatres. Education programmes have
been created; Master’s that accept or incorporate dance, theat-
rical writing, visual arts assemblage and performance or video
art. It is all more porous now.
How we understand and treat the body has also
changed. Dance and the body were something people related
with music and theatre. Now the body as such is being ques-
tioned: the political body, identity, gender, sexuality. We talk
about disciplines, transversality and issues that arise in our con-
temporary society. Is everything more performative? Yes. There
is much in historical performance art and contemporary perfor-
mance studies. Art and dance have expanded, and they are be-
coming a territory of research, reflection, manifestos, militancy,
poetry and, above all, a territory that is expanding, is becoming
less formalist and more conceptual, if that makes sense.
Do the new generations take it for granted? The roads
open up and new generations walk them, that’s how it goes,
and sometimes without knowing how they were built.
67 Collecting Dance
ENIGMATIC
DEBRIS
Clémentine Deliss
68
1. Scene of the Crime
A large gleaming liver lies on a table, cut to the diagrammatic shape

of the Etruscan liver of Piacenza.1 Next to this viscous lump of flesh
sits a multi-tonal mop of hair. It’s a brush made from woven strands
cut from the heads of thirty-six people in the room. Recently removed
from living bodies, both animal and human, these organs effect a foren-
sic fascination, as if they constituted live DNA at the scene of a crime.
Scattered around the smudge of blood are other things: a rat trap wo-
ven out of reed; a clock with one hand; a label for an object that is not
there; some pieces of coloured paper with printed texts; two small
flickering light boxes by Jenny Holzer; and a painted Virgin Mary made
of synthetic plaster around thirty centimetres high. Together, these dif-
ferent agent-objects act within a Debating Chamber organised by the
Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U) at KW in November 2021.2 Placed
in different constellations to one another, they become ‘participative
devices’, connecting people to things, words and ideas and forecast-
ing new meanings and interpretations (Korsby & Stavrianakis 2020,
p. 95). Transitional, inquiry-led and semi-private, this three-hour-long
‘contingent exhibition’ offers a curatorial conduit for us to momentari-
ly explore and understand how we can come together as a circle of col-
leagues. The situation is vulnerable. The Stenographer types:
69 Enigmatic Debris
MM-U Debating Chamber, 2021 at KW
with BLESS hairbrush and cow’s liver.
Image-work: Eva Stenram
People slowly arrive. Everyone’s wearing a mask. There are
refreshments at one corner of the room by the stairs leading
down through the gallery, across four floors. Guests are hand-
ed a collection of four slim pamphlets in various colours, bound
together with a thin brown paper band. In the centre of the
room stands a table, divided into numbered segments. It looks
like a rudimentary city map, the numbers indicating the dif-
ferent neighbourhoods. There are some green-coloured seg-
ments, too, that look a bit like parks. Black plastic chairs with
metal legs are arranged around the table in a circle, interrupt-
ed by a white lectern with a microphone on it and a large digi-
tal clock. Across the table from the lectern stands another tall
table, behind which a man – the lawyer – wearing a checked
scarf is seated. There are various spotlights arranged around
the table, as well as people with film and still cameras. Off to
one side of the central table is a second table, decked out with
objects. Underneath it there are some shelves with various ar-
tefacts placed on them. In the back corner sits a technician who
speaks French. Most people are speaking English. I’m sat to the
left of the lectern on one of the same black chairs as form the
circle around the table and am typing on a laptop on a small,
squat table. It’s just gone 3 p.m. and things are about to begin.
A strange, repeated sound plays on the PA. A man steps up to
the lectern to welcome us and remind us that the gallery is state
funded. Clémentine then welcomes us all to the MM-U.3
With its graphic design and five metres in length, the ovoid ta-
ble could be in a casino or a war room.4 The thick red lines and black
numbers painted on the surface demarcate forty sectors. In the original
Babylonian context, these zones would have referred to the pantheon
of gods. Today the grid presages the dangers of categorical thinking
and what one can or cannot do, be this in art, curatorial practice
71 Enigmatic Debris
MM-U Debating Chamber, 2021 at KW, various prototypes
and ominous objects. Image-work: Eva Stenram
72
73
or related fields of inquiry. There is always an organisation to be put
to the test and dismantled in this decolonial exercise of ‘academic
iconoclasm’.
The Debating Chamber commences. Guests are seated, still, and
waiting, as if for an art conference to begin with a recognisable discur-
sive format.5 Then a mirroring occurs between the need to negotiate
our presence together and the incongruous grouping of objects on the
table. Identified as ‘prototypes’ or ‘ominous objects’, they mediate core
expressions of individual ways of thinking and, like omens, articulate
current concerns in the conditional tense, the ‘what if?’ necessary to
future readings.6 In the design of life, prototypes defy archival death.
They contain the potential to transform, even when surpassed or for-
gotten by research and design.7 Like a revenant, a prototype is there to
be re-energised, or risk falling into oblivion. In Eupalinos or the Architect
(1921), French poet Paul Valéry describes the morphological and seman-
tic ambiguities of an object that Socrates finds on the beach:
It was made from its own form, doubtful matter. Was it a fish
bone, bizarrely worn down by fine sand? Or ivory carved by a
craftsman beyond the waves for what purpose I do not know?
Was it a divine existence that perished in the same vessel for
which it had been made to prevent its sinking? Who was its au-
thor? A mortal who followed a concept, who used their hands
to form an object different to the raw material, carving and
etching, cutting, and joining; stopping and looking; then finally
letting go of their work – because something told them it was
complete. Or perhaps it was not the work of a living body but
made without self-awareness, shaped out of its own substance,
blindly forming organs and armatures, shell, bones, and protec-
tion, feeding and pulsating by itself, and taking part in its own
mysterious construction for time unknown. Or maybe it was just
the fruit of infinite time? … For a while, I considered it from all
its dimensions. I asked questions without waiting for answers.
This ambiguous object was the work of life, or art, or time, or a
game of nature. I could not tell the difference, so I threw it back
into the sea (Valéry, 1921).
When positioned in adjacency to one another, prototypes can

function like a contrast medium, highlighting differences and providing
both a critique of former systems of classification and evaluation, as
well as motivating questions, meanings and technicities.8 In their unfin-
ished and intermediate status, these artefacts, images, words, sounds
and texts trigger observations and conversations, and underpin the
foundation for a transversal methodology.9 Their divergent values, re-
flected by authored as well as anonymous or undocumented artists, lo-
cate them outside of the art market. Research collections made from
the ‘enigmatic debris’ (Valéry 1921) of an artist’s work are not sold at
auction or in fairs. Private galleries, if they own the estates of artists,
are not particularly engaged in collating and selling these individual ar-
chives as artworks. Yet these are far from being the biographic adden-
dum to an oeuvre. They have a prelusive quality that is significant and
generative.
The start of this inquiry takes place a few months earlier at an
MM-U online meeting or ‘Bureau d’Esprit’. Just as the ‘situation de-
signers’ BLESS begin to present their digital archive to the group, our
doorbells ring. Unexpectedly, each of us is handed a parcel containing a
BLESS prototype. I receive ‘Fur Wig 00’ (1996), one of their very first de-
signs; Matthias Bruhn is given the folding stool made of cowhide, Krista
Belle Stewart the mini treadmill, Tom McCarthy a pair of sunglasses
with gold chains dangling over the lens like in a lap-dancing club, and
Margareta von Oswald a long knobbly walking stick with a wine glass
for a handle. Through this action, BLESS have broken the strictures
of our virtual conversation. For rather than show us their prototypes
online, they have literally sent them out to us by messenger at a time
75 Enigmatic Debris
MM-U Debating Chamber, 2021 at KW, exercise in
76 visual thinking. Image-work: Eva Stenram
when we are confined to our homes by the pandemic.10 Later, when we
realise that this action is a performative moment without any transac-
tion of ownership, a particular conjecture remains: What if BLESS had
gifted one of their prototypes to the MM-U? Could this act of radical
generosity form the basis for a polysemic collection made from our indi-
vidual research materials? Might one produce symbolic capital from this
ideational aggregate or ‘holding for inquiry’ that reflects our individual
identities and aesthetic affiliations?
However, by extracting key designs and placing them into anoth-
er archival context, that of a research collection, one is fracturing pro-
fessional biographies and quite possibly giving away both quasiartworks
and codes of production. Such academic iconoclasm refutes the validity
of an ‘original context’ and the sanctity of named authorship in favour
of an experimental, unfinished archive with its own idiosyncratic style of
ordering, naming and documenting. It reverses the common anthropo-
logical process in which another culture’s artistic ingenuity is appropriat-
ed and reframed within a logos of ethnos. With the MM-U, we are doing
it to ourselves, fracturing our own bodies of work, propagating re-read-
ings and re-design, devising alternative terminologies and seeking to
produce a venue that can reflect this transgressive paradigm.
In his final publication, Paul Rabinow searches for methods
and terms to convey venues in which ‘thinking and invention’ can take
place collaboratively (Korsby & Stavrianakis 2020, p. 95). He states,
‘The challenge – and this could be pedagogic too – is what to do with
multiplicity? How do you assemble multiplicity into an assemblage
that’s dynamic, preserves the heterogeneous character of the parts,
but brings them into some relationship with each other that’s unex-
pected and good for everybody?’ (Rabinow 2014). At the University
of California, at Berkeley, he sets up the ‘Labinar’, a workspace for
sharing materials, talking about ‘empirical instances’, and noting how
different groupings can provide terms of analysis and synthesis. ‘The
aim’, he writes, is ‘to avoid the reduction of the seminar space to
77 Enigmatic Debris
a proxy zone for merely advancing in one’s thesis research. Simply put,
we wished to try and think together about things that we had not yet
thought about’ (Korsby & Stavrianakis 2020, p. 82). At one point, his
collaborators describe the increasingly repetitive tone of the meetings
and how they decide to introduce a fresh animal liver into the Labinar,
surprising their colleagues who pass it around noting the tactile quality
and incongruity of the organ within the university setting.11 This phys-
ical intervention dislodges the stasis felt in the group and creates an
unexpected moment of collectivity. Referring to the work of Pedersen
and Nielson, the agency of the liver is described as a ‘trans-temporal
hinge’ (Pedersen & Nielson 2013), a theoretical tool for understanding
situations or phenomena in which different temporalities (certain past,
present and future events) are momentarily assembled.12
2. Same Words, Same Ills13
The three-hour Debating Chamber at KW follows eighteen months of

pandemic-induced isolation. The procedure for the day is planned by
Tom McCarthy and Matthias Bruhn with rhetorical and performative
prompts along the lines of a parliamentary assembly.14 This is com-
bined with oracular protocols, which are equally political. The gather-
ing opens with a ‘Calling to Order’, a sonic intervention composed by
Augustin Maurs in which a shrill voice cries out ‘Die Welt … die Welt …’
(the world … the world …). Guest Assyriologist, Netanel Anor, pro-
nounces a prayer to the Babylonian sun god Shamesh in ancient
Akkadian. Later, Anor will close the session by reading the prognos-
tics of the liver and interpreting the ritual of pouring oil into a bowl
of water.15 In the short interval between the acts, a shuffling of chairs
enables a switch in positions. It is hard not to notice the generation-
al divide in discourse, referentiality and stance. We are effectively as
diverse and as interconnected as the artefacts laid out in front of us,
both in turn reflecting the ‘modern fiction of radical openness’.16
visual thinking. Image-work: Eva Stenram
79 Enigmatic Debris
After around thirty minutes, propositional groupings start
to form. The rat trap, first placed upright on the table, mimicking a
monument or high-rise, is laid on its side, ‘ready to catch an edict’.17
A plastic folder containing dust from a sawn-off beam and belonging
to Geoffrey Hendrick’s Flux Divorce Box18 now neighbours the prefab
souvenir of the Berlin Wall brought by Henrike Naumann. In between
both lies a broken shard of reddish land made by artist Krista Belle
Stewart and used to transport her heritage from Spaxomin in Canada
to Europe. It works well next to the grey sheet of paper prepared by
Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène that reads, ‘The term FICTION as an instrument
in law’.19 Questions of land, partition and fractured relationships materi-
alise between people, words and things. ‘What is language and what is
an object? Can we as actors become open to the point where we don’t
matter anymore? Do these objects play with us?’ asks Kristian Vistrup
Madsen, the designated Observer.20
The whole game is about language/symbolism, but only until it

isn’t any longer. Then it becomes a process of eroding the con-
text that was established by the ritual (presenting the objects/
prototypes; announcing them) and the table (the map, and
mapping not as a way of producing knowledge, but changing it).
But the objects are only open or closed within that context, oth-
erwise, open to what? To language? In the end, there is some-
thing ironically stable about their openness; any combination
seems possible. But where is the stopper, the limit; what would
the last action be? To take care, in this case, seems to mean tak-
ing care not to end the game. Some participants are keen to end
it, not by breaking rules, but re-establishing them: closing the
vertigo openness of the objects.21
Several transgressions take place over the course of the three

hours, actions which are defined by one participant as ‘disruptive’.22 The
first is the removal of human hair performed right at the start as peo-
ple are finding their seats and taking in the situation. Once gathered,
each lock is bound with thread and slipped through the rubber base of
a brush. No one seems particularly bothered about this activity carried
out by Hiro, the guest hairdresser, together with Ines and Desiree of
BLESS, who sit in silence making this surreal and tautological object. A
second disruption occurs when Matthias Bruhn picks up the statuette
of the Virgin Mary and pushes her iconic face into the glutinous liver.
Alluding to the blood of Christ, he veers precariously close to an act
of art-historical and theological blasphemy. The Madonna is put back
onto the table and told by Karl Holmqvist to ‘face the digital clock’.
Sometimes a sense of humour and playfulness revs up the session. But
the highlights remain moments when a disturbing action suspends cur-
rent perceptions, like in that instance of fall and retrieval found in syn-
copation.23 Then, as if in chain reaction, Augustin Maurs performs an
extensive rendition of the unpronounceable word, ‘ZZXJOANW’, Ruth
Buchanan shoves all the objects to the far side, clearing the table as if
to play a new set and Calum Bowden grabs the lamb’s liver from the
plate, slapping it onto the white surface of the table and staining it red.
At this point, Sam Parfitt the Stenographer notes:
Someone gets up and attempts to pronounce the unpro-

nounceable word. He takes the page of text to the podium
and makes ssss and zzzz sounds, then gargling sounds. It’s a
long word, more of a poem. It ends quite dramatically, almost
like an orgasm. Guests are then invited to throw whatever
is in their pockets on the table. In a moment, the table is lit-
tered with used tissues, cigarette packets and train tickets. It
is suggested to move all the objects to one end of the table.
Suddenly, the wig, wine and Mary are all congregated togeth-
er, at the far end of the table. Calum wants to take the liver
out of the dish and onto the table, placing it on Nos. 30 and 24.
81 Enigmatic Debris
The wine bottle is removed. The hairbrush is dangerously close
to the liver. People are gesticulating wildly around the table;
tensions are running high.
Three curatorial principles inform the MM-U’s Debating

Chamber. The first is its insertion into an existing exhibition, momen-
tarily jarring and expanding the canon of the host display; the second is
the concern to create a mood of vulnerability in a semi-private environ-
ment with an invited set of participants; the third is the attempt to de-
viate from academically legitimised norms of evaluation and modes of
transmission. The Debating Chamber has no breakdown of themes, list
of speakers or titles of papers. With a set of heteroclite agent-objects,
it throws confusion into expectations of context and documentation.
Moreover, as a curatorial platform positioned backstage, it may not be
permanent or visible to all. In fact, it is likely to discourage consensus
and be dysfunctional regarding institutional structures. It is not meant
to compete with an exhibition, but to act as a performative bypass, ac-
tivating ‘motion in thought’ (Korsby & Stavrianakis 2020, p. 67), and
pushing against disciplinary taxonomies. This aspect addresses the con-
ceptual nature of the documentation produced both before, during and
after the meeting. If artists develop a form of implicit communication
between each other, beyond the glare of the media and wider public,
then this exchange based on conceptual intimacy, when curated, ne-
cessitates a vector that will carry over their fragile, codified references.
To this purpose, I invite three artists to film and photograph the
‘organisation of knowledge’ of the Debating Chamber.24 The results of
the day are subsequently edited into a montage that relays an alternate
version of our inquiry rather than merely recording it.25 For example,
works by Eva Stenram use the trope of the cut-up and collage to per-
form a meta-commentary on the photographic document, accentuat-
ing the framing of object photography with its directives and biases.
Between the poetics of surrealist configurations and the presumed ob-
jectivity of museological imaging with its visual construction of taxon-
omies, her work translates the Debating Chamber into a photograph-
ic assemblage for future discussion. What happens that afternoon in
November 2021 at KW is not represented through photographs of us
all sitting in a circle looking at a group of things. Stenram is offering the
reader a prototype model of visual thinking with collections.
3. Documenting Counter-Conduct
In what manner can a recording supersede its banality and presumed

objectivity to convey a critical stance, both political and aesthetic? Is
it possible to radically subjectivise the act of documentation and keep
it private? How much pressure is placed on curators by the broadcast-
ing requirements of public-funded institutions? What happens to the
more initiate, tentative and obtuse expressions that are also part of
artistic and curatorial practice and that often run against the grain of
public-facing events? Does it constitute a form of counter-conduct to
withhold information, to perform communicational abstinence as an in-
stance of critique?26
Actionist photography, for example, devised its own channel
of documentation, providing an image-concept (Bildidee) with a visual
grammar of subjective reportage that retains fascination 50 years later
(Gorsen 2008, p. 9). As an art student at the cusp of the 1980s, I caught
the tail end of Viennese Actionism and witnessed remarkable perfor-
mances by Vito Acconci, Abramović/Ulay, Gina Pane, VALIE EXPORT,
Reindeer Werk, Stuart Brisley, General Idea and many more.27 I remem-
ber nakedness, surfaces penetrated, punctured and bleeding, like rit-
uals of transgression on the part of the artist. The materiality at hand
was that of the human body as a heightened transmitter of conceptu-
al propositions. In particular, I noted those artists who worked close-
ly with the performers, entrusted to translate their presence through
photography and film. Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Heinz Cibulka and
83 Enigmatic Debris
86 visual thinking. Image-work: Eva Stenramm
87 visual thinking. Image-work: Eva Stenramm
Luigi Hoffenreich transported the artists’ individual identities by inscrib-
ing their actions dialogically onto celluloid. Both artist and documenter
were implicitly partners in an act of representation that necessitated
an aesthetic break with post-war social and political ideologies. Cultural
historian, Peter Gorsen, claims that the photography of Viennese
Actionism was an ‘obsessive form’ of ‘simultaneous translation’, us-
ing the trope of ‘psycho-physical naturalism’. He writes, ‘The actor acts
and becomes the material of the action, mumbling, stuttering, falling,
sighing, vomiting, laughing, biting, shitting, and rolling within the ma-
teriality of these emissions’ (Gorsen 2008, p. 9). This was ‘revolutionary
subjectivism ...’, a work of ‘Totalaktion’ on the ‘material-body existence
without categorisation’. Influenced by imaginative and reflexive eth-
nographers such as Gregory Bateson, Michel Leiris, Jean Rouch, Clifford
Geertz, Hans-Peter Duerr and Michael Oppitz, this period of artist-led
archival formation was not only emancipatory, but also simultaneously
artwork and document.
In the second half of the 1980s in Europe and the US, things
change. It is no longer hip to belong to a commune, take part in artists’
workshops, or hand over the representation of one’s work to anoth-
er artist to define. Photographs of exhibits by Haim Steinbach or Jeff
Koons, for example, taken at the time of production in the mid- to late
1980s, frame the image of the art object as manufactured, speculative
capitalism.28 These squeaky-clean sculptures contrast with the messy,
organic expressions of earlier art actions and their quasi-ethnograph-
ic renderings. Photography is no longer ‘in there’, shooting corporeal
presence (as in cinema verité), but has a new role to play. By moving
away from an understanding of the document as empathic and gener-
ated through artistic collaboration, these neo-conceptual artists and
their galleries introduce a dispassionate focus on the individual work.
With 1989, and the expansionism of the art world beyond
European and North American borders, the document changes once
again. Now it veers towards increasing context-specificity, and with the
rise of cultural studies, affords another paradigm of quasi-ethnograph-
ic representation for artists working with referential practices of place,
gender and community.29 The work of Renée Green, the writings of
Miwon Kwon, and the curatorial practice of Ute Meta Bauer are exam-
ples of this self-conscious site-specific stance.30 In parallel, the journal
Texte zur Kunst, launched in Germany in 1990, institutes a new narra-
tology for critical transferral.31 Alongside this textualised form of doc-
umentation, discursive formats in art spaces are no longer add-ons to
exhibitions but central events, in turn becoming essential to the aca-
demic formalisation of artistic research. Today, the standardisation of
terminologies that underpin identifications of people and subject mat-
ter in exhibition-making works to neuter the potential for a practice of
counter-conduct that might confront normative formats for showing,
discussing, documenting and disseminating art.
The Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar offers an alternative approach
to this condition. In the 1990s, the transdisciplinary collective wrote
manifestos when it sought to announce a cultural and political urgency
in the country, for example deforestation or poverty. However, when
it came to performances carried out by the group there was no script.
Each member knew what they could bring to the table, and in the
crossover between painting, performance, film and photography, roles
were implicitly self-allocated. Bouna Médoune Sèye took photographs
of the performances, Djibril Diop Mambéty was responsible for film,
El Hadji Sy for costumes and scenography and the organ Metronome,
which I first published in Dakar in 1996, provided an international plat-
form for mediation between artists and writers. Metronome could
transmit the code of the Laboratoire without handing over the keys
to the house. Texts by Issa Samb, juxtaposed with those of Paul Virilio,
Guy Brett or Édouard Glissant, remain consciously opaque.32 Characters
often appear under pseudonym, as if on stage. There’s a military dicta-
tor, a radio host, an art dealer, deceased militants and opportunist art-
ists. In Samb’s narratives, the parameters of art practice are rendered
89 Enigmatic Debris
Proceedings of the Metabolic Museum-University,
Metronome, no. 12, vols. I–IV, 2021.
Image-work: Eva Stenram
to the outside reader in a prose that is neither contextual nor clearly
informative, but dramaturgical and interventionist on several levels.
Samb was a ‘passeur’ between the ministries and the street, the politi-
cians and the paupers.
Aliou, I had no choice, or anyway, a difficult choice to make. Art

is in fashion, in fact there’s one sure sign: there are no more real
civil servants, they’ve all become project-mongers. Look at the
gentlemen on the screen to the left on Wall Street. These New
York guys who’ve kindly set it all up for you, expecting to see
the riches rain down on Mélanie33 and its posterity. D’you get
it? All these cocksure kids and childish artworks for sale on the
Bamako market, to music by Bazoumana Sissoko. So, of course
the military boys and the predators come flocking from all over
when they see this stuff hanging on the picture rails. They run
wild and open up the operating theatre to all those rats, collect-
ing both the organs and the money. (Samb 1997, p. 50)
The Metabolic Museum-University requires a similarly encrypt-

ed style for transferring the dynamics between matter and thought.
To this end, each participant is sent the Proceedings of the Metabolic
Museum-University ahead of the Debating Chamber. Printed in Berlin
on coloured government paper, the four small pamphlets contain the
distillation of the Bureau d’Esprit meetings held by the MM-U over the
course of 2020–21, and during which we shared our personal methodol-
ogies and dilemmas. The pamphlets, which relaunch Metronome after
15 years, are purposefully not online. It is the intimacy of their passing
that counts, and the gesture of handing a booklet to another trusted
interlocutor to read. In today’s pandemic-induced immobility, these
Proceedings respond to the need for a private, non-digitised circulation
of unfinished and potentially sensitive inquiry. In one of the pamphlets,
for example, Tarek Atoui describes sound recordings that he made in
91 Enigmatic Debris
Beirut’s harbour the day before the explosions, and the difficult choices
he now faces around their transmission. Concept-work of this nature
effectively suspends dissemination to an arbitrary public in favour of
distinct person-to-person communication. As Luke Willis Thompson,
artist, and member of the MM-U, asks, ‘How can the institution become
a channel for artistic interference and classificatory transgression? Does
digital hypervisibility serve the decolonial work we undertake?’34
4. Parallel Taxonomies
Today’s understanding of documentation in art is forensic, traceable

and contractual. The impact of the blockchain and its protocols of
acquisition, ownership and transferral is right on track with the new
taxonomies currently being composed to deal with the evaluation
of artworks illegitimately acquired during colonialism and lacking bi-
ographical data. If ethnological provenance studies are about filling
in the lacunae of an object’s background and its journey to Europe,
this requires an extra booking technology to substantiate ownership
(Reichert 2021, p. 11). With this digital inventory system, a new order
of conservative historicism restores authority and veracity to ethnol-
ogy’s nineteenth-century focus on ritual and iconic ‘masterpieces’.
Engagement in provenance studies, parented by European foreign
and cultural ministries, is laudable, but it remains closely tied to fu-
ture exploitation, not to mention the continuity of the ethno-colonial
museum at home and abroad (Deliss 2020). The most valorised eth-
nographic object is either one that has no intermediary dealer but
has gone straight from source to museum, or one that has circulated
between prestigious owners, gaining museological and art-historical
credibility along the way. By producing proof of provenance, one ef-
fectively augments the value of the item on the global market.
There is a curious conjunction between the current fascination
with tracking and tracing, and the digital ownership of prime works of
so-called ‘tribal art’. To this effect, museum anthropology revives its
earlier morphological focus and deploys CT scanners to produce visual
data for exploitation, all the while supporting restitution. Yet the own-
ership of this new downloadable object is in the hands of the museum
that has the power to reproduce representations on any scale, in any
medium and for whatever purpose. With the aid of the hospital scan-
ner, the formerly unclassifiable object achieves ontological determin-
ism. Ultimately, ethnology has produced a cult of possession, an obses-
sive focus on the inscription of ownership through disciplinary tropes
of contextualisation.
Questions of ownership and audience (i.e., the need to balance

access and restriction, to ‘quarantine’ a portion of our delibera-
tions from the public, even as we plan to eventually enact them
in some kind of public arena) have loomed large in our discus-
sions, as have those of how to manage or accommodate the of-
ten unsettling backstories housed and stored up by containers
of the sort we’re dealing with.
I think a vital axis for us here is ‘Tikanga’. For us, this
would translate into the question: On whose authority are we
operating? Under whose jurisdiction? Just as Count Dracula’s
boxed earth passes through many legal territories en route
to London (we get detailed records of the fees, taxes, bribes
etc. paid to each regional authority), so the artefacts in Berlin’s
many collections have seen their location, ownership or status
morphing with the various shifts in geography or geo-politics or
simply time that they have undergone.35
Both legal complexity, contention and ambiguity underlie the re-

lationship between research collections of the past and their latent po-
tential for future knowledge production. For the younger generation,
there can be no in-depth remediation without the elaboration of a le-
93 Enigmatic Debris
gal language with which to redistribute rights. Nothing is open-source,
and even less so if it is embargoed within the universal museum. Who
has the right to produce derivatives based on objects in ethnological
collections? Who controls the legitimacy of interpretation? To open the
caskets of colonial museums in Europe is to deal with the complex ram-
ifications of a new social responsibility built around the ethics of acces-
sibility to this vast cultural heritage. Such engagement is about archi-
tectonics and methodology, reconfiguring physical space in museums
for assemblages to be metabolised and rethought as interdependent of
several narratologies, locations and systems of ownership.
The overarching twentieth-century formulation of ‘permanent’
and ‘temporary’ exhibitions is neither sustainable, nor does it corre-
spond to the requirements of a decolonial art history formulated via
the agency of collections. To this purpose one can begin to think of
the exhibition as a moving, growing, flourishing and transitional plant,
with artworks and artefacts in all media arriving, leaving, being placed
into momentary constellations, taken down new routes of inquiry and
documented in a multitude of different ways. To transgress the rhetor-
ical systems of art history, anthropology and curatorial practice means
working on situations that smuggle in complexity through channels and
interfaces that cannot be made visible or marketed easily. Contingent
exhibitions such as the ‘Debating Chamber’ at KW clearly stimulate tur-
bulence.36 Disquieting moments are there to question the mirage of cu-
ratorial clarity and push both organisation, reception and documenta-
tion into a subjective, vulnerable mode. They are exercises or rehearsals
in academic iconoclasm that can help to construct new narratives and
performative ways of exhibiting and documenting collections and ideas
in the twenty-first century.
ENDNOTES
1 The table is based on a diagram of the bronze model of a sheep’s liver

found in Piacenza, Italy, dating back to 400 BC, and drawn by Alessandro
Morandi in 1991. It depicts sixteen sections that in turn represent astrologi-
cal houses or dwelling places of individual deities. Strategists, often in war,
would make their final decisions as a result of oracular protocols conducted
by Babylonian haruspicists for which liver or entrails were read as ‘ominous’
objects.
2 The members of the Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U) in 2020–21
are BLESS (situation designers), Matthias Bruhn (art and media histori-
an), Clémentine Deliss (curator of the MM-U, associate curator KW), Krist
Gruijthuijsen (curator, director KW), Iman Issa (artist), Augustin Maurs (com-
poser, musician), Tom McCarthy (novelist), Henrike Naumann (artist), Azu
Nwagbogu (curator), Margareta von Oswald (anthropologist), Manuel
Raeder (designer), Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène (lawyer for investment and tax),
Krista Belle Stewart (artist) and Luke Willis Thompson (artist). A first experi-
ment with an assemblage of artefacts was conducted between members of
the MM-U in July 2020. It took place within the exhibition of Hassan Sharif on
a day when KW was closed to the public.
3 These are extracts from the report drafted by Sam Parfitt, anthropologist,
and invigilator at KW, who was invited to take on the role of Stenographer of
the Debating Chamber.
4 Artist Santiago Mostyn suggested the setting evoked the partitioning of
Africa in Berlin in 1884.
5 Guest participants includeed Hubertus von Amelunxen (art historian,
director Archivio Conz), Netanel Anor (Assyriologist), Dido Baxevanidis
(psychotherapist), Calum Bowden (anthropologist and digital designer),
Ruth Buchanan (artist), Shoufay Derz (artist), Sam Durant (artist), Olivier
Guesselé-Garai (artist), Paz Guevara (cultural theoretician), Anna Gritz
(curator, KW), Hannes Hacke (cultural historian), Jakob Karpus (artist),
Mariamargherita Maceli (art historian, Archivio Conz), Marc Hollenstein
95 Enigmatic Debris
(graphic designer), Karl Holmqvist (artist), Sofie Krogh Christensen (curator,
KW), Léon Kruijswijk (curator, KW), Talya Lubinsky (artist), Kristian Vistrup
Madsen (art critic and writer), Antje Majewski (artist), Santiago Mostyn
(artist), Matt Mullican (artist), Tahani Nadim (sociologist of science), Thais
Napomuceno (filmmaker), Ana Prvački (artist), Daniel Rosenberg (historian),
Franka Schneider (cultural historian), Eva Stenram (artist, photographer),
Sérgio Taborda (artist), Robin Watkins (artist), Ivo Wessel (collector).
6 List of prototypes and ominous objects: miniature concrete reproduction of
a segment of the Berlin Wall; set of engraved wooden forks and spoons for
a bride and groom; silk tie with embroidered dogs; wall clock with one hand
(Henrike Naumann); bottle of red wine with SI on the label (Tom McCarthy);
broken tile made from the land of Spaxomin (Krista Belle Stewart); Madonna
made from plastic and used in an Italian TV programme (Matthias Bruhn);
sealed cardboard box as a proxy for an object non-present; written descrip-
tion of the contents of the cardboard box, ‘Rund, schwer, glatt, schmut-
zig grün’ (Iman Issa); Fur Wig 00, 1996; hairbrush made during the Debating
Chamber with strands of hair from all participants (BLESS); welded steel
letters also used as birds’ houses (Manuel Raeder); the term ‘fiction’ as
an instrument in law (Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène); two black-and-white pho-
tographs of displays on ‘Africa’ exhibited at the Ethnological Museum in
Berlin, Dahlem (Margareta von Oswald); the word that is unpronounceable,
ZZXJOAWN (Augustin Maurs); conversation between Marcel Broodthaers
and his cat (Krist Gruijthuijsen); fresh liver; instrument for smoothing the
shaft of boots, once belonging to Lothar Baumgarten; wooden shoe-
making lasts, unchanged since 2002; rat trap made in rattan, Lusanga,
Democratic Republic of Congo; registration form for antiquities, Nigeria,
1974; wood mould of a head for shaping performance costumes, Nigeria,
2021 (Clémentine Deliss); box of thirty-six coloured wooden cubes (Matt
Mullican); extract from P. K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962 (Sergio
Taborda); neolithic arrowhead and a coccyx bone (Ana Prvački); two light
boxes by Jenny Holzer with ‘Truisms’ and ‘Inflammatory Sentences’, 1996;
electronic digital clock (Ivo Wessel); three pieces from the ‘Flux Divorce
Box’ by Geoffrey Hendricks, 1973; collage made from a handwritten letter,
a shipping envelope and a book placed in a wooden box by Alison Knowles,
1997 (Archivio Conz).
7 The term prototype is used by Issa Samb, co-founder of the Laboratoire
Agit’Art in Dakar, who reiterates that no object is in a museum is ‘useless’.
See Clémentine Deliss (2020, p. 18).
8 Adjacency ‘sets in motion heterogeneous elements, practices and forms’,
implying that there are generative qualities harboured in collections that
can support the flourishing of collaborative practices of concept-work. See
Korsby and Stavrianakis (2020, p. 53).
9 For details on the Prototype Collection see Metronome no. 12, vols. I–IV
(2021), available only by post or directly in person from KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Auguststrasse 69, 10117 Berlin. Further examples of this
concept can be found in Deliss 2011.
10 BLESS had suggested the same operation take place before the Debating
Chamber, and that we send one prototype to each of the guest partici-
pants in advance of the session, to live with it and understand it further.
Unfortunately, this proposal could not be executed for reasons to do with
timing and organisational capacity.
11 Sheep or lamb’s liver, freshly removed, is an ancient medium for strategic
divination. Recognised as the key metabolic point in the body, the liver offers
the imprint of a life once lived while signalling a future yet to be enacted.
12 To quote Korsby and Stavrianakis, ‘What we take from these collaborative
moments, and what we hope to pass on to others with this account, is to of-
fer an alternative perspective on what scholarly work in the university might
look like’ (2020, p. 84).
13 ‘Mêmes mots, mêmes maux’, artist and philosopher Issa Samb in a short text
sent to the author in 2003.
14 The procedure is elaborated by Tom McCarthy and Matthias Bruhn.
15 Some drops of sesame oil into water act as an additional oracle. Anor’s read-
ing is auspicious.
16 A comment made by Kristian Vistrup Madsen, designated Observer of the
Debating Chamber.
97 Enigmatic Debris
17 A comment made by Tom McCarthy during the Debating Chamber.
18 The works by Geoffrey Henrdricks and Alison Knowles were kindly lent by
Archivio Conz, Berlin.
19 This statement on the printed card was brought to the Debating Chamber
by MM-U member and lawyer Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène. While this sentence
has truly polysemantic reverberations, it also indicates the civic status of fu-
ture residents of Germany. The government employs the unusual term of
Fiktionsbescheinigung (Fictional Certificate) to represent the intermediary
status of citizenship pending a residence permit.
20 An observation made by Kristian Vistrup Madsen.
21 Kristian Vistrup Madsen, notes.
22 The term is used by Léon Kruijswijk to designate significant ruptures in the
Debating Chamber.
23 For an expanded discussion on syncopation, see Metronome no. 12, vol. II,
2021, ‘Syncopathologies’.
24 See MacKenzie Wark.
25 The artists are Eva Stenram (evastenram.net), Thais Nepomuceno (thaisnep-
omuceno.art) and Jakob Karpus, a former art student of mine at the HfBK
(University of the Arts, Hamburg), who collaborated on homemuseum.net
and set up the artists’ research collective Birds of Knowledge.
26 See Foucault 2009.
27 Witnessed in 1978 at different galleries in Vienna (Galerie Nächst St. Stephan;
Modern Art Galerie Grita Insam), and at the International Performance
Festival Wien and Graz, organised by the Österreichische Kunstverein.
28 For an expanded curatorial model that brings the ethnological in dialogue
with the neo-conceptual, see Lotte or the Transformation of the Object,
curated by Clémentine Deliss for Styrian Autumn 1990, and Academy of
Fine Arts, Vienna, 1991. Catalogue Durch, 1990, Akademische Druck und
Verlagsanstalt, Graz (series produced by Peter Pakesch). Pakesch, P. (ed.).
1990. Durch, exh. cat. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Akademische Druck und
Verlagsanstalt, Graz.
29 In ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, published in 1995, Hal Foster states,
‘…rogue investigations of anthropology, like queer critiques of psycho-
analysis, possess vanguard status today: it is along these lines that the
critical edge is felt to cut most incisively.’
30 See Kwon 2002.
31 While visuals featured in the pages of Texte zur Kunst, its model was the
American journal October, which was text-heavy.
32 Metronome issues nos. 1, 3 and 7 (1997–2001), available from the author on
request. Not made for online circulation.
33 Mélanie is code for Senegal, referencing the pigment melanin.
34 In Deliss et al. 2021.
35 By referring to ‘Tikanga’, Tom McCarthy extends the proposition of Luke
Willis Thompson that this Maori word is relevant to the constitution of the
MM-U. Thompson states, ‘The word is often mistranslated from Maori into
English as protocol, but it’s really a philosophy of law and a system of gov-
ernance. I think the best translation is ritualized practices designed for sur-
vival.’ In Metronome vol. III, no. 12, p. 3.
36 I am grateful to KW Institute for Contemporary Art for enabling me to hold
the Debating Chamber, and to all members of the MM-U, the invited guests,
and the team from KW for their support.
99 Enigmatic Debris
REFERENCE LIST
Deliss, C. 2020, The Metabolic Museum, Hatje Cantz, Berlin.

Deliss, C. (ed.). 2021, “Proceedings of the Metabolic Museum-University”,
Metronome no.12, vols. I–IV, Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
Deliss, C. (ed.). 2011, Object Atlas: Fieldwork in the Museum, Kerber Verlag,
Bielefeld.
Foster, H. 1995, “The artist as ethnographer?”, in G. Marcus and F. Myers (eds),
The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, University of California
Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London.
Foucault, M. 2009, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell, Picador, London.
Korsby, TM. and Stavrianakis, A. 2020, “Chapter Title”, in Paul Rabinow (ed.),
The Privilege of Neglect: Science as a Vocation Revisited, 3rd edition, ARC
Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, Berkeley.
Kwon, M. 2002, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Pedersen, MA. and Morton Nielson, M. 2013, “Trans-Temporal Hinges:
Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastructural Projects in
Mozambique and Mongolia”, Social Analysis vol. 57, no. 1, viewed 3 January
2022, https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/social-analysis/57/1/
sa570109.xml.
Rabinow, P. 2014, Research Dialog with Paul Rabinow 10.11.2014, online video, 29
December, viewed 9 January 2022, https://vimeo.com/115589641.
Reichert, K. 2021, Krypto-Kunst: Digitale Bildkulturen, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach,
Berlin.
Samb, I. 1997. “And This Time That Chases after Us…”, trans. C. Deliss,
Metronome, no. 1, London.
Valéry, P. 1921, Eupalinos or the Architect, trans. Clémentine Deliss.

CASE STUDIES
101
ARCHIVING
LIVE
PERFORMANCE
ART: THE CASE
OF OTOBONG
NKANGA
Lotte Bode
102
When, in 2019, the Nigeria-born and Belgium-based visual and per-
formance artist Otobong Nkanga reached out to the Museum of
Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) and the Flemish Centre for Art
Archives (CKV) to examine how her performances could enter into the
collection of the museum, she wanted to ensure their afterlife would
still be ‘alive’. Because artist and institution joined forces in creating new
ways of thinking about archiving performance, this case became a pilot
research project in the quest of the Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV)
to research methodologies for archiving performance art.1 This contribu-
tion will offer a compilation of three in-depth interviews and one group
conversation with Nkanga. It reflects on the way her work asks for ‘a
breathing archive’, a notion she introduces herself. Listening to the artist
and starting from her own vocabulary, Nkanga’s case can be a way to ap-
proach some problems of archiving live performance art in museums.2
L’Internationale’s Our Many Europes-programme focuses on the

1990s, the period in which the world started turning into a ‘global
village’, and for you the time in which you migrated from Nigeria to
Europe. In this period, more and more artists started to interrogate
the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against the
grain (Foster 2004). Also among historians, literary critics and an-
thropologists, the archive was elevated to new analytic status with
103 Archiving Live Performance Art...

distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny of its own. The archive started to
shift from being approached as source to subject (Stoler 2009, pp.
44–6). What does the archive mean for your work?
I like to think about the archive as a breathing entity. Breathing

means the work has to have a life in response to the amount of
oxygen there is in the space at the time. When it comes to ar-
chiving my performative work, a crucial principle will be the idea
of evolvement, which points at a certain flexibility in the way of
archiving while also allowing the archived materials to change
over time. This approach is in contrast with the classic archivist
point of view, which revolves around preservation and is more
static. Evolvement is in line with the spirit of my work, since
there are different ways in which it evolves: each time the work
is different – unlike a theatre or dance piece that is rehearsed
and follows the same scenario more or less.
Transmission can be for a younger generation or other
groups and is not (or at least not necessarily) about arresting or
fixing the transmitted. Griots from Senegal or Mali, for exam-
ple, know the stories of families and know the socio-economic
positioning within a family. This knowledge is stored in the
mind, in memories, in objects, in places, etc. Through touch
and smell the knowledge is transmitted to younger people.
Someone can put the history back outside into a community
and remind people of it. This is extremely breathable: there is a
physical archive in the continuation of touching the earth, the
material, knowing that this tree has to be planted here, in the
cloth and in the symbols. It is not something that is locked up
within an institution.
A crisis can occur in the case of war or the displacement
of people: for example, in the form of slavery, it breaks the ar-
chive and the transmission. Within Western structures, you can

lock things down. In this context, the paradox is that cutting the
oxygen is very crucial to make sure that it is kept alive.
The notion of ‘the breathing archive’ also hints at the place your perfor-
mances take within your oeuvre. You create installations, sculptures,
textile pieces and drawings, and very often these material objects are
‘activated’ through live performance. In the performance Taste of a
Stone: Itiat esa Ufok (2010), for example, you activated the installation
Taste of a Stone (2010–ongoing). How did this activation work?
I performed five to nine hours for a few days in a row. The set-
ting for Taste of a Stone: Itiat esa Ufok considered the place – the
courtyard of Bait Khalid Ibrahim Heritage Area in Sharjah – as a
space of contemplation. I fell in love with the space when I first
saw it, because of the trees in the middle and because you could
hear birds chirping away [makes bird whistling noises]. I had al-
ready made the installation Taste of a Stone in Copenhagen, but
without the performance and without the placing inside a mu-
seum. Immediately, I had a vision that the space would work if I
made this installation with the stones and rocks.
We had white gravel in the space and twelve rocks tak-
en from the Fujairah Mountain in the Emirates. I also printed
about ten or twelve poems on stones and twelve photograph-
ic images on Galala stones. The images came from different
places in the world: Curaçao, the Emirates, Nigeria, Senegal. …
Each image had a resonance to the Emirates, even though they
were from different places. The water, the sea, made me feel
like ‘oh my god, this reminds me of the Île de Gorée in Senegal’,
and the patched houses made me think of Curaçao. It made
sense to be there.
When I was in the Emirates installing the work, I also
found some tropical plants close to my own history and

Otobong Nkanga, From Where I Stand:
Glimmer, 2015. Installation view at M HKA.
Photo: Christine Clinckx

107
Otobong Nkanga, From Where I Stand:
Glimmer, 2015. Installation view at M HKA.
109 Photo: Christine Clinckx
memories. The papaya tree also grew in Festac [Town], the
place where we lived in Nigeria, and the Queen of the Night,
which you only smell at night, was part of my childhood. The
papaya tree, the Queen of the Night and the mango tree be-
came the plants that I performed with. I’d sit with the trees and
perform with them when people came. I’d also ask people to
vote whether they wanted a dance of the Queen of the Night, a
song, a story close to home or something else. The Queen of the
Night was mainly the plant on my head, but sometimes I would
carry the papaya tree or the mango tree. Carrying the papaya
tree was hardcore, because it was heavy and long [laughs]!
Because the Queen of the Night is also an important
plant in Asia – other names are Hasna Hena or Raatraani – per-
forming with it made me dance with my hands in the style of
typical Asian or Indian movements [gestures with her hands].
The plant is evoking different histories. Even though the Queen
of the Night originally comes from the Martinique area, it
moved to different parts of the world. In the performance I talk
about the movement from the islands into Asia. Taste of a Stone:
Itiat esa Ufok also tells you about the histories of movements of
materials, goods, plants, bodies, people.
The performance entailed stories that I’d researched,
not only about the plants, but also about the printed plates.
Sometimes I’d read the poems that I’ve written and tell the sto-
ry of how the poems came to be. I would talk about the rocks
from the Fujairah Mountain and what it meant for them to be
there. I’d talk about the people that laboured to put the rocks
there: mostly Indian or Pakistani people that have come in to
work. You’re not meant to talk about these kinds of labour is-
sues. So, it’s a subversive way to talk about labour, exploita-
tion, but also things that are similar, similarities of other spaces,
sweat. ... While I’m sweating under the heat of the sun during

my performance, the men that moved the stones also sweated.
I’m telling the audience that they’re sitting on a stone, put there
by five men who laboured on it, withered from overwork and
time, and not getting enough money to live and go back, and
at the same time you’re watching me sweat while I perform for
you. You’re making a connection, creating narratives.
From there the performance could break into a song, for
example one that my mother taught me in a courtyard. You’re
shifting from a place of being conscious of the material you’re
on, labour, pain, tiredness, body, withering, into a moment of
calming down your anxiousness, realising that we’re under the
blue sky which is the same everywhere. From a moment of wa-
ter to a poem about someone that is stuck in between worlds
at the crossroads. Those are the histories of many people who
come to the Emirates to work: they don’t have enough money
to go back or to stay, and meanwhile their energy is being used
and wasted without a future, because they’re not growing. And
then from growth, you can talk about the plant. This plant will
grow under the sun if you give it water. Water gives the oppor-
tunity to talk about the sea. So, Taste of a Stone existed by con-
necting different keywords that allowed it to shift from places
of criticism to places of soothing, growth, connectivity. That’s
how it could be nine hours long [laughs]!
The way you describe this performance is telling of the way your per-
formative practice develops in general. Your performances are contin-
uously evolving themselves, but also part of a complex network. Can
you illustrate this?
There’s a statue that has the image of Virgin Mary, but in the
Candomblé religion it would represent an African deity, or
Orisha, called Yemanjá.3 It was a way to subvert the system.

Every person projects her or his own cultural background on the
statue. It shows how certain works can shift and don’t have to
be stable. Different people read the statue differently.
In Taste of Stone: Itiat esa Ufok a lady from the audience,
Patricia Falguières, referred to the caryatides. She is a research-
er on museums, tombs and graveyards and those kinds of top-
ics at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. The
performance made her realise how the body functions as archi-
tecture and how the work is always shifting. I, myself, hadn’t
thought of the performance that way yet. I could take this im-
age further into another work. Thus, due to the conversation
with the woman and so much more, Diaspore (2014–ongoing)
but also Carved to Flow (2017) became possible.
Taste of A Stone and Diaspore always come together
and are difficult to see as separate events. … The displacement
of the body is central: people who are displaced like plants.
Queen of the Night is a plant that connects Taste of a Stone and
Diaspore. The connection doesn’t come from the title of the
work but from the elements. Carved to Flow takes up every-
thing. The link with Queen of the Night is, however, not neces-
sarily formal, but also conceptual.
The classic Western adherence to one single ‘original’ work of art

seems to be in conflict with the premises of your artistic practice.4
How do you look at this?
Some of my performances were not even recorded in the first

place. Next to that, I don’t remember exactly what I said in
each performance. Some things are meant to be lost. Museums
generally want to have everything, that are locked up and con-
tained. The way I look at it, some things are just not meant to be
there. Memory also plays a trick on us. Tangible materials exist

to make us know that something existed, but within those frag-
ments there are gaps. What’s interesting is to think about the
gaps. They can be left as gaps or filled with other things.
Tangible attributes can leave a pattern of the existence
of a performance, just like material patterns can also indicate
customs or rituals. Lighting a candle in a Catholic monastery,
for example, leaves candle wax on the altar. This way the next
person knows where he or she should put the candle and a pat-
tern is created. For me, documenting comes through accumu-
lation. This principle of accumulation is a way of archiving per-
formance, as it also involves actions and interactions that can
be repeated again and again. It’s a gesture that takes place con-
stantly and shifts and stains the material or gives it another kind
of pattern or feel.
Your performance practice consists of material, digital, immaterial

and spiritual elements. How do we render visible what is left of your
performative practice?
Just like in oral history, it’s important for the core of the per-
formance to stay the same. When someone tells me a story
in oral traditions, it’s not just meant for me, but it’s meant to
be given to the next person. And the precise form of the sto-
ry doesn’t have to stay intact, but the essence has to be kept.
You can adjust the story as you like and add your own accents
as long as the message is kept. I’m interested in the way things
can collapse or shift if you look at oral history and transmission.
It should breathe, but it has the essence, it has the core. For ex-
ample, when a performance prescribes you to behave like a ro-
bot, to have a certain tension, it can be up to you however you
take that gesture.5

Otobong Nkanga, Taste of
a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok, 2010.
Installation view at Sharjah
Biennial 11. Courtesy of
the Sharjah Art Foundation
114
Otobong Nkanga, Diaspore, 2014.
Installation view at 14 Rooms, Art Basel.
Photo: Mark Niedermann

For some works there is a prototype, for some works
there is a material archive. For example, Diaspore has proto-
types: a digital file with the drawing of the floor, the costumes,
explanations.6 When the performance needs to be done, you
know exactly which materials to get for it. And if one wants to
keep the materials of a first performance, like the plant pots for
example, then one can archive those and they can be used for
another performance. But to start with, there is just the proto-
type, the kind of instructions. Because, I mean, each body will
be different. So, you have to get a shirt for that person, you
have to get pants for that person, you have to get shoes. You
can’t give someone else’s size to another person who doesn’t
fit in it. Certain things, like the plants, will have to be given out
for someone to take care of them. Unless the museum says: we
plant Queen of the Night. Then I’m not sure it will be able to sur-
vive [laughs]!
Your performances seem to ask for a modular system to which new

items and connections in all possible directions can be added while us-
ers can decide how to navigate between different layers of informa-
tion. How do you visualise this?
I’m thinking of an online platform, a rhizomic flowchart in

which you can see many clusters under one topic. I compare
it with a world map with flight connections in which big con-
glomerates like New York, Paris, Shanghai or Beijing form
heavy ports from which tonnes of tentacles depart and ar-
rive. So, you see the tentacles of how one connects to anoth-
er. Clusters connect with it each other, and keywords connect
with each other.7
When you click on a keyword, it opens up more key-
words and clusters of words. ... I think it’s not just the title of

Otobong Nkanga, Carved to Flow, 2017.
Installation view at documenta 14, Kassel.
117 Photo: Fabian Fröhlich
the work, but key materials that allow for a thing to have ten-
tacles. The core words could be ‘labour’, ‘landscape’, ‘architec-
ture’, ‘support structures’ and so on. Some things will repeat
themselves under all five or all ten structures. Then some are
isolated within some. We have to find words that can be preg-
nant with many things.
Since the personal input of your performers, co-creators, but also au-
dience members – hence the example of the spectator mentioning
the caryatides – feed your oeuvre, giving these actants a place in your
archive could also be a way of expanding. Can people be part of the
archive?
It’s an interesting way of thinking of archive in the sense that it’s

not only material, but it could be people – and they know they’re
part of it. I think this is quite unique in relation to how a lot of in-
stitutions think about archiving. When we talk about memory,
it’s not a static thing, and the ways people experience things dif-
fer so much. The way I think something went, might be totally
different for someone else because it’s seen from another per-
spective. I think it’s interesting to get other ways of recording a
story, to get several possibilities of understanding what a work
means or how it’s seen from another perspective. There could
be a core group of people that we ask to be part of an archive as
human beings.
Next to that, I think there should be an open source,
link or place where people can add keywords, photographs,
materials, texts, thoughts, references. If the contribution ex-
tends the geographies of a similarity – an aesthetic similarity
or conceptual similarity – even if it wasn’t originally part of my
thinking, then it’s important to add it [to the core structure].
The core comes from the place of thinking of the artist and

the structures that were placed at that time, but it doesn’t ex-
clude that there’re other knowledges that could be references
to the work.
ENDNOTES
1 Currently, the CKV is reflecting on the presence of performance in the M HKA
collection: What are the needs of artists associated with the M HKA? How
can the museum meet these needs? The CKV wants to build up expertise on
archiving performance in order to share methodologies and tools with oth-
er museums and archiving institutions in Flanders. Lotte Bode conducted
the research from April 2021 until April 2022. See https://ckv.muhka.be/en/
in-de-praktijk/research-project-archiving-performance/.
2 Museums have, since the 1990s, become increasingly interested in acquir-
ing and preserving live performance art pieces – even if it confronts them
with tantalising dilemmas. For a useful overview of the ongoing debates on
the inclusion of live performance art in museum and archival collections,
both from an institutional and scholarly point of view, see Giannachi and
Westerman (2018).
3 Candomblé is a religious movement in South America, especially in Brazil,
which developed among Afro-Brazilian communities amid the Atlantic slave
trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It arose through the blend-
ing of the traditional religions brought to Brazil by enslaved West and Central
Africans, the majority of them Yoruba, Fon and Bantu, and the Roman
Catholic teachings of the Portuguese colonialists who then controlled the
area. Candomblé doesn’t know a central authority and it involves the ven-
eration of spirits known as orixás, deities whose names and attributes de-
rive from traditional West African gods and who are equated with Roman
Catholic saints. Yemanjá is a major water spirit from the Yoruba religion, who
is often syncretised with either Our Lady of Regla in the Afro-Cuban diaspora
or various other Virgin Mary figures of the Catholic Church. See ‘Candomblé’,

Wikipedia, 14 September 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=-
Candomblé&oldid=1044264854; and ‘Yemọja’, Wikipedia, 14 September 2021,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yemọja&oldid=1044205048.
4 Archiving methods in the West are typically geared towards principles such
as provenance, original order and cataloguing, which taken together ought
to facilitate both the preservation and consultation of primary resources
(see Millar 2017).
5 Nkanga also indicates to be inspired by Allan Kaprow and his view on
Happenings. Kaprow created ‘scores’, texts that captured only the ‘central
metaphor’ of his Happenings, in order for them to be ‘reinvented’ accord-
ing to the changing circumstances. Nkanga herself reinvented Kaprow’s
Baggage and called her version Baggage 1972.2007/08.
6 The performance Diaspore (2014–ongoing) has been performed in Basel,
Shanghai and Berlin, each time by a different group of women with a Sub-
Saharan African background. Moving through the white space with Queen of
the Night plants on their heads, the women sing songs they associate with
their individual African origins or tell stories about their own migration jour-
neys. For this performance Nkanga also created a score.
7 Nkanga gives the example of the website: https://visuwords.com/.

REFERENCE LIST
Foster, H. 2004, “An Archival Impulse”, October vol. 110, pp. 3–22.
Giannachi, G. and Westerman, J. (eds), 2018, Histories of Performance
Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, Routledge,
London/New York.
Millar, L. 2017, Archives: Principles and Practices, 2nd edition, Facet Publishing,
London.
Stoler, A. 2009, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Wikipedia, “Candomblé”, viewed 14 September 2021, https://en.wikipedia.
org/w/index.php?title=Candomblé&oldid=1044264854.
Wikipedia, “Yemoja”, viewed 14 September 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/
index.php?title=Yem%E1%BB%8Dja&oldid=1044205048.

SOME THINGS
LAST A
LONG TIME.
The case of the Greetings
from Jerusalem Avenue
by Joanna Rajkowska
from the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art
in Warsaw
Zofia Czartoryska
122
In 2002, the artist Joanna Rajkowska planted a life-sized artificial palm
tree in the middle of the busy roundabout in the centre of Warsaw. It
was supposed to stay there for a year. The art world was suspicious,
and the general public was furious that the work took the spot of the
traditional Christmas tree. The difficult Polish-Jewish past, evoked by
its title, was a polarising issue as well. Some people argued that it is
a ‘breach of decorum’ to locate such a piece on the landmark histor-
ic axis of the Royal Route and Jerusalem Avenue. Yet, Greetings from
Jerusalem Avenue became the most iconic project in the public space in
Poland after 1989. The work proved to have life of its own, constantly
changing its shape, renewing and shuffling its meanings and triggering
actions of many different constituents.
Part of the initial reluctance towards the work came from the
fact that nobody really knew what it actually was, even the artist her-
self (Rajkowska 2012). A sculpture, an installation, a monument, a pub-
lic art project or just a piece of urban design? What tradition can it be
ascribed to? Is it kitsch or a post-conceptual masterpiece? Without a
doubt, it was a complete stranger – both to the traditionalist majority
and the critically driven artistic milieu at the turn of the millennia. It was
only at about this time, that Rosalind Krauss coined the term ‘post-me-
dium condition’ (Krauss 1999), to describe new hybrid forms of art that
cannot be captured using traditional divides between the genres and
disciplines.
123 Some Things Last a Long Time...

Mock-up of Rajkowska’s Palm Tree.
Photo: Joanna Rajkowska.
Courtesy of the artist and Museum
of Modern Art in Warsaw

When we analyse two decades of the palm’s history by look-
ing at how it acts and not the way it appears, we start to see that it is
a piece with a deeply performative nature. It can be well described as
a potent non-human actor (or rather an actress), to borrow the term
from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, used to capture a specific
agency of things that ‘work’ (i.e., have an impact on social, cultural and
material reality) (Latour 2007). The double meaning of the word used
by Latour is very accurate in this case, as it is an active object, which
functions in a theatrical way. Its material presence frames the city as a
stage – it is continuously used as both a prop and scenography for hap-
penings, but it also performs in different roles as a commonly anthropo-
morphised persona.
Since 2014, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue has been under
care of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, officially as a depos-
it in the collection. The distinct inner mechanics of the work require a
matching institutional approach, as it is not a dead object with a fixed
appearance and meaning. Its location in the strategic public space and
vulnerable physicality are other factors that make its preservation chal-
lenging. In the first part of this case study, the work will be reinterpret-
ed as a piece of performance art and put in the broader historical con-
text of the Polish live arts. In the second part, the strategy of museum’s
‘custodianship’ over this performative, ongoing project is discussed.
Historical Context
Joanna Rajkowska (b. 1968 in Bydgoszcz, Poland) has created public

projects, objects, films and installations, as well as ephemeral actions
and non-gallery situations. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Kraków (1988–93) and continued her education in the State
University of New York (1994–95). In the 1990s, she was mainly preoc-
cupied with relationship between the physicality and psychology of a
human, frequently in reference to her own body. The iconic work of

this period is Satisfaction Guaranteed (2000), in which she canned her
bodily fluids and marketed them as consumer goods.
In the next decade, her art evolved into what Piotr Piotrowski
called the ‘agoraphilia’ of the artists working in the post-communist con-
text. He defines that as: ‘the drive to enter the public space, the desire
to participate in that space, to shape public life, to perform critical and
design functions for the sake of and within the social space’ (Piotrowski
2012, p. 7). Before 1989, access to the public space was fully controlled
and limited by the state, and thus Eastern Europe, even until today, ‘with
its distinctive history of totalitarian regimes, creates specific ideological
and political frames for public art or art in the public sphere’ (Piotrowski
2012, p. 68). Agoraphobic tendencies of the politicians as well as the ex-
pectations of the public proved to outlive the old system, which result-
ed in controversies around the works of public art in the following years
of political transformation. Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue serves as
a good example, as it was openly attacked and sabotaged by the con-
servative mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński (later president of Poland),
who perceived it as a culturally foreign element. Each side of the con-
flict had a different idea of how democratic values should be understood
and what has the status of civic space – a place of consensus on the one
hand, and the agonistic agora where conflicts and dissent can be voiced
on the other (Piotrowski 2012, p. 63).
Rajkowska’s works in general belong to the long tradition of
performance art in the public space in Poland. Rajkowska’s palm tree
history can be traced back to provocative, absurdist happenings of fu-
turist poets Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat in the streets of Warsaw
in the 1920s. The actions of these people – like the earlier manifesta-
tions of their Italian predecessors – questioned the conventions of tra-
ditional theatre, and as such mark the beginning of what came to be
called performance in the visual arts (Goldberg 2011). During commu-
nist times, most performance art took place in niche artistic venues or
private spaces (Bryzgel 2017). Yet there were still artists interested in

Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue.

the potential of action in the (highly oppressive) public realm. The ex-
perimental theatrical group Akademia Ruchu (Movement Academy),
founded in 1973, and who are known for their ‘theatre of gestures and
visual narrative’, performed more than 200 actions in the urban con-
text. They examined the way avant-garde gestures acquire meanings
in everyday situations. In Europe (1976, part of the collection of MSN)
a busy street was blocked by a lot of performers running with banners
with absurd phrases from a poem by Anatol Stern, which in the context
of workers’ strikes at the time served as ‘performative political allego-
ries’ (Akademia Ruchu 2006). Interestingly, AR frequently chose the
symbolically loaded Warsaw Royal Route (where the palm tree is locat-
ed), as a site for their performances: for instance, Happy Day (Akademia
Ruchu 2006). Rajkowska’s Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue owes a lot
to the tradition of these anarchist, Dadaistic, humorous yet political and
(anti)theatrical undertakings.
A different approach was represented by a pioneer feminist per-
former, Ewa Partum. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez sees her art as an exam-
ple of the ‘resilient practices’ (Petrešin-Bachelez 2014, p. 214) of artists in
the Eastern bloc who used their body as a medium of dissent in the op-
pressive public sphere. One of her performances took place outside of
the gallery next to the Royal Palace (the beginning of the Royal Route),
where the naked artist was confronted with wedding guests waiting for
a ceremony – an extreme example of a ‘breach of decorum’. Rajkowska
notes that for her, the palm tree is a substitute for a female body, a
sort of mannequin (a term she borrows from another Jewish-Polish
avant-garde writer and artist, Bruno Schulz) (Schulz 2013) to which she
delegates her performance. What these performances have in common
(with AR actions as well) is that they offer ‘disruptions to the routine use
of public space’ (Petrešin-Bachelez 2014, p. 217).
Above all, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue springs directly from
the rich performative context of the 1990s (like the rise of a delegated
performance, characterised by the separation of the work from its char-

ismatic creator) though the work cannot be unproblematically ascribed
to any of the tendencies. It can be situated at the intersection of relation-
al aesthetics, which was aimed at creating a situation of encounter and
kindness between the public,1 and the key paradigm in Polish art at the
time – the critical art. As the artist has said, ‘sometimes it is necessary to
unite, at other times to divide’ (Rajkowska 2012). The most famous piece
of relational art in Poland is Paweł Althamer’s Bródno 2000, when the art-
ist convinced over 200 families in a block of flats to take part in the action
of forming the number ‘2,000’ on the façade of the building by turning
off and on the lights at a fixed time. Rajkowska seems to share an inter-
est in such temporary communities, for example when she states: ‘I don’t
want people to understand one another. That’s not possible. I want them
to be next to each other under the palm’ (Rajkowska 2002). Her own lat-
er work Oxygenator (2006) – a pond with air-ozonating equipment and
benches around it, designed to form a place of encounter in a site with a
difficult history and conflicted present – is another iconic example of the
tendency in Polish art.
On the other hand, the palm is not detached from the antago-
nistic approach of critical artists of the time, whose strategy was more
akin to one of putting a cat amongst pigeons. Their works were often
drastic and provocative, aimed at uncovering uncomfortable truths
about society. At first sight, the surreal, absurd palm tree is nothing like
that, yet the outrage of the general public could suggest otherwise. In
a recent interview, Rajkowska admitted that at the beginning it was a
sort of a symbolic ‘whip to smash those who deserved it’, namely Polish
anti-Semites.2 Yet, when asked if she feels part of the critical tradition,
she replied: ‘I’ve never been in the position of the external observer,
who can point the finger at something or somebody. I’ve always felt
the part of this oppression; my body was reacting to it from the inside’
(Rajkowska 2021).
A good example of this non-distanced criticism is the artist’s
performance Mea Shearim (2001), which is the name of the orthodox

Joanna Rajkowska, Oxygenator, 2007.
Courtesy of the artist

Joanna Rajkowska in Israel, 2001.
Photo: Artur Żmijewski.

Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue,
12 August 2006. Photo: Konrad Pustoła.
132 Courtesy of the artist and Museum
quarter of Jerusalem, and where the artist laid herself down on the
pavement in order to disrupt the stiff gender conventions in the com-
munity and see what the reaction to the vulnerable ‘other’ (in this case a
non-orthodox woman) would be. The raised stick, captured by the artist
Artur Żmijewski, who documented the piece, showed that such a disrup-
tion is fiercely rejected. It was the experience of the visit to Israel during
the turbulent time of the Second Intifada that gave birth to the most
seminal work of the artist to date: Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue.
The Palm Tree as a Spectacle
Her stay in Israel made the artist realise the void left by the absence
of the Jewish community in Poland (before the Second World War,
Warsaw was the second biggest Jewish city in the world after New
York). For the first time, she noticed that one of the main streets in the
city centre, Jerusalem Avenue, refers directly to Jewish inhabitants.3
The alien, surreal element of the Middle Eastern landscape was sup-
posed to highlight and challenge the invisibility of the street’s name but
also refer to the migrant communities that make up the contemporary
vibrant metropolis. At the same time, she emphasised that the work is
a Dadaist joke that is supposed to baffle the viewer: ‘The palm tree re-
lates to the expression that (in the Polish language) we use to describe
something unthinkable, something outside our way of comprehension,
something – to put it simply – absurd’ (Rajkowska 2002).
Yet, the palm did not end up as a material symbol of a difficult
past or Eastern European sense of humour. If the visual arts are tra-
ditionally the field of production of objects and the performing arts
produce emotions and experiences, then the palm tree is definitely
closer to the latter. The performing arts have a very long history of
‘activities without the end product’ (Jackson 2020) (like theatrical
performances), and the tacky artificial tree is not an end product of
Rajkowska’s initial idea. The palm’s poor and provisional execution de-

rives from the fact that it has the ‘materiality of a prop or scenography,
which people are not even looking at, they impose their own idea of a
palm on it’ (Rajkowska 2021). The work is thus not an object (a sculp-
ture or installation) but an ongoing spectacle on the urban stage, for
which it serves as a scenography, prop and the lead actress.
The palm is a site-specific work located in a very scenic site –
the crossing of two important axes: Jerusalem Avenue and the so-
called Royal Route (a protected historical landmark, packed with pal-
aces, state institutions and monuments). Its location at the traffic
island in the middle of a roundabout gives the impression of an ex-
posed stage that can be viewed from 360 degrees. This impression is
even more intense when the work is seen from the distant perspec-
tive of two crossing streets. Its urban surroundings create an effect
of theatrical wings, with multiple compositional planes overlapping
each other. Thus, it unveils the whole city as a scene of an ongoing ur-
ban spectacle. When one enters the central stage (illegally, apart from
the time of registered manifestations when the traffic is blocked), he
or she automatically becomes involved in a situation dictated by the
scenography of the palm. For some, it’s freeing, for others, uncom-
fortable. The participant in the ultra-nationalist march who was pass-
ing by the palm, felt the need to ‘incense’ it with the flag of Christ the
King of Poland, imitating a gesture of sanctification performed by
the priest in the Catholic Church with a censer. The stage is more ea-
gerly taken over by protesters from the liberal and left-wing side of
the political spectrum, who make use of the ‘otherness’ and humour
of this scenography. Good examples are the Lesbos Island-themed
happening during the Pride Parade in 2018 and the choreographic
piece performed during the Women’s Strike in 2020. Most common
though, is an apolitical, spontaneous, creative use of the work – the
palm is probably one of the most iconic spots for posed photographs
in Warsaw, and the ideas range from weddings to Miami Vice-inspired
photo sessions.

March of Independence, 2019.
Courtesy of the artist and
Museum of Modern Art in
Warsaw
Performance during the

All-Poland Woman’s Strike
in Warsaw, October 2020.
Photo: Robert Jaworski.
136
Lesbos, performance by Czarne Szmaty collective
during Equality Parade, 2018. Photo: Pat Mic.
Courtesy of the artists
Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue.

137
Photo: Błażej Żuławski. Courtesy of the artist
and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
As the artist stated in a recent interview: ‘She’s like a bold, pro-
miscuous woman, coming from nowhere, without a family history.
She’s giving herself to everybody, one after another’ (Rajkowska 2020).
She refers to the fact that the object proved to be an open signifier, an
empty frame that can bear very different meanings, given by numerous
performers who use it as a prop in their own actions. The first notable
action of this kind was when the gigantic nurse cap was attached to the
top of scaffolding (during one of many renovations) as a sign of soli-
darity with striking female healthcare workers (inspired by the feminist
philosopher Ewa Majewska). Other notable examples are the hanging
of the keffiyeh during a pro-Palestinian support action (in 2011) and an
anarchist protest ‘Bread Not Games’ during the 2012 European Football
Championship. The palm served as a pole for the Ukrainian flag already
twice – during the Euromaidan in 2014 and in 2022 after the Russian in-
vasion of Ukraine. Claire Bishop notes that today activists prove to be
the most radical political performers, and the fact that Rajkowska’s
work is so eagerly used by them (with support of the artist) is a good
example of that (Bishop 2020).
Quite early on, the palm started to be anthropomorphised in
discourse, which helps to show that its specific agency is intuitively
perceived by the public. During its recent ‘18th Birthday’ celebrations,
its life cycle was described as follows: the first decade was childhood,
when the tree inspired cheerful, celebratory happenings and (after
the initial aversion vanished) became a symbol of a contemporary di-
verse metropolis. Around 2010, when the political situation got tense,
the palm tree became a ‘palmitsan’4 – a left-wing activist. In 2019, the
most important happening on the palm tree so far took place. For the
Death of the Palm Tree (commissioned by the UN agency for the World
Environment Day), its green fake leaves got replaced with real dry
leaves of a palm, which died due to climate anomalies in the south of
France. The Brechtian ‘distancing effect’ (inherent to the concept of the
palm) was reversed – suddenly the fake tree died for real. Its gruesome

Matylda Damięcka, Untitled, 2020. Courtesy of
the artist and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Palm tree as a nurse. Photo: Joanna Rajkowska.
Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Modern Art
in Warsaw

appearance was widely covered by the media, including the New York
Times. It was a moment when an entirely new understanding of this ex-
otic plant started to dominate the narrative – one of warning against
a global catastrophe. The two recent delegated, poetic performanc-
es Letters from the Palm Tree (2020 and 2021, co-authored by the artist
and Sebastian Cichocki) mark the period of the tree’s ‘maturity’. The
first-person poetic manifestos are reminders for the public of the values
of solidarity and responsibility for the other, phrased from the imagined
perspective of a tree-sage. The first one referred to the climate crisis
and the latter to the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border in
2021 (Rajkowska, Cichocki 2020).
These three main ways in which the palm tree functions – as a
scenography, prop and actress – can be captured with the overarching
term of ‘spectacle’. It points to the fact that it is a strictly time-based
work, that can only be understood by following the action on the scene,
both short term (during a single performance) and long term (with two
decades of its constant evolution). Keeping in mind Latour’s idea that a
thing is never simple – it is a hybrid network of human and non-human
actors – it seems that this term comes closest to capturing the active,
complex and spectacular character of this work. While appropriating the
terms of theatre studies, it’s important to note that the piece is theatri-
cal in a ‘postdramatic’ way, as defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann (Lehmann,
2016). He refers to the tendency in contemporary theatre that is centred
not around text but rather around visual narratives and was strongly
influenced by performance in visual arts (Dadaism, Fluxus, etc.). Hence,
Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue is an excellent example of a post-
medium work of art, which crosses boundaries between the disciplines.
‘Collecting’ the Palm Tree
The palm tree was erected with support from the Ujazdowski Castle
Centre for Contemporary Art and a private foundation, and it was

Keffiyeh on the Palm Tree (protest against joint meeting of the
governments of Poland and Israel in occupied Jerusalem), 2011.
Photo: Joanna Rajkowska. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw
142 Palm tree during Euro 2012. Photo: Jan Gebert.

Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Modern Art
in Warsaw
Death of the Palm Tree, project commissioned by UNEP/
GRID-Warsaw Centre and run by the artist Joanna Rajkowska
in collaboration with Syrena Communications, supported by the
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Photo: Marek Szczepański.
143 The Palm House. Photo: Sisi Cecylia.

Courtesy of the artist and Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw
supposed to be dismantled after one year. After a protest action from
notable figures of Polish culture (who acted under the name The
Palm’s Defence Committee) the work was kept, yet despite the offer
to donate it to the city, it remained the private property of the artist
(once a city official even called it ‘her private problem’ in a conversa-
tion). The fact that in the late 2000s the work became widely recog-
nised and accepted, present in pop culture, and frequently covered
by the media (even tabloids), didn’t change its precarious situation.
Rajkowska herself was fully legally liable for its highly problematic
maintenance and funding. The turning point was a fierce controversy
around the work in 2012.
During the Euro Football Championship in Poland, city officials
installed a huge, inflated football on the roundabout with no consulta-
tion. Together with anarchists, Rajkowska conducted an action of pro-
test against the corrupt organisation of this massive event: they decid-
ed to deface the palm by removing the majority of the leaves and plac-
ing the banner ‘Bread Not Games’ on the top of it (which police took
down after a couple of hours). All the fans coming to see the games in
Warsaw passed the ugly looking stump. ‘In my eyes, you went a long
way from an artist to a terrorist, not giving a damn about, contrary to
what you say, the good of the city. … The palm has become part of the
Warsaw landscape and as such is no longer the property of an artist
but belongs to the whole Warsaw community’, read one of many let-
ters that she received (Rajkowska 2013). It sparked a debate about the
ownership of the work of art in the public space. Whose palm is it? Who
should decide about how it looks and what it communicates? And who
should pay for it? Rajkowska always wanted the palm to be a common
good, yet at this point it was obvious that a work of such an importance
cannot be in the hands of politicians nor a private collector or sponsor.
In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw started to support the
project and soon after signed a contract for deposit in the collection. It
was agreed that the project will be jointly curated by the artist and the

museum. The relationship of the museum to this vulnerable work was
tenderly called a ‘custodianship’, whereas the ownership remained with
the artist. It came in line with the ongoing debates about collecting per-
formance, which, as it was argued, should be more about ‘preserving
and protecting them, presenting them for the public’ rather than mak-
ing it a possession of a single institution (Schouweiler 2011).
Without a doubt, this canonical work of contemporary Polish
art fits perfectly into the narrative and character of the collection of
the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Yet for the piece whose raison
d’être is responding to the changing context and being used by active
citizens, the institutional policies pose a challenge as well. Entering the
public collection by acquisition would impose legal restrictions that
could strongly affect the spontaneous use of the work in public space.
Another issue that could affect its use could be a change of leadership
in the institution, one with an abruptly different approach to art (i.e., an
‘agoraphobic’ one), which could result in turning it into a politically neu-
tral dead object. Thus, the custodianship model allows flexibility that is
well suited for this singular piece of art.
As a ‘foster parent’, the institution took over the tiresome bu-
reaucratic processes around this ‘non-road object’ (its bizarrely named
legal status), endless repairs of its fragile structure and shared the re-
sponsibility for more or less radical happenings that occur around it.
Yet, more importantly, it engaged the instruments of the museum to
preserve the rich (and ongoing) history of this urban object. In 2015, the
museum digitalised and published online the extensive archive of the
project gathered by the artist, including preparatory material, photo-
graphic documentation, documents and press clippings, which allowed
the performative character of the work to be better appreciated.5
Furthermore, the museum organised a public call to complement the
archive with crowdsourced visual material. Today, it is continued via the
Instagram profile @warszawskapalma, where pictures of users are re-
posted together with ‘official’ documentation.

Despite all these efforts, the work is still not widely acknowl-
edged as a hybrid, performative work. Those who encountered the
work at the roundabout, until recently had limited access to its rich his-
tory. A change occurred in 2020, when, for its widely celebrated ‘18th
Birthday’, the work gained an exhibition space in the vitrine of the
nearby building, called ‘the palm house’. The first exhibition presented
memorabilia (like an empty nest that was found on the tree-top), the
Letter from the Palm and a slideshow from the most seminal moments
of its life, complemented with the written personal commentary of the
artist. It was the artist’s way of overcoming the challenge of a dead ar-
chive – a set of images that do not preserve the ideas, stories and emo-
tions that are the most important components of such happenings.
Though not planned as a Beuys-style ‘social sculpture’ that fosters cre-
ativity in the public, it has become a work of art that is co-authored by
dozens of people who took and take part in this ongoing urban spec-
tacle. It is their experience that should also be preserved in the collec-
tion in order to preserve Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue as a work of
performance art. The next important step should be the creation of an
archive of the oral history of actions involving the palm. The current
ideas include a film documentary, an immersive walk/podcast series
or cooperation with a storyteller who could preserve and transfer the
stories further in a performative way.
The artist remains personally involved in the project, yet she
claims she has no urge to control how the palm is being activated.
Most of the actions happen spontaneously, without asking for permis-
sion anyway. After all, the palm is an ‘adult’ and has a whole life ahead.

ENDNOTES
1 The necessity to unite was an important theme in the public debate around
the civic society, social capital and democracy in the years of transformation.
Sociologists were frequently quoting the condition of “sociological vacuum”
(a term coined in 1979 by Stefan Nowak), which is still used to describe the
lack of trust and sense of community in the Polish society.
2 It was the time of the fierce public debate over complicity of the Poles in the
Holocaust, triggered by Jan Tomasz Gross book Neighbours (2000), about
the mass murder in Jedwabne in 1941. Polish-Jewish relationships were im-
portant issue of the critical art in Poland.
3 It is named after the eighteenth century New Jerusalem – a Jewish
merchant settlement, dismantled after the legal battle from their Christian
competitors.
4 A term coined by the curator Sebastian Cichocki.
5 Joanna Rajkowska, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (section of the online
catalogue of the Artists Archives), viewed 10 January 2022, https://artmuse-
um.pl/en/archiwum/pozdrowienia-z-alej-jerozolimskich.

REFERENCE LIST
Akademia Ruchu, “Europa” (entry in the online catalogue of the collection),

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, viewed 10 January 2022, https://artmuse-
um.pl/en/kolekcja/praca/akademia-ruchu-europa-egz-6-6-1-ap.
Akademia Ruchu, “Happy day” (entry in the online catlogue of the Film Archive),
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, viewed 10 January 2022, https://artmuse-
um.pl/pl/filmoteka/praca/akademia-ruchu-happy-day.
Bishop, C. Czarne pudełko, biały sześcian, szara strefa [Black Box, White Cube, Gray
Zone], in: Performans, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2020.
Bryzgel, A. 2017, Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960, Manchester
University Press.
“Palm Tree Urban Guerilla: Joanna Rajkowska in Conversation with Sebastian
Cichocki”, Przekrój magazine (2012), viewed 10 January 2022, http://www.
rajkowska.com/en/palmtyzantka-miejska-sebastian-cichocki-rozmawia-z-
joanna-rajkowska.
Goldberg, R. 2011, Performance Art. From Futurism to the present, Thames &
Hudson, London.
Jackson, S. 2020, “Performans: Jak to robimy teraz?” [The Way We Perform
Now], in: J. Zielińska Performans, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek
Ujazdowski, Warsaw.
Krauss, R. 1999, Voyage on the North See: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium con-
dition, Thames & Hudson, London.
Latour, B. 2007, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-
Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Lehmann, HT. 2016, “Postdramatic”, in S. Jackson and P. Marincola (eds), In
Terms of Performance (online publication), http://intermsofperformance.site/
keywords/postdramatic/hans-thies-lehmann.
Petresin-Bachelez, N. 2017, “Resilient practices, practices of affect: a few case
studies on performances in public spaces and their controversies in the former
Eastern Europe”, in M. Dziewańska and A. Lepecki (eds), Points of Convergence:
Alternative Views on Performance, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw.

Piotrowski, P. 2012, Art and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe, Reaktion
Books, London.
Rajkowska, J. 2013, The Exclamation Tree, in The National Public Art Council’s an-
nual catalogue, Stockholm, viewed 10 January 2022, http://www.rajkowska.
com/en/the-exclamation-tree-by-joanna-rajkowska/.
Rajkowska, J. and Cichocki S. 2020, “Letter from the Palm”, viewed 10 January
2022, https://artmuseum.pl/pl/doc/video-list-od-palmy, 2020.
Schouweiler, S., Collecting performance, 15.12.2011, https://walkerart.org/maga-
zine/collecting-performance (access: 10.01.2022)
Schulz, B. 2013, A Treatise on Mannequins, or, The Second Book of Genesis, in:
Rajkowska J. Where the Beast is Buried, Zero Books, UK.
Stefańska, B. and Depczyński J. 2020, “Palma: Interview with Joanna
Rajkowska”, 12 December, Muzeum Na Fali, Radio Kapitał, viewed 10
January 2022, https://radiokapital.pl/shows/muzeum-na-fali/13-palma/.
Unpublished interview with Joanna Rajkowska by the author, November 2021.
Żmijewski, A. 2002, Joanna Rajkowska in conversation with Artur Żmijewski,
http://www.rajkowska.com/en/o-palmie-z-joanna-rajkowska-rozmawia-
artur-zmijewski-w-2002/. Originally published in: Żmijewski, A. 2008, Drżące
ciała. Rozmowy z artystami, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Kronika,
Warszawa-Bytom.

TRANSFER
OF
RESPONSIBILITY
AND
KNOWLEDGE
150
‘Development has nothing to do with continuity, in the sense of an unin-
terrupted progression. On the contrary, there is a constant unfolding and
folding, with certain things gaining new perspectives while others are be-
ing re-veiled. Development is the ceaseless attempt to balance the original
with the present, which sometimes can only be accomplished by leaping
forward. And this is where it happens, that a leap that is too broad, opens
up unknown areas, that has to be secured again by looking back, because in
the run-up nobody is really at home.’1
Gerhard Storck 1982
In 2013, artist Tania Bruguera initiated the Museum of Arte Útil at the
Van Abbemuseum (VAM).2 It proposed new uses for art within socie-
ty, where artists were replaced with initiators and spectators replaced
with users.3 It also furthered VAM director Charles Esche’s vision of the
museum as social powerplant, and, ever since, the VAM has cultivated
these ideas, especially in how it approaches collection programming.4
Under the direction of Jean Leering (1964–73), the VAM had a similar
endeavour to underline the social relevance of art. Working towards
the development of a general awareness of social processes, Leering
viewed the museum as a platform for contemporary art and an edu-
cational institution where the visitor can learn to find his or her way
around present-day culture (Van der Schoor 1979, pp. 26, 28).
151 Transfer of Responsibility and Knowledge

A pivotal work that referenced these ideals is the 1. Werksatz
(1963–69) by Franz Erhard Walther. It consists of fifty-eight shaped
canvas objects that function as ‘process instruments’: each is defined
by its own framework of action developed by Walther and textile
engineer Johanna Walther. These canvas objects are then handed,
with a set of conditions, to the public, who are invited to produce the
work. The textiles are the vehicle towards a particular awareness that
is the artwork – the immaterial awareness you arrive at when using
the textiles: ‘I was not simply interested in questioning the canons of
genre and material but in the elementary question: what actually is
a work’ (Köttering & Walther 2000, p. 27). In so doing, not dissimilar
to Bruguera’s approach with art and use, Walther redefined the field
of sculpture, whereby the artist initiates the work and the public be-
comes the producer of temporal, experience-shaping art forms.
A part of the 1. Werksatz entered the collection in 1975 without
any precursor to guide the institution on how to present non-static
works.5 Preparing the textiles for work-actions in 2018 raised ques-
tions about preserving the material and the ways it had been acti-
vated already. Although parts had been displayed, its activation was
sporadic and undocumented. In line with our mission to critically look
back at the museum’s history, I take time here to review how the
work has been framed by city politics, museum policy, organisation-
al climate, and zeitgeist over almost fifty years. I begin with Walther’s
solo show in 1972, in which the artist was closely involved in the reali-
sation of the work, to consider knowledge transfer, the effect of the
work’s institutionalisation on artist and museum and how this can in-
form acquisition of similar works.

Work-actions
‘The decisive fundamental idea was to build up an oeuvre from action.’6

Franz Erhard Walther 1984
The 1. Werksatz was the centrepiece of Franz Erhard Walther’s 1972

show, organised with the artist at VAM, then under the direction of
Jean Leering. In advance, information meetings were held with groups
interested in interactive artistic education: local colleges, high schools
and art professionals from the museum’s network. To entice them to
register for the workshops that comprised the work of the 1. Werksatz,
a demonstration tape was shown to help visualise it. It showed Walther
and staff working with his objects in a park close to the VAM. Students
were often perplexed by the footage, as it was beyond their under-
standing of art.7 The museum supplied teaching materials to each of
the schools to prepare the students to join in the workshops, and staff
provided an occasional guest lecture.8
Leering later realised how intensively the participants ‘need
to be prepared by means of demonstration and training, in order to
be able to effectuate the maximum possibilities of such a cultural of-
fer’.9 Walther regarded mediation and evaluation as essential tools to
each activation of the work. He trained social science students to help
him mediate his ideas and how to anticipate questions or comments
from the audience that could disturb the concentration in the ongoing
action.10
‘What significance will this work have for the museum in the fu-
ture?’ Walther asked. ‘Two points will be important: instead of being
receptive, the public will actually actively participate. The information is
no longer provided by the object, but must be acquired while working.
An extensive amount of information will then be collected at the place
where people work, which can be organized and made accessible.’11 The
artist appreciated how Leering’s team prepared for the presentation

1. Werksatz, preparations and workshop,
Van Abbemuseum, 1972. Photos: Hans Biezen

of his work,12 and his feedback, along with that of staff and users, is col-
lected in a canvas-sleeved documentary booklet that provides a rich ac-
count of all involved. Walther’s action diagram appears as an imprint,
giving it the appearance of an artist’s book that could easily be over-
looked as material for setting up future demonstrations.
At the time Walther felt that the public in Eindhoven was only
interested in the experience as participants in the actions, not in the
artistic dimensions of his work (Köttering & Walther 2000, p. 96). While
there were things to improve upon, the museum and artist felt posi-
tive about the outcome of the ‘work-actions’. As Leering wished to ac-
quire an edition of the 1. Werksatz, the feedback would help improve
future workshops. Head of education Jerven Ober proceeded to work
with the objects with Walther in Hamburg. In exchange, Walther was
interested in Ober’s notes from the workshops in Eindhoven, as it could
help him modify his transfer of knowledge.13
While visual information is helpful, it can be viewed too simply,
Walther points out.14 Without mediation, the artist’s early publications,
with an artistic vocabulary, sketches and diagrams might have been
hermetic to an unfamiliar audience. The purpose of mediation is not
only to inform and guide people into the work, but also to offer tools to
lead the discussions from the sensorial to the analytical, and therefore
help them appropriate the work for themselves and establish a deeper
connection, in which users turn into actors (Bationo-Tillon & Decortis
2016). ‘I use words or language as my modelling clay to try to circum-
scribe what happens in the work-action,’ said Walther (Köttering &
Walther 2000, p. 28).
Before the municipality granted the acquisition, Leering left the
museum, as city politics no longer supported his artistic programme
(Albatros 1979, p. 74). This was unfortunate, as the changes in art mak-
ing needed a progressive institutional vision like his to accommodate
revolutionary works like the 1. Werksatz. The function of the museum
as either a responsive body, with an engaging and public-oriented

Canvas sleeve with action
diagram imprint, exhibition
catalogue, Van Abbemuseum,
1972
Nr. 58, 1. Werksatz,

displayed as object,
'Summer Exhibition,
Permanent Collection',
Van Abbemuseum, 1980.
Photo: Hans Biezen

stance contributing to social awareness, or an autonomous entity,
within which art takes centre stage, was subject to lively debate in the
Netherlands in the 1970s (Elshout 2016, p. 108). In response to pro-
gressive protests, the municipality appointed Rudi Fuchs as director
(1975–87), according to whom ‘a museum is there to organize objects
and show a state of affairs and not to be turned into a kind of psy-
cho-technical institution’ (Fuchs 1976, p. 23). Leering concluded in 1999:
‘Participatory group work with the 1. Werksatz never came about, while
that was precisely the essence of the work and the main reason for ac-
quiring’ (Pingen 2005, p. 385). What’s left of its significance when the
museum stops activating the Werksatz for decades, thereby precluding
the creation of an archive?
‘The expansive and utopian feel that characterised the
Werksatzarbeiten in the sixties, the optimistic faith in unlimited possi-
bilities that were open to everyone – I increasingly wanted to retract
all of this in the seventies, because it seemed to me that such ideas
just didn’t work anymore’ (Köttering & Walther 2000, p. 34). Walther
had certain requirements regarding space, time, and mediation that
are rarely given within an institution.15 There are themes in the work –
as he has explained – that can only be enacted outdoors, or have con-
ditions that ask for a much longer duration to be recognised, which
is not provided in the museum in terms of time and space. These are
only provided by the museum through documentation.16 ‘Just because
in a museum this is how it currently is, I cannot make work tailored to
the museum.’17
By 1982, observing the history of the 1. Werksatz, Gerhard
Storck, director of KWM Krefeld, observed: ‘The direct connection be-
tween artist and audience through the objects – that is, the direct par-
ticipation of the audience in pre-planned creative processes – only
rarely worked’ (Storck 1982, n.p.). For Walther, the Werksatz took on a
retrospective character by the mid-1970s (Köttering & Walther 2000, p.
234). His ideas in art had shifted from building situations, to presenting

static ‘installations’ (Vogel 1977, p. 76). An illusion in art was shattered,
noted Storck, when Walther preferred to see the instruments of his
1. Werksatz unused and stored on a shelf, ‘withdrawn from the arbitrar-
iness of any use and stored: wrapped up in themselves they rest, com-
pletely ready to be rediscovered in due time’ (Storck 1982, n.p.).
Relatedly, Dave Beech argues that institutions shoot themselves
in the foot by displaying a work for its aesthetics while not address-
ing its critical origins. The work remains a critical one and an audience
cannot be excluded from critically analysing this aesthetic presenta-
tion (Beech 2006). With Walther’s conscious and complete cessation of
activity with the 1. Werksatz, the subsequent ‘Storage Form’ could be
viewed as his institutional critique.
Information management
‘One has to have knowledge of the material / matter with which one has
to deal.’18
Franz Erhard Walther 1973
In the 1990s, significant changes became apparent in society, technolo-

gy and the arts. Dorothea von Hantelmann speaks in this respect of the
‘experiential turn’: ‘From the 1960s onwards, the creation and shap-
ing of experiences have increasingly become an integral part of the
artwork’s conception,’ which ‘corresponds to a general revaluation of
experience in Western societies, in which “experience” has become a
focus of social, economic and cultural activity’ (Von Hantelmann 2014).
Here she references Gerhard Schulze’s (1992) Die Erlebnisgesellschaft
(The Experience Society). When basic needs were met – due to in-
creases in wealth since the late twentieth century – people became
sensitive to the experience aspect of objects, activities, interaction and
life itself. Experience became the primary essence of having a satisfy-
ing and fulfilling life; it also affected the art world. Artists increasingly

turned to action as a constituent part of their work, whereby Walther’s
enjoyed newly attention. Since the mid-1990s he re-engaged with the
1. Werksatz by filming the actions with the objects – a plan from 1969.
In 1997, when the director of MAMCO Geneva asked if Walther would
like to demonstrate for the public the 1. Werksatz that had been on dis-
play there in ‘Storage Form’ since 1994, he saw the work in a new light.
The time felt right to unwrap the canvas objects and demonstrate the
Werksatz for a newly susceptible generation (Köttering & Walther
2000, p. 234).
Digital technology exploded in the 1990s, introducing pro-
fessional collection management and information systems. Parallel
to this, material-technical and ethical conservation issues concern-
ing modern art were professionally addressed. Platforms like SBMK
(Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art) were set up
to approach these challenges through interdisciplinary research and
symposia, whereby the VAM, along with other institutions and pro-
fessionals, were closely involved. These initiatives help identify what
transfer of responsibility and knowledge means when collecting art
forms that came out of the 1960s, such as installations, performance
and concept art. Meaningful changes in museum collection philos-
ophies were set in motion by director Jan Debbaut (1988–2003). In
his view, the museum is a platform of knowledge. The immaterial (in-
formation) management of the collection was considered a primary
task, and he made use of automation to benefit scientific research.19
With the new wing a large library was built, and the archive was now
hosted in a climate-controlled vault. By the late 1990s, the municipal
archives gave the museum access to legally ceded documents con-
taining valuable information on past correspondence about acquisi-
tions and exhibitions, along with general management documents,
and which had been stored in the bicycle cellar under poor conditions
(Franssen 2007).20 The bulk of materials were processed into several
sub-archives.

1. Werksatz displayed in ‘Storage Form’. Collection
Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, Van Abbemuseum
Eindhoven, 1983–84. Photo: Hans Biezen
From the Permanent Collection, Franz Erhard Walther,

Van Abbemuseum, 1993–94. Photo: Peter Cox

Action-based arts depend on an efficient information infrastruc-
ture. Analogue sub-archives lack an interconnected structure, as they
are focused on storing instead of using information. To cross refer-
ence the library, art and archives, you have to thoroughly know their
interrelations to find items within them. This is a key problem in recon-
structing how to activate Walther’s 1. Werksatz. As Agnieszka Wielocha
writes: ‘What we find is that in the museum, the identity of the contem-
porary artwork, distributed between physical objects and the stories
which contextualise them, becomes divided between two institution-
al realms – the collection and the archive – which are governed by dif-
ferent rules and procedures.’21 Her conclusion is certainly relevant for
Walther’s case: ‘Whereas institutions invest in care for the objects in
their collection, the documentation that may carry the bulk of an art-
work’s identity often receives less attention and resources’ (Wielocha
2021, p. 354). Although the importance of information management
was identified at the VAM in 1989, there was no experience in instal-
lation or live art documentation management, and access to archival
holdings remained limited. The exhibition folder in 1993 stated: ‘Now
that the body, social reflection and interaction with the viewer are once
again important issues in contemporary art, the Van Abbemuseum is to
exhibit works by German artist Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939) from its
own collection.’ Although it referenced activation and use, the formal-
ist presentation was not looking like it would facilitate this. The descrip-
tion lacked embodied knowledge. Without such knowledge, there is no
understanding of Walther’s work.22
A shift occurred in 1999, when Leering was invited to make an
exhibition with his acquisitions. While developing his presentation plan,
he wrote a letter to the curator of collections: ‘Due to Rudi’s exhibi-
tion, I realised that in the earlier set up I made an omission to not make
space for Walther’s Werksatz. I would prefer to show a selection of it, in
combination with the photos [that were made] while using the pieces
(and not, like Rudi, who only demanded the visitor’s attention for the

Critical analysis of allocated space and furniture looking
back on the presentation of 2009.
Rien ne va plus, exhibition view, Van Abbemuseum, 2009.
Photo: Peter Cox

Exploring Nr. 36,
1. Werksatz,
Studio Van
Abbemuseum,
2018.
Photo: Peter Cox,
Eindhoven

work as an object).’23 All thirteen pieces were exhibited. One was dis-
played in the centre, to be used following the directions on the wall la-
bel. There was no active education and mediation program. The space –
the museums assembly hall – was not visually documented. The lack of
input from Leering’s original staff, who worked directly with Walther in
his 1999 show, brought into sharp relief that a museum is an accumula-
tion of knowledge and experience. The information on how the original
demonstrations were set up in 1972 can only be found in the exhibition
management file and the annual report – documents you would not
usually consult.24 A few more displays of the 1. Werksatz followed in the
2000s, which now grew in contextual documentation.
The role of the collection as a cultural memory, whereby collec-
tion, library and archives are not separate islands, is something Charles
Esche, director since 2005, encourages. In the group presentation
Rien ne vas plus in 2009, during Play Van Abbe, Part I, The Game and the
Players,25 the focus was on artists who explore the boundaries of the
museum context and challenge the visitor. The factsheet reads: ‘A per-
formance or installation requires a completely different form of con-
servation and reuse than a painting or sculpture. An installation has to
be set up again every time. Every room is different and offers different
possibilities. That is why the curator works with the various potential
meanings of the work of art, sometimes together with the artist and
sometimes without him or her.’26 The last part here is ambiguous with
respect to knowing and representing the artist’s intentions. As Walther
defined each object within its own framework of action, one should
critically question space and furniture if a certain work deals with physi-
cal dynamics and endurance.
In 2018 Walther’s process material was activated in the collec-
tion display The Way Beyond Art (2017–21), a title taken from Alexander
Dorner’s eponymous 1947 publication. Dorner’s argument – that a mu-
seum should become a driving force, whereby art is the engine for
change, stimulating learning and action beyond the museum walls –

166 Exploring Nr. 36, 1. Werksatz, Studio Van Abbemuseum,
2018. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven
InternationalLocals constituency group exploring Politisch,
Werksalon, 2018. Photo: Niek Tijsse Klasen
Ceremonial closing of the first Werksalon season, Van Abbe-

museum Eindhoven, 2018. Photo: Dieuwke van den Heuvel

links comfortably with Esche’s view of the museum as social power-
plant. By creating active relations by programming a Werksalon in The
Way Beyond Art display, inviting constituencies and stimulating interac-
tion with certain artworks, visitors were able to use the museum and
become actors. The constituency groups each discussed the topics of
their concern and, with the outcomes, chose a work from the collection
to explore those ideas. This way of mediation is an example of creating
a deeper connection with art through appropriation.
Walther’s objects are tools for actual, immaterial work, but they
have been mostly presented as art objects and treated as references.
Knowledge vanished when Leering left; the staff dissolved, and its suc-
cessor closed down the education department. Activating 1. Werksatz
wasn’t considered necessary to convey its meaning. As a result, there
was no demand for information on how to activate it. Documentary
photos made the work look deceptively simple and, in combination
with a loose understanding, produced inadequate or limited activa-
tions. It was the first work in the collection that depended on an in-
formation infrastructure, embodied knowledge and a vision of media-
tion to live in a collection. Clearly, taking responsibility and transfer of
knowledge go hand in hand. Success relies on the work being under-
stood, supported and executed, all of which depends on the configura-
tion and vision of the director and their staff.
Practical Solutions
In different decades, the 1. Werksatz has been approached from differ-

ent perspectives by all parties, giving its activation and presentation of
the work a constant actuality. In the early 1970s Leering was primari-
ly concerned with the social objective27; Fuchs displayed it as historical
documents frozen in time; the sensation-driven 1990s opened a win-
dow to the thrills of activation; in the 2000s the work was interpreted
as an example of ‘Slow Living’28; since the 2010s the work equals the

idea of Arte Útil and the visitor / activator as constituent element of the
work; it also indicates a shift to the corporeal and multisensorial that
logically comes from an inclusive approach of the function of the mu-
seum, which requires empathy. Learning and re-reading is an ongoing
process and part of the transferral of responsibility and knowledge.
In preparation for activating Walther’s canvas objects in 2018,
our museum conservators became concerned about the extensive han-
dling. Wearing gloves and surgical booties would affect the sensory
experience. Moreover, the cleaning advice published in 1968 was con-
sidered to be too invasive (Walther 1968). As working with the textiles
is vital in the work’s understanding, the making of exhibition copies
seemed a logical and not uncommon practice to preserve the origi-
nals. In an email to the author from October 17 2021, Susanne Walther
detailed how she proposed this very idea back in 2009, to encourage
collectors to enable activations as inherent. Since then the artist has
allowed copies of certain elements under specific terms: they must be
manufactured by textile engineer Johanna Walther, who co-developed
the original 1. Werksatz. Excluded from being copied are the elements
with additional materials, like foam rubber or wood. The copies differ
with intent from the originals in material and colour. A second genera-
tion of exhibition copies closer to the originals is currently being consid-
ered, as colour and material weight does matter in the experience.
From a(n) (im)material conservation perspective, training ses-
sions with copies help one gain knowledge of the separate objects
from the 1. Werksatz, each with its own requirements, handling and
meaning. The knowledge for correctly executing the 1. Werksatz is lost
in our museum and needs to be learned and taught. The Franz Erhard
Walther Foundation sees its central role in passing on information on
how the work activations should be handled. Solutions could entail
workshops organised by the foundation in the right handling and sit-
uating of the objects, for instance. It is important to create ownership
within and around our institutions, since performative art depends on

passionate people, in addition to ambassadors who have expertise,
enthusiasm, ingenuity and a network. One must realise that ten years
of inactivity means skipping a working generation. In order to prevent
continuous loss of knowledge, regular activation keeps the thresh-
olds and costs low and maintains contacts. It’s worth maintaining the
European network – developing a digital platform to stimulate collab-
oration, exchange information and mutual guidance on activations of
performative works in our collections.
In imagining the archive otherwise, we can invest in the knowl-
edge management of process-based art that meets the requirements of
the end-users through rethinking a digital archive. For instance, taking
a closer look at Sanneke Stigter’s DIAL – Digital Index of an Artwork’s
Life could be a point of departure: ‘The DIAL is developed as a practical
tool that makes it clear that an artwork’s character or behaviour is not
object inherent but conception dependent’ (Stigter 2019, pp. 289–95).
Besides documenting and contextualising the past, assembling a digital
toolkit for reactivation and providing online services for crowd sourced
testimonials, we need to be reminded that even the best structured
digital archives remain passive containers. Knowledge transfer is still a
human-to-human interaction, as it depends on communicating instead
of sending. Performative art provides a museum a unique opportunity
to establish an active connection with its public, developing networks
and reaching new audiences. Collecting performative art requires insti-
tutional ambition; instead of a continued existence, there should be a
desire to keep the work alive.

ENDNOTES
1 ‘Entwickeln hat ja nichts mit Kontinuität im Sinne eines ununterbrochenen

Vorwärtsschreitens zu tun – so, als gäbe es einen Ausgangspunkt und ein
Ziel. Vielmehr finden ständig Aus- und Einwicklungen statt, wobei bestim-
mten Dingen neue Seiten abgewonnen werden, während anderes neu ver-
hüllt wird. Entwicklung ist der unaufhörliche Versuch, ursprüngliches mit
Gegenwärtigem ins Gleichgewicht zu bringen, was manchmal nur noch durch
einen Sprung nach vorne bewerkstelligt werden kann. Und hier passiert es
dann, dass ein zu weiter Satz, der unbekannte Bereiche erschliesst, durch
Rückblicke wieder abgesichert werden muss, weil dort im Vorfeld eigen-
tlich noch niemand ganz zu Hause ist.’ Gerhard Storck, “Wer Resultate
erwartet, braucht erst gar nicht anzufangen”, in Gerhard Storck and
Marianne Stockebrand, “Franz Erhard Walther Werkzeichnungen”, exh. cat.
(Krefeld: Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1982), n.p. All translations Chantal
Kleinmeulman unless otherwise noted.
2 Developed with collaborative construction project based in Berlin,
constructLab.
3 Arte Útil roughly translates into English as ‘useful art’, but in this context it
proposes art as a tool or device. Criteria of Arte Útil are: Propose new uses
for art within society; challenge the field within which it operates (civic, leg-
islative, pedagogical, scientific, economic, etc.); be ‘timing specific’, respond-
ing to current urgencies; be implemented and function in real situations; re-
place authors with initiators and spectators with users; have practical, bene-
ficial outcomes for its users; pursue sustainability whilst adapting to chang-
ing conditions; re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation.
4 The collection presentation “The Way Beyond Art” (2017–21), including the
‘Werksalon’ as laboratory for diverse constituency groups using the collec-
tion, and the Arte Útil Archive was made accessible.
5 In consultation with the artist a representative selection of thirteen pieces
were acquired of the 1. Werksatz (1963–69), no: 13, 23, 26, 28, 35, 36, 42, 45,
46, 51, 52, 55, and 58.

6 Franz Erhard Walther, “The other concept of oeuvre”, in Rudi Fuchs and
Franz Erhard Walther, “Franz Erhard Walther : Works 1978-1984”, exh. cat.
(Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1984), n.p.
7 Lit, P. van (n.d.). Mr. P. van Lit to Jerven Ober, undated [Letter]. VAM
Exhibition Archive, inv.nr. 271. Box 76. Transcription with typo in letterhead
[Jeroen: read Jerven] published in: Jean Leering, Jerven Ober and Franz
Erhard Walther, “Franz Erhard Walther, Verslag van de tentoonstelling in het
Van Abbemuseum 13.10.72 tm 29.10.72. Vroege werken, 1955-’63, 1. Werksatz,
bestaande uit 58 stukken, 1963-’69”, Eindhoven, 1972, n.p. (§ 6.2).
8 “Commissie van Toezicht: Jaarverslag 1972. Van Abbemuseum”,
Management Archive [Beheersarchief] RHC A-1104 576 Periode: 1972.
9 Hoe intensief de deelnemers “door middel van demonstratie en train-
ing voorbereid dienen te worden om de maximale mogelijkheden van
een dergelijk kultureel aanbod te kunnen effektueren.” Leering, Ober and
Walther, (§ 1.2).
10 VAM Exhibition Archive, inv.nr. 271. Box 76.
11 Leering, Ober and Walther, (§ 5.3).
12 Ibid.
13 Walther, F.E. (1972, 6 November). Franz Erhard Walther to Jerven Ober,
November 6, 1972 [Letter]. VAM Exhibition Archive, inv.nr. 271. Box 76.
14 Walther referring to video and photographs in conversation with the staff.
Leering, Ober and Walther, (§ 2.1).
15 ‘Ort hat Bedeutung. Der Ort, an dem ich bin. Der Ort, den ich erwähle.
Das Ort, von dem aus ich mich ausdehne. Das hat durchaus existentielle
Bedeutung. … Museum kann ein Ort sein. Aber entscheidend ist doch: dass
man Ort frei wählt: weil eine Idee damit zusammenhängt. Wenn ein Ort
vorgegeben ist, habe ich diese Freiheit ja nicht, in der Regel nicht. Mit die-
sem Widerspruch muss ich fertig werden, wenn ich mit Museumssituationen
zu tun habe.’ Vogel, C. 1977, “Dialog George Jappe – Franz Erhard Walther”,
in D. Ronte and E. Weiss, Franz Erhard Walther: 2. Werksatz. Skulpturen.
Zeichnungen, exh. cat. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 61–62, 75–76.

16 ‘Dann gibt es Arbeiten … die Verhältnisse darin sind nicht unmittelbar erken-
nbar, man müsste sich länger damit befassen, was im Museum zeitlich und
räumlich nicht gegeben ist.’ Ibid., 62.
17 ‘Ich meine, nur weil das Museum heute so ist, kann ich ja nicht Arbeiten
machen, die auf das Museum zugeschnitten ist.” Ibid.
18 Walther, F.E. & Nolte, G., “Part of 1 Werksatz”, exh.cat., Vanier College /
Vehicule Art Inc., Montreal, 1973, unpag.
19 “Ondernemingsplan Van Abbemuseum. Nota naar aanleiding van de bestu-
urlijke opdracht dd. 23 januari 1989”, VAM Beheersarchief, RHC A-1105 036
Periode: 1989–1989.
20 The handing over of the management archive by the municipality back to the
museum coincides with the building of the large modern extension. The mu-
seum space increased enormously with proper space to house its own ar-
chive in a modern equipped library. It was the focal point for Debbaut’s ap-
proach of the museum as knowledge centre, modernising the registration
systems.
21 See VAM Exhibition Documentation Archive inv. 33. Doos 1993. It was
probably inspired by the 1. Werksatz from the Städtisches Kunstmuseum
Bonn, which was shown in Storage Form at the VAM in the 1983–84 collec-
tion exchange display, see “Verzameling Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn
= Collection Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn”, 1983 and VAM Exhibition
Management Archive inv. 454; Box 148.
22 ‘Ja, maar het moest eerst de ervaring opdoen, het moet werkelijke ervarin-
gen daarmee krijgen en dan kan men pas van een eerste begrijpen spreken,
dan weet het waarover ik spreek. [Yes, but the [public] must first gain the ex-
perience, it must get real experience with it, and only then can one speak of
an initial understanding, then it knows what I am talking about].’ Walther in
interview with staff of the Van Abbemuseum. Leering, Ober and Walther, § 2.1.
23 Leering, J. (1999, 7 July). Jean Leering to Christiane Berndes, July 7, 1999
[Letter]. VAM Exhibition management archive, inv. 82; Box 1999.
24 Only the general Management Archive (Beheersarchief) from 1936–89 was
digitised and made accessible online in 2014. The 72nd annual report can be

accessed there. The specific exhibition management file is a separate sub-ar-
chive that has not been digitised. The exhibition’s public information is acces-
sible via Vubis. It is not connected to the collection registration system TMS;
a cross search is not possible.
25 Summary: ‘An 18-month program Play Van Abbe. The program is divided into
four parts, each with its own theme, and includes exhibitions, projects, per-
formances, lectures and discussions, centred around the museum’s collec-
tion. Part 1, The game and the players has as main parts: Repetition: Summer
arrangement 1983, the reconstruction of a collection exhibition from 1983;
Strange and Close, a presentation of recent purchases; the exhibition Rien ne
va plus and the Edition III – Masquerade project. In this first part of Play Van
Abbe, the museum focuses on the stories of artists and exhibition makers.
Who are the “players” within a museum and what stories do they tell? What
did a collection presentation look like in 1983 and what in 2009? It is about
the positioning of an art museum - now and in the past - and rethinking this
position; both a productive environment in which stories are told and a pre-
sentation space in which things can be seen.’ VAM Exhibition Documentation
Archive, inv. 87, 88; Box 2009-5-6; Collection Presentations
26 “Factsheet Rien ne va Plus”, VAM Exhibition Documentation Archive, inv. 87,
88 ; Box 2009-5-6; Collection Presentations.
27 ‘on the newly evolved concept of collective creativity. It became primarily
concerned with the social objective of increasing the educative and cultural
function which the museum can exercise for a large, broadly-based public.’
(Van der Schoor 1979, p. 34).
28 The term ‘slow living’ (‘onthaasten’ in Dutch) was a popular notion at the
time in response to the fast pace of modern life, and used in reviewing
Walther’s work (Steevensz 2002, p. 136). It may have been be influenced by
Jean Leering attributing a didactic and therapeutic value to art: ‘Together
with its equivalent disciplines such as philosophy, science, technology, eth-
ics, etc., art plays a major role in the formation of lexical and visual concepts
and the concrete shapes based on them, in which man can find ways of ori-
entating himself in relation to his past and future and identifying himself with

the present. Without such landmarks man is alienated from his own reality,
and in this sense cultural activity, including the work of the museum, should
be seen as one aspect of preventive mental health care’ (Van der Schoor
1979, p. 30). According to Pingen, staff meeting minutes in 1972, noted that it
was advised for users of Walther’s Werksatz, who after the experience want-
ed to explore more in this field, to join a local sensitivity centre for aware-
ness training (Pingen 2005, p. 297).
REFERENCE LIST
Albatros, W., 1979, “Interview with Jean Leering”, in C. Blotkamp et al. (eds),
Museum in Motion?, Staatsuitgeverij, The Hague.
Bationo-Tillon, A. and Decortis, F. 2016, “Understanding Museum Activity to
Contribute to the Design of Tools for Cultural Mediation: New Dimensions of
Activity?”, Le travail humain, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 53–70, https://doi.org/10.3917/
th.791.0053.
Beech, D. 2006, “Institutionalisation for All – Dave Beech tackles an old taboo”,
Art Monthly, vol. 294, March 2006, http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/
site/article/institutionalisation-for-all-by-dave-beech-march-2006.
Elshout, D.J. 2016, “De moderne museumwereld in Nederland: Sociale dy-
namiek in beleid, erfgoed, markt, wetenschap en media”, PhD dissertation,
University of Amsterdam.
Franssen, D. 2007, “Van boekenplank naar kennisproductie De geschieden-
is van de bibliotheek van het Van Abbemuseum 1936–2007”, in R. Koot, M.
Nijhoff and S. Scheltjens, Kunstbibliotheken in Nederland. Tien korte schetsen,
Primavera Pers, Leiden.
Fuchs, R. 1976, “Wat Leering beweert is onaanvaardbaar”, Hollands Diep, vol. 2,
no. 2.
Köttering, M. and Walther, S. 2000, Franz Erhard Walther: Sites of Origin – Sites of
Influence: Exhibitions 1962–2000, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie Nordhorn.

Leering, J. 1970, “De funktie van het museum”, Museumjournaal, vol. 15, no. 4
(1970), p. 7.
Leering, J., Ober, J. and Walther, FE., “Franz Erhard Walther, Verslag van de ten-
toonstelling in het Van Abbemuseum 13.10.72 tm 29.10.72. Vroege werken,
1955-–63, 1. Werksatz, bestaande uit 58 stukken, 1963–69”, Eindhoven, 1972.
Pingen, R. 2005, “Dat museum is een mijnheer: De geschiedenis van het Van
Abbemuseum 1936–2003”, PhD dissertation, Free University Amsterdam.
Steevensz, B. 2002, “XXI”, in J. Debbaut and M. Verhulst (eds), Van
Abbemuseum: Het collectieboek, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Stigter, S. 2019, “Towards Process-Based Research in Conservation: DIAL for
Complex Artworks”, in L. Guisti and N. Ricciardi, Museums at the Post-Digital
Turn, Mousse Publishing, Milan.
Storck, G. and Stockebrand, M. 1982, Franz Erhard Walther Werkzeichnungen,
exh. cat. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld.
Storck, G. 2000, “Wer Resultate erwartet, braucht erst gar nicht anzufangen”, in
G. Storck and M. Stockebrand (eds), Franz Erhard Walther Werkzeichnungen,
exh. cat. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld.
Van der Schoor, F. 1979, “The Van Abbemuseum 1964-1973: The ideas”, in C.
Blotkamp et al. (ed.), Museum in Motion?, Staatsuitgeverij, The Hague.
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Walther, FE. and Nolte, G., 1973, Part of 1 Werksatz, exh. cat., Vanier College /
Vehicule Art Inc., Montreal.
Vogel, C. 1977, “Dialog George Jappe—Franz Erhard Walther”, in D. Ronte and
E. Weiss (catalogue), and C. Vogel (text), Franz Erhard Walther: 2. Werksatz.
Skulpturen. Zeichnungen, exh. cat. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Wielocha, AB. 2021, “Collecting Archives of Objects and Stories: On the lives and
futures of contemporary art at the museum”, PhD dissertation, University of
Amsterdam.

HOW TO
DESCRIBE
WHAT A
MIRROR LOOKS
LIKE? ON
RIA PACQUÉE’S
MADAME
AND IT
Persis Bekkering
178
This is one way to tell a story: by telling another one. To speak of some-
thing fractured, complex, one could make up the fiction of the one who
fell in love.
Love is always a good vehicle for stories, in the way we have
been taught to understand Love as an Event. Something with a be-
fore and an after: with a beginning, a middle and inevitably always an
end. For a writer, letting a character fall in love is a great scaffolding
known as the Inciting Incident, to add the texture of eventness to the
chaos and non-linearity of the world. In classic narratology, the Inciting
Incident sets the character in motion and drives him towards his goal.
It’s the origin of the plot, the invisible hand.
But let’s not write a story about stories. I will invent a lover
because I want to write about Madame and It, alter egos of Antwerp-
based artist Ria Pacquée (b. 1954). They are best described as perfor-
mance projects, two consecutive series that appeared in Pacquée’s
work during the 1980s and 1990s, exhibited in the form of photographs
and small installations. The Madame series are amateurish snapshots,
often mounted on cheap canvas; in contrast, the performances of It
are captured by a professional photographer and printed in black and
white.
These are their material outlines. But it doesn’t reveal anything
about their truth. To tell of Madame and It, then, a lover will be my pros-
thesis.
179 How to Describe What a Mirror Looks Like?

The lover functions as a prosthetic device to chase the shadows, not
letting these artworks escape me. I call them artworks, but they are
not events. They are disappearances. Sometimes I think of them as
mirrors. How does one describe what a mirror looks like? Our precepts
only have the frame in common. Madame (1982–91) and It (1991–95) are
two characters that appeared without notice and without continuity in
the work (and life) of Ria Pacquée. They are disappearances. They are
also among Pacquée’s most well-known works, which is a funny way
to describe things that have never been there. All that is left are some
photos, many of them uncredited, a few props, an archive containing
cut-outs of foxed reviews with good and bad ideas. I might be exagger-
ating, but, if I am, it’s for the sake of the story.
This will be a story of a failure, then. But a good one. In
Pacquée’s universe, there is a lot of space for failure. When I first met
the artist, she told me that in the next life, she would like to return as a
singer. A good singer, she said, with bad songs.
So, I imagine someone falling in love with Madame. The One
Who Fell in Love. Who is this person? A man, of course, a man would be
the perfect other to Madame. Madame is the norm, after all. She must
be heterosexual. Madame is so much the norm, it’s as if the complete
book of norms is written on her body, the pages rushing towards her
like a black hole indiscriminately attracting mass. Madame is the black
hole of normative life, the empty yet heavy epicentre of white Western
culture, and therefore it is impossible to comprehend her. We know her
well. She is the absolute average, the vanishing point of our desires.
Part of us wants to be her. We all feel inclined to touch her, but we
don’t want to lose ourselves. We reach out in the same way that we are
interested in feeling the heat of the flame, without wanting to burn a
finger. A flame that we’ve only heard about, but that we haven’t seen.
Madame attracts so much mass, she is like a black hole. Even light she
absorbs, and therefore we cannot see her. But our poor lover doesn’t
know this yet.

Ria Pacquée, Madame, 1982, Montevideo, Antwerp.
Photographer unknown

Our lover has seen her, or so he thinks. He remembers the
Inciting Incident as a thing of Chance, and in his vivid, tenacious mem-
ory – a memory that doesn’t account for failure – the incident has
thickened into an Encounter.
He remembers seeing her and immediately losing his heart. It
was as if she invited him. Yes, he felt called by her, he heard her mute
cry and he wanted to be what she needed. To be the answer to the
question that was expressed in her (dis)appearance. He didn’t ask
himself whether his interpellation was justified. He saw a woman that
needed to be freed. She was devastatingly alone, but she wasn’t free.
The frame was holding her captive. The frames around Madame were
like the well-wrought floral garlands around the dusted mirrors in that
hotel in Venice, as Joseph Brodsky wrote: ‘More coherent than their
contents, straining, as it were, to keep them from spreading over the
wall’ (Brodsky 1992, pp. 54, 55).
In fact, our lover has seen her before, but he doesn’t realise it.
It was long before he first saw her. He stared at her in 1982, shivering in
an art space in Antwerp. This wasn’t yet the Inciting Incident, it couldn’t
have been; she appalled him. She didn’t have a name, wasn’t yet bap-
tised Madame, the black hole. She was too distinct to be his mirror, too
strange. She was stinky. She chain-smoked and audibly sipped tepid
Stella Artois. In her makeshift little brick house that was constructed in-
side Montevideo, surrounded by rickety furniture, she appeared drowsy
and aloof. Her mind was plugged in to another frequency, surfing the
slow waves of Valium, her favourite downer. A dark pair of glasses com-
pleted the look, a failed attempt to hint at glamour and distant cool.
Instead, they added to her murkiness. As Aldous Huxley (cited in Virilio
2009, p. 60) put it in The Art of Seeing: ‘One can acquire an addiction to
goggles, just as one can acquire an addiction to tobacco or alcohol.’
Surprisingly, her nylon tights were intact. But the television
she was looking at was broken. She didn’t seem to bother, as it didn’t
bother her that the house smelled so strongly of piss and chicken shit.
Quietly she sat there, gulping beer.

Yes, it was really her sitting there, her ash-blonde hair slightly
rising above the back of the chair, an elbow leaning over the armrest.
But she wasn’t actually there. She was more like a puppet. A stand-in
for something or someone else. The puppet didn’t show a lot of life.
Our lover was in a strange mood that night and didn’t stay very
long. It was cold inside, he kept his coat and hat on. The space was
about 2,000 square metres, and though it exhibited art, no one was
interested in making money, so there was no means to heat up the
space. That was not what bothered him.
His friends passed around a bottle of aquavit. They had come
to see Minus Delta T, the performance group from Zurich that played
at Montevideo that night, but for some reason they’d just missed it.
The friends in the little makeshift house acted boisterously, making bad
jokes, as guys do when they see a woman behaving like she shouldn’t,
being all smelly and unpleasant and unaccommodating even though
her tights were intact. At least they made sure she didn’t hear what
they said.
Our lover tried to catch a glimpse of the person inhabiting the
body. He needed to see proof of her anima. Inside his own body, he
became as still as she appeared on the outside. The self-abandonment
this woman was enacting bothered him. Suddenly, he felt a yearning
to collapse the space, to cover all the filthy layers of absence with his
own. She didn’t acknowledge his presence. She didn’t seem as vul-
nerable as he was. ‘The wearer of dark glasses knows that the protec-
tors-propagators of bodies and images are loaded weapons,’ Paul Virilio
commented on Huxley’s naïve observations on sunglasses, two years
before our lover stood face to face with the woman who came to be
known as Madame (Virilio 2009, p. 61).
He never saw her again, forgot about her the next day. The aq-
uavit diligently washed away the images. The show left but a trace of
anxiety in him, of something uncomfortable. It would take some years
before he would meet her again for the first time. As one makes up the

Waiting for My Man Who Lost the War, 1983,
Streets of Antwerp. Photographer unknown

story of the Inciting Incident only in retrospect, connecting moments
in time until the coherence of form is artificially achieved (we all know
the warm embrace of coherent form), the conflict between truth,
consciousness and time is resolved through fiction.
One year later, he didn’t see her in his hometown of Antwerp.
Our lover was lying in someone else’s arms that day, a few streets
away, the arms of a very possessive woman; he liked to feel impor-
tant to someone. Meanwhile, Madame had constructed a red wood-
en house. Madame likes to build little houses. On the façade, she
had sprayed in English: ‘Waiting for my man who lost the war.’ It
was summer, she was wearing a baby-pink t-shirt that made her look
modern. From within her little booth on the Meir, she stared at pas-
sers-by. No dark glasses this time, not even the thick round glasses
that would become her trademark, no glasses at all. Her retinas bare
and exposed to the gaze of everyone. Her man has lost the war, she
is unarmed.
Would anyone have asked which war it was the man had lost
in 1983? I wonder. She tried her best to stand out, in the red wooden
house in a busy street in Antwerp. There is a picture of her with a man
in a grey suit walking by, almost disappearing in the urban surround-
ings of the same shade of grey. He looks at her or looks through her.
Would anyone have grasped the mystery of those words? I
wonder. The slogan is playing on the cultural trope of the woman left
behind by her spouse for an important cause. Heroic Odysseus fight-
ing wars and saving the honour of a people. We imagine her looking
out over sea, dressed in the wings of chastity and devout persistence.
But the hero has lost. And she is still waiting. Why? Will he ever come
back? If he lost the war, what has she lost in its wake?
The woman doesn’t have a name. She is not yet known as
Madame. No one thanked her for waiting. No one will compensate her
for her husband’s loss. He lost, and so did she. History will be written
by those who won, and she will have been forgotten.

Souvenirs of the Men I’ve Loved, 1985,
Hof ter Cauwerschueren, Brussels.

Two years later. It’s 1985, and the lover has grown a mous-
tache, which he will keep for the next fifteen years. Madame has
found her defining look, too: the thick glasses with a brown frame
and the timeless fashion items of a decent woman, a woman who
could be a teacher or an office clerk or an aunt and who deserves our
respect. Trench coat, low heels, impeccable nylons.
It’s two years later and Madame has come forward. The only
self-destruction she allows herself from now on is smoking cigarettes.
She has matured. She’s not passively waiting for a loser anymore, she’s
taking action. On the table in front of her, a collection of familiar look-
ing objects: pictures, a miniature Eiffel tower, prize cups, a tape re-
corder, a razor, goggles, a snorkel. ‘Souvenirs of the Men I’ve Loved’,
a wooden panel says. Another one: ‘À Vendre’, for sale. The bold ges-
ture will be noted: at the end of the day she’s sold almost everything.
Maybe people really needed the goggles, maybe people just wanted to
support the broken-hearted garage sale.
What appears at first to be a tragicomic intervention – a sad
woman selling the remainders of her past affairs, exposing the equip-
ment of the domestic sphere on the streets of Brussels in a humoris-
tic act of vengeance – gains depth over time. The objects on the table,
displaced from their habitat, their fate of domestic invisibility undone,
are unbearably normal. Her men could have been everyone and any-
one. Her men: mass figures. They buy souvenirs in Paris, they frame a
reclining nude, they win the billiard cup. The objects bear witness to
Madame’s evolution into becoming the black hole. The book of norms
is being studied and guarded here. Later, Madame would stop interven-
ing in the world. She would fit in, up to the extent of disappearing. Yet
the aesthetics of the generic are already here.
Only now, while trying to compose a story, resolving conflicts
in time, consciousness and truth, I notice the paradoxical references
in the composition. The prize cups: her men, who are now split up into
a multitude, were winners after all. They lost a war, but won another.

Madame exposes an economy of love, an economy we now understand
to be gendered – of a world ruled by the logics of winning and losing,
acquiring and disposing. For Madame, the permanence of objects is
winning it from the eventness of love.
All these moments the lover could have seen the woman he
would fall in love with. He failed. Maybe she tried too hard to be seen.
Maybe that’s why she would soon stop trying. At that moment she be-
came visible to him, our lover. Her withdrawal incited the Incident.
He finally saw her. She wasn’t there. Truth be told, he only saw
her dress. It was her wedding dress he saw, draped over a chair, sur-
rounded by the traditional, generic props of marriage, stand-ins for
the regime of the family (the smallest unit of capitalist privatisation).
A white bag, white heels, white veil, all abandoned by her presence.
Objects that only make sense in their interchangeability. Madame put
them there on the chair, neither neatly nor chaotically, the composition
suggesting only a minimum of care – just enough care to be visible as
such. In many ways, Madame is in between. She is the either/or that is
the black hole, the one that defies linear temporality. This sounds im-
pressive; no wonder he fell in love.
The empty dress attracted his attention. Once, a body had been
inside of the garment, he thought, plucking his moustache. Finding
someone’s clothes is such a strange event. An auratic sensation.
Absence intensified, made palpable like a shrine. Somewhere, someday
a woman got undressed, her nylon covered legs caressing the silk lin-
ing. Displaced from its traditional embedding in the couple, and from
the couple, the family, from the family, society, the dress seemed the
loneliest thing the lover had ever seen. He could sense the aura ema-
nating from it, the aura of a woman who needed to be saved. He, too,
was never asked to marry. He was her, he was the naked body that un-
furled the itchy, cheap chiffon. The familiar loneliness the scenario ex-
uded burned a hole in his chest. He had so much to give to the world.

Then his gaze moved along the walls of the gallery, he noticed
the photographs mounted on canvas, like the family portraits in the liv-
ing rooms of his now settled-down friends. How on earth did he end up
here? Why had he come alone? With a sudden sense of social failure, he
beheld the vestiges of Madame’s lonely wedding day. Madame posing
in front of the town hall, her face not showing any emotions. Madame
on the back seat of a simple white Mercedes, wearing white gloves,
staring in the lens of the camera with the same blank expression. So
blank and so vulnerable. Madame kneeling in front of the altar, alone.
Enough, the lover couldn’t stand it anymore. His heart was about to ex-
plode. Where was this lonely woman? Could he still offer her his hand,
kneeling beside her as her long-awaited bride, a stand-in for Jesus?
He ran outside, turned a corner. Panting, he leaned with his
hands on his knees. Drizzle seemed to wet him from all sides, as if he
was standing in a cloud of still water drops. A white Mercedes drove by,
but he knew he was too late. The face of Madame was still with him.
Afterimages of the Inciting Incident, like these black-and-white draw-
ings that make you see the face of Jesus after staring at it for a minute.
Not that he could describe her, if anyone had asked. Her face was like
a black hole, and he could project on it everything that he wanted. She
didn’t seem sad about it. She didn’t seem sad at all. Walking home in
his brown leather shoes, the shoes of the everyday man, he knew it had
happened – he had fallen in love.
Being in love made him happy and sad. He wanted to have her
for himself, but in the small, flourishing artistic milieu of Antwerp, she
had become quite well known. Madame had evolved from a gener-
ic title to a proper name. Madame Going on a Pilgrimage to Lourdes.
Madame at a Carnival in Cologne. Madame Visiting the Open-Air
Museum Bokrijk. Her name evoked tender smiles on people’s fac-
es. Some people described her as lonely, others a goofy aunt. Some
said she was embodying a present that was already antiquated, some
thought she was exposing our society’s death drive, or the hypocrisy of

Toilet Madame, 1986, Vooruit, Ghent.
Madame Visiting the Open-Air-Museum Bokrijk, 1989,

Bokrijk. Photo: Philippe Chasseur

Madame Going on a Pelgrimage to Lourdes,
1989, Lourdes, France.
Photo: Philippe Chasseur

the art world, or the book of norms, or the dialectics between commu-
nity and individuality. Sometimes, when his inquiries revealed a more
than ordinary concern, when his faltering voice betrayed his yearning,
he was met with low-key scorn. Why, a gallerist with a soft voice and
the softest cashmere cardigan once told him. Don’t you know she is dis-
continuous? Don’t you know she only exists when we’re not there? All
we get are traces, proofs of her existence, but never existence itself.
You are in love with a black hole.
Over the years however, he started to enjoy the hunt for
Madame. It made him laugh to hear she had cleaned the toilet at a par-
ty he’d attended at de Vooruit in Ghent. She had been sitting in plain
sight. He must have given her a few coins, he thought happily, maybe
she had sold him a cigarette. He had become a tracker, and it pleased
him to realise that the journey, the tracking had become more impor-
tant than the goal. That’s the lie he told himself, eying Madame Visiting
Mini-Europe, his beloved standing tall next to the Tower of Pisa, tiny
under the Atomium. His heart swelled in his chest. How perfect she
was. How flawlessly she blended into her environment. The only thing
salient about her was her loneliness, her stillness, her vulnerable blank-
ness, and that’s where he came in. He loved how important she made
him feel. So important he disappeared to himself, sucked in by the
black hole. The more people looked at her, the less he understood him-
self. Maybe Madame was like a mirror. Like the hotel mirror Brodsky
wrote about, ‘dulled by having seen so many. What they return to you
is not your identity but your anonymity.’ (Brodsky 1992, p. 22.)
It’s just a performance, a man on his right whispered, betting his
sweating forehead.
But who is the audience, our lover replied. Is it us? Or the people
in the picture?
The man shrugged. Not us. Not you.
Rumours had reached the lover. Madame had eloped, like a
character jumping off the page. Madame, sucked up by the black hole

that she herself had become. Collapse. As Pacquée says, she had be-
come too good, too much in control. In performance, one must balance
the fine line between catastrophe and perfection. Catastrophe adds
too much visibility. It puts the spotlight on the shadow that is the art-
ist, revealing the character’s double. Perfection leads to the receding of
art, like a character escaping the book. The mechanical equals the dis-
appearance of meaning.
This could have been a good ending for our hero, then. We have
offered him a good deal, a line of flight. He could have been saved from
the two tragic endings that were always already contained in his story:
catastrophe or perfection. But he was persistent. He must have sensed
something. Endowed with as much hubris his existence as a protago-
nist could afford him. Give me another chance, he said. Don’t let me go.
Hold me in the warm embrace of coherent form.
Not being able to resist, I decided to let him have his pleasure
and watch. He is now the voyeur of this text. He is quietly witnessing
me looking at the project Ria Pacquée started in the year she aban-
doned Madame because she had become too good at it. From the lone-
ly mass lady-figure, she wanted to create a character without character.
Someone like the ambivalent figure on the painting she had bought at a
flea market, a figure that was supposed to be a mother but looked more
like a priest: a failed painting. That was what incited It, a good failure.
In 1991, It travelled to the City district of London, the heart of
capitalist accumulation that doesn’t need a less generic name. It was
not attracted to leisurely activities like his predecessor. It loved seeing
people work. Rush and work. It was a worker himself, pushing a cart
through town loaded with scrap wood (in The Car), or collecting stones
in the Swiss mountains (in The Collector of Stones). In London, It want-
ed to make a point. It carried a big placard he wanted the businessmen
to see. ‘Listen! As offender and victim prisoners of ourselves looking at
our shadow deep inside, he who has left but one moment to live has
nothing to hide anymore,’ the big placard said.

The Car, 1992, Streets of Antwerp.
Photo: Philippe Chasseur

Ria Pacquée,The Collector of Stones, 1992, Furka,
Switzerland. Photo: Patrick Van Den Eynde

Have You Accepted That Whatever Seems to Be is Not,
and That That Which Seems Not to Be, Is?, 1991, London.
Photo: Virginia Nimarkoh

People rushed by. No one stopped to read the text. Capital had
to flow. Capital doesn’t pause. Only the cops cared to have a little chat
with It. You can only stand on the same spot for three minutes, they
told It. Then you must flow again.
So It flowed. It was a maverick, but not a criminal. The ti-
tle of the series that resulted from this trip reads like a negation
of Parmenides, the first philosopher of Western history: Have You
Accepted That Whatever Seems to Be Is Not, and That That Which Seems
Not to Be, Is? I don’t know if this makes sense. It is not about sense,
maybe. Stepping into Its universe, we must accept Its logics. Whatever
seems to be is not. Appearance is disappearance.
Like me, the lover suddenly interjects. I seem not to be, yet I am.
Just like Madame, I tell him. Together you live in disappearance.
It was ungendered – today It would be thought of as non-bina-
ry. This ambivalence felt close to Pacquée herself, she told me, because
she often got misgendered. But gender was not what It was about, she
added. It was not about Pacquée herself at all. Where Madame was
the black hole, the lonely book of norms, It was an outsider. Madame
joined everybody and anyone and blended into the environment. It had
his weird little projects. It didn’t care about what other people did. It in-
tervened clumsily in the world, where Madame was the world’s passive
reflection, dulled by having seen so many. Where Madame returned to
us our anonymity, It was nobody himself.
But who is Its audience, our lover asks, plucking his moustache?
Not us, I said. Not us.

REFERENCE LIST
Brodsky, J. 1992, Watermark: An Essay on Venice, Penguin Modern Classics,

New York City.
Interview with Ria Pacquée by Persis Bekkering and Joanna Zielińska,
September 21, 2021.
Interview with Annie Gentils by Persis Bekkering, September 23, 2021.
Matthé, J. (ed.), 2018, Ria Pacquée: Slamm, Ramble, Perform: A Monograph,
Occasional Papers, London.
M HKA archives
Virilio, P. 2009, Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman, Semiotext(e),
Los Angeles.

199
(DIS)APPEARING
WITHOUT
A TRACE:
A CASE STUDY
OF MARÍA
TERESA
HINCAPIÉ
Claudia Segura
200
*A Common Future
In 1990, María Teresa Hincapié (1954–2008) received First Prize at the

XXXIII National Salon of Artists in Colombia for her long-duration per-
formance Una cosa es una cosa (A Thing Is a Thing), the first time this
prize was awarded to an ephemeral, non-object work. The action con-
sisted of placing all of the things that the artist possessed in her home
in the exhibition space over several weeks and during eight continu-
ous hours per day, creating a dance with her body while rearranging
the different elements according to changing criteria. She received this
distinction again in 1996 with Divina proporción (Divine Proportion), in
which she inhabited the exhibition space for days while walking very
slowly, as well as planting and watering grass and soil in the concrete
floor of the industrial space.
Hincapié was born in Armenia, Colombia and died aged fifty-
four after a long illness. She became a key figure in the development
of performance art in the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia and was a
thoughtful voice that explored this genre. She specialised in what we
could call the poetics of the domestic in performance, bringing the do-
mestic into the art realm. The exploration of ordinary everyday life
and the transformation of routine actions into symbolic acts created a
methodology for her practice. Art became the guide for her existence,
201 (Dis)appearing without a Trace...

María Teresa Hincapié,
Divina proporción (Divine
Proportion), 1995
Prize-winner at the 36th
Salon of Colombian Artists,
1996. Courtesy of Santiago
Zuluaga, Casas Riegner,
Bogotá, and 1 Mira Madrid,
Madrid
María Teresa Hincapié, Una cosa es una cosa

(A Thing Is a Thing), 1990
First prize at the 33rd Salon of Colombian Artists,
Corferias, Bogotá. Courtesy of Santiago Zuluaga,
Casas Riegner, Bogotá, and 1 Mira Madrid, Madrid

not only providing a framework for her creativity but also influencing
her ethics and understanding of politics.
In 1995, she began the ambitious project Hacia lo sagrado
(Towards the Sacred) with a walk from Bogotá to San Agustín, a jour-
ney lasting twenty-one days. During the walk she combined survival
and ritualistic actions with mythical thought, which, from that moment
on, became the fundamental nucleus of her poetics:
What I understand as Sacred, then, is any objective that con-

sists in establishing harmony, balance, between the interi-
or and the exterior, between the individual and the collec-
tive, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between
man and the universe. It has to do with what today’s man
calls ecology, a word that, as everyone knows, comes from
the Greek oikos, house, and in some languages it also means
school. So ecology includes a very precise brief, which is
for man to learn to live with his habitat, his village, his city,
his country, with the cosmos. To learn to study the interac-
tions that unite us all thanks to a common future. (Bernal de
Herrera 2001, p. 2).
Many questions arise when intending to exhibit her work in a

museum that is willing both to show the importance of her practice
as well as to present a new understanding of the body and its context
within performance. How does one demonstrate this through archi-
val documents, or works on paper? As the sole activator of the work,
Hincapié’s Estate initially discarded the idea of the re-enactments
of her pieces. In an attempt to include the physicality, gesture, still-
ness, silence, movement and presence that her work emanates, and
in attempting to avoid a re-enactment, the exhibition “María Teresa
Hincapié: If This Were A Beginning of Infinity”1 at MACBA (Museum of
Contemporary Art of Barcelona) and at MAMM (Museum of Modern

Art of Medellín) seeks to combine diverse voices that engage in dia-
logue with Hincapié’s practice.
Together with Emiliano Valdés (Chief Curator of MAMM, Museo
de Arte Moderno de Medellín), co-curator of the exhibition, we have
decided to invite three artists selected through their personal and pro-
fessional connection, and shared interest in Hincapié’s oeuvre, to de-
velop new works based on her performative language. With the aim of
establishing the potential of affect as a mechanism through which to
interact with the deceased artist, we are seeking to reproduce an at-
titude associated with communal sharing, to which Hincapié adhered
during her life and artistic career. At the end of the 1990s, she acquired
land, which she called ‘la Fruta’, in the vicinity of the Sierra Nevada de
Santa Marta. There she planned to establish an artist residency, ‘Aldea-
escuela’ (Village-school), a project that she carried out until her final
days. She believed that living in a collective was conducive to the pro-
duction and transmission of knowledge. Additionally, this case study
explores orality as a strategy for the preservation of ephemeral art and
other associated historiographies. It also questions how to classify, ex-
hibit, and collect durational performance materials when the process is,
in and of itself, the artwork. Moreover, it becomes a platform for con-
siderations regarding time: the time of work, the time of the performer,
the time of the audience, the time between the original work and the
response made by a new performer and eternal time.
** Notes on the performative in María Teresa Hincapié
Yes, what I did was rise above everything, I even picked up lit-
ter, screwed it up into a ball and hid it behind a shoe, behind the
door. … At that time I had no idea what performance was; all I
knew was that it was a discipline that fascinated me and gave
me the rigour to carry out very long works. I started working
for twelve hours, I threw myself into that theatre. I’d get there

in the morning, with everything. … The work where five people
were there for three days, for me, it wasn’t putting on a show, it
was giving myself the chance to be able to work, to have a disci-
pline, to have rigour and, at the same time, for people, someone
who wanted to go in, could go in and, if they wanted to see my
work, they could see it. It wasn’t a spectacle or a work, it was a
‘training’, a laboratory project based on everyday life; very slow,
because I’ve worked a lot with slowness; if I am going to pick up
this glass, I take my time, I adopt a position, I can look at it, a lot
of things can happen. From the moment I got up until I went to
bed, I cooked, washed, swept, made breakfast, had lunch, put
curlers in, put face packs on. … You can’t imagine all the things I
did in twelve hours! (Bernal de Herrera 2001, p. 39)
Landing in the contemporary art circuit spontaneously and almost by

chance, María Teresa Hincapié always had a very particular definition
of the performative, which, despite being run through by the perform-
ing arts, resisted specific categorisation, instead oscillating between
life, creation in movement and the search for the mystical. She left
the world of theatre determined and exhausted by the game of rep-
resentation that was unable to channel an expressive urgency allowed
by other genres such as dance or accommodated by more hybrid spac-
es such as the exhibition. Even then, the purely dramatic genre, which
she embraced for several years (from 1978 to 1985) as an actress in the
group Acto Latino,2 gave her extreme control of her body. With her di-
rector, Juan Monsalve, she learned the practices of Eugenio Barba’s
theatre anthropology,3 centring on handling the body according to the
principles of dance and theatre of various cultures, especially eastern
ones. For two years she did street theatre and followed closely the pre-
cepts of poor theatre as theorised by Jerzy Grotowski. She especially
explored the spiritual side that he accorded to the actor, described as
follows:

The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the
‘trance’ and of the integration of all the actor’s psychic and bod-
ily powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his
being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of ‘trans-lumina-
tion’ (Grotowski 2002).
María Teresa Hincapié took this rigour to the limit. She thus ini-
tiated a path towards long duration in which she had already dwelt for
years in rehearsals with her company and which she followed persever-
ingly because it connected her with what was most essential in her life:
the everyday. She said so herself on various occasions:
I am a theatre actress because, with theatre, I came back to life.

I learned to walk, to sit down, to get dressed, to speak, to sing,
to dance, to look through everything. To awaken the invisible
(Monsalve 2010, p. 171).
For Hincapié, then, artistic practice immediately becomes a

guide to life, a way of inhabiting the world that becomes aware of a
body through which ideas and wills materialise:
I’m not interested in dead art. I think that life is art and my body
is my living art. My body is one that has to move, that is watch-
ing, that is tired, that is exhausted. This is my proposal (Serna
2010, p. 97).
For María Teresa Hincapié, the body is a sign4 that makes itself
present in a certain space and time, although it conjures up many other
places and times because there is an invisible dimension that connects
its matter with the entire universe. ‘Making’ art is the vehicle through
which one can connect holistically with the world. It thereby becomes a
corporeal ritual that makes itself present, that knows how to be, that is.

María Teresa Hincapié, Ondina (Undine),
dance version, 1986
Acto Latino and Álvaro Restrepo.
Teatro Colsubsidio, Bogotá, Colombia.
Photo: Ernesto Monsalve. Courtesy of
Santiago Zuluaga, Casas Riegner, Bogotá,
and 1 Mira Madrid, Madrid

María Teresa Hincapié, Tú eres santo (You
Are Holy) from the project Hacia Lo Sagrado
(Towards the Sacred), 1995
Photo: Óscar Monsalve, MAMBO Archive.
Courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno de
Bogotá, MAMBO, Bogotá

Performer with a capital letter is a man of action. He is not
somebody who plays another. He is a doer, a priest, a warri-
or. He is outside aesthetic genres. Ritual is performance, an
accomplished action, an act. Performer is a state of being. To
Performer, knowledge stands as duty and knowledge is a mat-
ter of doing (Grotowski 1992).
In her creative conception, Hincapié conceives her actions as

exercises – tools to better decipher the reality that surrounds her. In
fact, it was not until later, sometimes even to validate herself to the art
circuit itself, that she used the word ‘performance’, always accompa-
nied by an explanation that made it elastic and placed it in a space of
becoming:
I frequently insist on the need to work, not so much for the

work in itself as for the revelation involved in its process. Body,
time, space, action. These are important motivations in my
work: Una cosa es una cosa is a kind of distillation of this entire
process (Bernal de Herrera 2001).
This idea of training ultimately pinpoints something that is in

transition, developing, that never ends: ‘I believe in a mutant being, a
being that constantly changes.’5 The body configures the work itself,
determining and modifying it according to its relation with the moment
and the place through sensory skills. This constant changing explains
the fact that many of Hincapié’s works repeat the same actions and
continue to vary over time. Elements are added, or removed, or the ti-
tle changes, but follow similar patterns of movement. Constant muta-
tion is clearly opposed to the notion of permanence – a key concept for
art historiographies – and to producing some thing that remains.

I’m interested in making an art that cannot be photographed,
that cannot be recorded, that resists being consumed like all
the media products that globalization imposes on us every day.
I want to produce an image that remains in people’s minds
(Hincapié 2010, p. 12).
It is obviously necessary to rethink the lexicon we use when

looking at practices in hybrid categories, as the tools provided by muse-
um conservation and curatorial teams are castrating. We must turn im-
agination into political potential that, with its new formulas and gram-
mars, distils other ways of addressing such central issues as acquisition,
ownership, preservation and durability.
One of María Teresa Hincapié’s conceptual references was
Suzi Gablik, especially as regards the idea that art should follow an
ecological imperative and be a gateway to a revitalising spirituality.
Somehow, art should stand apart from social alienation and commod-
ification, becoming empathetic and generous. To give form to this de-
sire, Maria Teresa Hincapié wrote a quotation from US-American art
critic Lewis Hyde on the floor of the exhibition space for her piece Tu
eres santo:
A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. … every modern art-

ist who has chosen to labour with a gift must sooner or later
wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by
market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves,
how is the artist to nourish himself spiritually and materially, in
an age whose values are market values and whose commerce
exists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodi-
ties? (Hyde 2007)
In the practice of María Teresa Hincapié there is an explicit, per-

severing will not to produce; it is a constant strategy of resistance to

María Teresa Hincapié,Vitrina, 1989
Long-duration performance in commercial
premises in a building on Avenida Jiménez/
Carrera 4.a, Bogotá. Courtesy of Santiago
Zuluaga and Museo de Arte Moderno de
Bogotá, MAMBO, Bogotá

the commercial world that surrounds it. She imagines alternative values
to those of a society that has to generate products, where productivity
is the great social objective to the detriment of nature and the relation
that we human beings can have with it. In Hincapié, then, the perform-
ative permeates any creative act in the artist’s life: a pilgrimage to an-
other city, clearing a beach of plastics, sharing food with the Huichols,
inhabiting a museum, occupying a gallery for a ritual, being silent, read-
ing, cleaning, organizing – it cannot be reduced to a tangible object.
Indeed, the search for the sacred, as a metaphor for union with
the universe, is vital to understanding ‘the performative’ in Hincapié’s
practice. It is not insignificant that this allusion leads us once more to
her beginnings in the theatre world, and particularly to Grotowski,
whom she always followed very closely. As Daniel Fermani writes:
It is necessary to understand that Grotoswki was a man in

search of spirituality, and theatre had given him the possibility
of undertaking that search through the physical, through man’s
relationship first with the world, then with the other and with
himself. … This work therefore exceeds the limits of a theatri-
cal technique proper and immerses itself in the dense, personal,
almost mystical experience of a man who plunges into the in-
timate possibilities of the spirit by taking the path of the body.
Thanks to these conditions, that are almost a kind of mysticism,
it is paradoxical to call oneself a ‘follower’ of Grotowski, or to
speak of Grotowskian theatre, since a true follower of the Polish
master should be a spiritual seeker rather than a theatre artist.
(Fermani 2007)
This is a very close approximation to Hincapié’s 2004 definition

of ‘performance’: ‘What I call performance is a life experience that does
not necessarily have to be the protagonist of anything, that does not
have to become a spectacle. For me, performance is purer, it’s like what

God must see as an attitude, an inner attitude, of the human being, and
doesn’t need to say it … for me, they are silent acts of love’ (Bernal de
Herrera 2001).
How, then, to represent the creative practice, which out of con-
ceptual necessity is ephemeral, in an exhibition full of records (docu-
ments, personal archives, interviews, oral testimonies, recordings of
actions and photographs), while remaining faithful to the spirit of the
artist?
***My desire is to speak with you: the cognitive legacy
To represent this memory of the ephemeral and underline the inherent

political resistance of a voluntarily outdated practice, I borrow the defi-
nition of the term ‘exhibition’ that Mathieu Copeland offers in his essay
“Choreographing Exhibitions: An Exhibition Happening Everywhere, at
All Times, with and for Everyone”:6 ‘To consider the word “exhibition”,
and its French translation “exposition”, is to assert the possibility of
both an exhibition stripped bare of all content – as in exposed – and
the idea of an “ex-position” – a position that was, but is no more, that
moves on; a position that is yet to happen’ (Copeland 2017).
The curatorial approach of the exhibition, then, treats it as the
start of a continuum of imagination and making by means of records of
the practice of an artist who believed in the transmission of knowledge
as a mechanism for living together. These records comprise not only
those in the archive, but also future records constructed in the exhibi-
tion itself. All of them, whether archival or newly created, piece togeth-
er a dialogue that aims to be expansive, that seeks to reach the other
and so on in time.
This age requires us to turn our lives into works of art. … And to
speak of a ‘work of art’ in our times is highly debatable. My de-
sire is to speak with you (Monsalve 2010, p. 166).

María Teresa Hincapié on her property, La Fruta,
in Quebrada Valencia, Sierra de Santa Marta in
Colombia, starting work on her ‘Aldea School’ (Village)
project of experimental artist communities (c. 1997).
216 Courtesy of Santiago Zuluaga, Casas Riegner,
Bogotá, and 1 Mira Madrid, Madrid
Communication between different parties is essential to under-
standing the production of knowledge in the transfer of information,
and the exhibition sees orality as a strategy to preserve the ephemer-
al and other historiographies. In Phenomenology of Perception (2013),
Maurice Merleau-Ponty attributes a corporeal dimension to language.
For Merleau-Ponty, the word and, therefore, speech always happen not
only through but in the body, which is the source of communication.
In this proposal, then, the polyphony of voices (understanding voices
not only as the new works created specially for the exhibition but also
as the diverse, heterogeneous archive materials) is seen as the driving
force that generates knowledge and the key to access the performative
in making together and sharing collectively.
We have to return to a more humane, supportive community

world. We need to support each other. In La Sierra I think it is
possible to live in community. To regain peace, we have to learn
to renounce things, which is why I don’t want a business, I want
to be with beings who are willing to create a spiritual revolution
(Monsalve 2010, p. 168).
To clarify how we will deal with archival material in this exhibi-

tion, I borrow the words of Myriam Van Imschoot when she contrasts
Peggy Phelan and Rebecca Schneider’s theories on the performative:
Whereas Phelan prioritizes performance as disappearance, since

it happens once and only once before it enters the mnemonic
field of memory, Schneider speaks of performance as memory.
And rather than underscoring uniqueness, she points at body-
to-body transmissions and to the way they are deeply charac-
terized by a practice of repetition. In doing so, Schneider does
not so much want to escape the archive; rather, she seeks to
expand its scope, so as to emphasize the value not only of the

bones, but also of the flesh. Flesh – not as a passive matter, but
as a physicalized relational field of interaction, intensities, tech-
niques, histories, traces, and relicts of experienced information.
Flesh – with its own history and genealogy (Van Imschoot 2017).
The archive is, then, also woven of the very flesh that the body
presents. It enables a series of intertexts and connections that go be-
yond the expired temporality of a moment. Considering the exhibition
as a possible future allows the understanding of its forms to come,
thereby proclaiming its openness to a plurality of constantly mutating
voices. As Isidoro Valcárcel Medina said: ‘A work of art is only precise-
ly that when it generates other works of art…’7 This exhibition also
aims to be transitory: a platform structured by affects and the recogni-
tion that coexistence between pasts and what is still to be built can be
imagined. To bring it closer to the notion of home proposed by Suely
Rolnik:
To build an ‘at home’ nowadays depends on operations that are

rather inactive in modern Western subjectivity, but familiar to
the anthropophagous mode in its most active actualization: to
be in tune with the transfigurations within the body, resulting
from the new connections of flows; to surf the events that such
transfigurations trigger; to experience concrete arrangements
of existence that incarnate these palpable mutations; to invent
new life possibilities (Rolnik 1998, p. 137).
In conclusion, if we understand the Hincapié’s performative

practice from this perspective, then surely the transmission of knowing
and knowledge is the necessary seed for the performative to contin-
ue its articulation, whether in a home or in a school or in a way of liv-
ing together. For this reason, the exhibition “María Teresa Hincapié: If
This Were A Beginning of Infinity” aims to establish a knowledge base

on which to continue building and exploring not just the artist’s prac-
tice, but also the understanding of and the nuances inherent in the
performative.
ENDNOTES
1 “María Teresa Hincapié: If This Were A Beginning of Infinity”, exhibition

co-curated by Claudia Segura (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain) and Emiliano Valdés
(MAMM, Medellín, Colombia) from 16 March to 12 June 2022 at the MAMM
and from 20 October 2022 to 26 February 2023 at the MACBA.
2 Acto Latino was directed by Juan Monsalve from 1967 to 1989.
3 The International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) was founded in
1979 by Eugenio Barba and is based in Holstebro (Denmark). This multicul-
tural network of artists and experts gives life to an itinerant university and
its main field of study is theatre anthropology, researching the fundamental
principles that generate the actor/dancer’s ‘presence’ or ‘scenic life’. It is an
interdisciplinary group, its principles based on an analysis of different theat-
rical forms from the most diverse traditions, Eastern as well as Western, an-
cient as well as contemporary, that focus on the way the actor handles their
body.
4 María Teresa Hincapié, “El objeto como signo. El cuerpo como signo” on
the work Punto de fuga, Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Bogotá, 1989.
5 Interview with María Teresa Hincapié, 1990 – Una cosa es una cosa,
Colcultura video.
6 Mathieu Copeland, Coreografiar exposiciones, Oficina de Cultura y Turismo –
Dirección General de Promoción Cultural de la Comunidad de Madrid on the
occasion of the exhibition “Una exposición coreografiada” presented at the
Centro Arte Dos de Mayo, CA2M, 2017.
7 Interview with Isidoro Valcárcel Medina by Maite Garbayo in the publication
for the exhibition “Antes que todo” curated by Aimar Arriola and Manuela
Moscoso, at the CA2M, 2010.

REFERENCE LIST
Bernal de Herrera, M. 2001, El anzuelo y el salmón. María Teresa Hincapié:

“Caminar hacia lo sagrado”, unpublished Master’s thesis, Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, Arts Faculty, Bogotá campus.
Copeland, M. 2017, Coreografiar exposiciones, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo,
Móstoles.
Fermani, D. 2007, “El teatro como vehículo en Grotowski”, La Vorágine Revista
de Crítica Cultural y Teoría Teatral, no. 11.
Grotowski, J. 1992, “El Performer”, Revista Máscara, vol. 3, nos. 11–12.
Grotowski, J. 2002, Towards A Poor Theatre, Routledge, New York City.
Hincapié, M.T. 2010, “El espacio se mueve despacio”, in J. Serna, N. Gómez and
F. González (eds), Elemental, vida y obra de María Teresa Hincapié, Laguna
Libros, Bogotá.
Gablik, S. 1985, Has Modernism Failed?, Thames and Hudson, London.
Hyde, L. 2007, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Vintage,
New York City.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2013, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, New York City.
Monsalve, J. 2010, “Mi deseo es hablar contigo”, in J. Serna, N. Gómez, and
F. González (eds.), Elemental, vida y obra de María Teresa Hincapié, Laguna
Libros, Bogotá.
Palladini, G. 2019, “On Coexisting, Mending and Imagining: Notes on the
Domestic of Performance”, in A. Vujanovic and LA. Piazza (eds), A Live
Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, B-Books Verlag,
Berlin.
Rolnik, S. 1998, “Anthropophagic Subjectivity”, in Arte Contemporânea Brasileira:
Um e/entre Outro/s, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo.
Serna, J. 2010, “Hacia lo sagrado”, in J. Serna, N. Gómez and F. González (eds),
Elemental, vida y obra de María Teresa Hincapié, Laguna Libros, Bogotá.
Van Imschoot, M. 2017, “Rests in Pieces: On Scores, Notation and Trace in
Dance”, in M. Copeland (ed.), Coreografiar exposiciones, Centro Arte Dos de
Mayo, Móstoles.

WHAT
A MUSEUM
CAN (NOT) DO
Performing collective
methodologies with Circo
Interior Bruto
Myriam Rubio
222
How do we recall things? How do we remember signs of
affection?
Do what has never been done, do what doesn’t know how to
be done.
Yes, but in company; alone it’s more difficult.
The first net is in place: what matters is collective action.
How we face the absence of the other in a community of affec-
tions, how we bear this pain. We humans are always making nets,
we always work with nets, because otherwise, the pain is unbear-
able. If you fall to the ground and don’t have a net, we know what
happens. This net allows us to bear what we have lived.
The second net, superposed on the first: the archive.
The archive allows us to bear the past. The obvious allows us to
see things face to face: this is supported thanks to a support,
and the support allows you to support it, it’s that elementary,
what’s to be done.
These words are taken from Jaime Vallaure’s performance about

The Past at the third in-house congress of the artist collective Circo
Interior Bruto (CIB, Madrid, 1999). We had invited this collective to
form part of the exhibition “Action: A Provisional History of the 90s”
(MACBA, July 2020 – February 2021), comprising mainly documentary
223 What a Museum Can (Not) Do...

Presentation of Circo Interior Bruto, June 1999.
Courtesy of Circo Interior Bruto

archives, photography and video. The exhibition historicises a gener-
ation of artists who, in the early 1990s, recovered the action practices
begun in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s.
In response to the invitation, CIB initally suggested publishing a
book to document its track record. A book, it was argued, could func-
tion as a portable, permanent, accessible, handleable pocket file device.
Moreover, the collective realised that a documentary exhibition would
distort and aestheticise its past work in a specific time and space. But at
the museum’s insistence, the group proposed El Futuro (The Future) as
an alternative, an eight-month-long project in which, as a case study, it
would present its methodology of collective creation.
The project staged the construction of the artistic experience –
usually hidden in the workshop – framing this process as a challenge
to the artist. It thus made uncoded, fugitive ways of living available to
the observer, in the sense of Barthes’ concept of idiorhythmia (Lepecki
2018, p. 15). Play, decision-making, complicities, error, desires, contra-
dictions – all these form part of the common learning process.
The short quote that begins Vallaure’s reflection on the CIB’s
past outlines relevant aspects developed in this text, which observes
the singularity of this group of artists to draw some useful conclusions
from its performative practice and collective methodology.
So, according to the CIB, how do we recall things? How do we
remember signs of affection?
The CIB’s practice is set in a tradition of artistic attitudes that,
throughout the twentieth century, has to varying degrees resisted
being ‘collected’ by the museum. As Vallaure indicates, this resist-
ance has offered a springboard for Institutional Critique since the
1960s. It has enabled a face-to-face confrontation with the muse-
um’s conflictual role as preserver of those other practices focuses on
the process of creation and the collective life experience. It also per-
mits other temporalities that go beyond the idea of useful, finished
form. This is an old dilemma: we need a device to support memory,

Third congress of the CIB. In the image,
Teresa del Pozo, Paula Morón and Belen Cueto.
Courtesy of Myriam Rubio

the net beneath the trapeze artist in the circus. Indeed, the collec-
tion department’s function is to find the metric fit that enables these
attitudes to form part of its museum’s logic. As a preservation ma-
chine, it investigates methods for ordering temporary works, the ar-
chive and documentation and the possible protocols of reactivation.
Stubbornly, however, some artists’ works insist on occupy a space of
discomfort as their proper ‘place’. But why do they decide to position
themselves on that fringe?
This question has no single answer. Jimmie Durham sees
this as false problem, as something possibly lost in translation, a
short-sightedness in the Western vision of the universal: ‘On a broad-
er level, it seems a naiveté to me that so many Europeans assume
that their languages adequately explain or reflect the world. It is
a kind of denial of history, also; especially with words like “art”’
(Durham 2015, p. 252). I recall an email exchange between the
Argentinian Colectivo Etcétera and Chilean researcher and artist
Nancy Garín, which brought up some other nuances. Garín recom-
mends situating oneself in the flight from work to doing1. ‘The muse-
um that allows itself the desire to preserve certain practices linked
to the body, time and the immaterial should introduce the idea of in-
discipline into its structure. A way of making that is inherent to these
practices, in constant flight from the normative frameworks of the
disciplines in the visual arts.’ Etcétera, meanwhile, points out that
there is an intention behind that which defines itself as performance
in terms of discipline. We don’t do that. In terms of discipline we de-
fine ourselves as artists. But we work using many other disciplines:
music, theatre, poetry. For us, performance is a language and a tool,
not a discipline. It is important to realise that it is as precarious as po-
etry, for example, but even more complex, because it does not find a
place.
The exhibition set out to find a place in the museum for collec-
tive, performance-based works like CIB’s, drawing reference to Jonah

Westerman’s premises: ‘Performance is not a form unto itself, a spe-
cial and different kind of art that must be isolated or quarantined but
is instead an integral and crucial component of contemporary art his-
tory.’ In other words, as a practice performance exceeds its own defi-
nition (‘any one form or mode of production’) and looks at art’s rela-
tionship to audiences and to the social world at large, as well as the
way in which ‘we comprehend and exhibit the history of contemporary
art’ (Westerman 2016). With this in mind, the question moves from ar-
tistic practice towards the limits that define what a museum can (not)
do. The museum needs to be transformed to adopt that which is left
out: works that do not meet the requisites, which do not occupy or fit,
which have no body because they are multiple, which do not have a
place. An undisciplined knowledge: ‘That which has never been done,
does not know how to be done.’ A circus, for example.
Expanding the language of the museum enables space for un-
disciplined works. Instead of ‘purchase’ or ‘collect’, for example, one
can use the verb ‘adopt’, a term that contains the idea of care, the
sum of different knowledge, accepting that which is foreign. It pre-
supposes not a previous temporality, but a link. It conceives of linking
a disappearing work to the history of the institution. Finally, it sparks
thinking about archive curation not just through the items an archive
contains but also through the works that have affected it – as often
happens with family trees or with chosen families. A proposal to see
the collection as a community.
The Circus As Method
The model of the circus was – is – an extremely rich reference

for rethinking performative wandering; for creating an easily
moveable collective structure that makes it easier to combine
efforts and interests. A structure that keeps alive the idiosyncra-
sy of each of its components and in which, at the same time, the

Circo Interior Bruto, The Creation of the World
in Eleven Shows: Camping at 300 Metres:
The Holidays. Courtesy of Circo Interior Bruto

sum of them constitutes a unity of a higher order. A circus is at
once the trapeze artist and the big top, the lion and the wagons,
the individual and the collective (Vallaure 2006).
In 1999, after other collective experiences, a dozen artists set up Circo

Interior Bruto in a rented space in the Lavapiés district of Madrid to pur-
sue artistic research. The name is a play on PIB (Producto Interno Bruto,
the Spanish acronym for Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) and could be
translated as Gross Inner Circus. The collective is currently made up of
Jesús Acevedo, Belén Cueto, Marta de Gonzalo, Rafael Lamata, Publio
Pérez Prieto, Rafael Suárez, Jaime Vallaure and François Wimberg.
Previously it also included Paula Morón, Luis Naranjo, Eduardo Navarro,
Kamen Nedev and the ever-present Teresa del Pozo.
This generation of artists is part of the tradition of Institutional
Critique. The art-historical thread of its work weaves together Dadaist
parties and Cabaret Voltaire with absurd humour and the aphoristic
greguería. It also touches upon the methodologies of the Bauhaus,
the affiliation of Oskar Schlemmer and Fluxus with conceptual art. It
combines Situationist drift and Lettrism with the playful approach of
Robert Filliou, the pedagogical practices of Beuys with the call for a
process-based art that extends to the body through dance and to video
through experimental film.
The particularity of their practice derives from three main de-
cisions. The first was to adopt a position on the fringes of the artistic,
creating a balance between the formats of popular culture and the ref-
erences of contemporary art, with an alert attitude to any gesture that
could be co-opted by high culture.
The second was to centralise research and the process as ob-
jects in themselves – artistic experiences in which ‘the process of doing’
and ‘doing with others’ acquire their ultimate meaning. Though antago-
nistic in form and tone, Jorge Oteiza’s conceptual approach offers one
frame of reference in the recent historical context: his writing, his

experimental laboratory as methodology, along with his ethical posi-
tion, withdrawing from the art scene in 1959 to continue with other po-
etic, pedagogical and social pursuits. In the first decades of the twen-
ty-first century, the CIB explored this path intensely, integrating re-
search as a fundamental part of its artistic projects and attributing oth-
er roles to artists such as educator, mediator and curator.
The third decision was to characterise the work of collective au-
thorship as an artistic project. Here are some personal notes about the
CIB’s method, written during preparatory meetings:
A work system in permanent crisis. Being in balance. Being avail-

able, to art, to conceptual love. A vertiginous way of working, to
the limits. No conditions. Situating oneself in rehearsal time as
work. Economy of means. A stage structure that is possible be-
cause everything is self-managed. Scene-changing movements
as action. Affective role relationships, like in a big family: yield-
ing as a methodology, giving up perfection to obtain harmony.
You’ll never manage it on your own.
In its first stage, from 1999 to 2005, the CIB developed a work-
ing methodology with the aim of maturing into a coherent collective.
In those six years, CIB’s activity was organised into three main the-
matic blocks. The first, La creación del mundo en once funciones (The
Creation of the World in Eleven Shows, 1999–2001), consisted of eleven
independent works addressing human social organisation in the cos-
mos (Vallaure 2006).2 The second block, Mercado de futuros (Futures
Market, 2002), accentuated the experimental nature of the staging. The
research concentrated on the idea of reality and its repercussions for
human beings. For this purpose, the collective chose four apparently
low-value, everyday formats: bingo as a system of chance, the techno-
logical conference, the rock/pop concert and the end-of-term school
play. A second congress was organised, in which exhaustion and

The Creation of the World in Eleven Shows:
The Andromeda Strain I. Atmospheric Phenomena,
Cabanyal-Canyamelar, Valencia, 11 December 1999.
The Creation of
the World in Eleven
Shows: Camping
at 300 Metres: The
Holidays, May 2000.
Courtesy of Circo
Interior Bruto
Circo Interior Bruto, Future Market 1/4: I Don't
Understand Anything: Bingo, January 2002.

disparity of criteria caused some members to leave the group. Finally,
the third block thematised trust, a decisive factor for the collective. The
structure was supported by a third conceptual scaffolding: La triología
de la revolución (The Triology of Revolution, 2005), a concept which, in
members’ own words, ‘allowed them to reflect on the impossible with
the energy required to build a barricade’. The revolution was left with
just two parts when the group silently dissolved after six years of con-
tinuous work.
Between each block, there was a period of reflection in the form
of an in-house congress. These allowed the members, using a system
of experimental presentations, to analyse the current situation and the
future of the group. Indeed, the collective prioritised a horizontal struc-
ture with no assigned roles and an equitable distribution of creation,
organisation and maintenance duties. Initially, collective work was the
sum of individual and group work, approved and ratified at the perma-
nent assembly. However, with time, the assembly developed into an au-
tonomous, organic entity, ‘something that escapes, unique, unrepeat-
able, something born of control yet absolutely uncontrolled’ (Vallaure
2006). In this sense, perhaps the most subversive aspect of CIB’s organ-
isation is the continuous containment of individual egos.
In the words of one of its members, Belén Cueto, ‘The CIB was
a place of personal, creative and political dissidence.’ Each investiga-
tion began with an experimental approach to social and conceptual
issues. Research in the workshop or laboratory lasted approximately
two months. Normally, the process ended with a single presentation or
‘show’ synthesising the laboratory work, incorporating performance,
paratheatre, absurd humour, visual-phonetic poetry and play. Each
presentation was attended by 100 ‘observers’. There was no rehearsal,
so there was no repeat.
A small community of dozens of people attended the shows in
the workshop. Thereafter, memory began to take shape – the I-was-
there, the blurred photos, the fragmented memory of the members

The Creation of the World in Eleven Shows, stage
for National Geographic: Homeland, November
2000. Courtesy of Circo Interior Bruto
Wall of the MACBA after Belen Cueto’s activation

carried out by the accomplices, November 2020.
235 Courtesy of Myriam Rubio
and the large audience that affectively accompanied the project. The
rumour.
The Future
A rumour that persists. After a break of ten years, the collective met
again in 2017. Without a workshop, they adapted Prometeo encadena-
do (Prometheus Bound, 2017) and Así habló Zaratrustra (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, 2018) to stage spaces.
The MACBA’s invitation was titled El futuro (The Future, 2020–
21). The project repeated the CIB’s methodology and began with a peri-
od of preparation, from July to September, due to the outbreak of the
COVID-19 pandemic. The circular space that housed it contained the ba-
sic structures of the circus: the original workshop’s blue-painted walls,
a habitable model with symbolic objects, a gas cylinder, a swing, an
empty stand occupying the place of the audience and a large projection
of a series of video pieces documenting the group’s in-house meetings
to discuss the project’s pros and cons.
The almost empty space was the product of sedimentation of
the relationships that accumulated and transformed within it. As such,
it acquired content depending on the internal conditions to which it
was subjected. Such conditions adapt to COVID-19 guidelines: cancel-
lations and little probability of travelling, touching, hugging or kissing
other non-cohabiting bodies.
September saw the third in-house congress (19–20 September
2020), which was the only presence-based event and became the
driving force of the project. Starting with questions about memory,
the group began to review what was essential to its practice to de-
termine an appropriate form to exhibit itself in the museum and to
move towards the future. It used performance to disrupt collective
thinking much like a conversation, based on exchange and the sum
of the multiple partial and subjective elaborations of other group

The gallery at the start and end of the third congress,
19–20 September 2020. Courtesy of Myriam Rubio

Laboratory: exercises
of the accomplices in
the activations of Marta
Gonzalo and Publio Pérez
Prieto, and Belen Cueto,
October and November
2020. Courtesy of
Myriam Rubio

members. Each member gave two presentations; sixteen hours of
listening occurred over two days. The performative congress was
theorised as a device, opposed to the documentary exhibition of the
archive. Oral presentation became a means for building historiogra-
phy – orality as memory, but expanded orality, memory by sedimen-
tation, like a beach.
Thus, the gallery became a creation lab until December 2020.
Then came the second wave of COVID-19. It was decided to acti-
vate the gallery by means of remote encounters, using projections
on the wall screen. An artist activated it by Zoom from another city,
but lacked an audience. It was then decided to form a mirror group
in the exhibition gallery, made up of young artists who had been
working in the museum prior to the pandemic. This vitally important
group, entrusted with carrying out different exercises and reflections
in the exhibition space, gradually became known as Los Cómplices
(The Accomplices). The name drew on an idea of complicity that Gesa
Ziemer understands as the ‘quality of doing with’ (Mittäterschaft), and
which defined in criminal law as participation in any of ‘an act’s three
steps of resolution, planning and execution’ (Ziemer 2012).
This ‘complicity’ created an intergenerational space of enor-
mous generosity and exchange of knowledge between the artists. It
added new live content in galleries with videos recorded by a webcam
acting as a space-time connector. In some cases, the accomplices acted
as remote members of the circus, contributing their particular skills and
playing with the established rules. In others, a member of the circus
unilaterally decided, in an anti-art gesture, to remove all the remaining
previous interventions and leave the gallery empty again.3 All decisions
and their consequences – some, like this last, difficult for the institu-
tion to absorb – were respected as the sum of the collective experi-
ence. The final show, El futuro (The Future), consisted of a web series
in which each of the eight chapters reflected on what had happened
during those months. The first chapter of the series, El trabajo colectivo

Laboratory: the activations of Fran Winberg and
Jaime Vallaure, November and December 2020.

(Collective Work), includes material from all the activations carried out
with the accomplices.4
Collective Work
Collective work is ideological work in the world of art and in the

normal world outside of art. Our economic, social and political
system is not interested in the slightest. When we created the
CIB we were interested in the creative capacity and the surprise
and enthusiasm of dealing with expressive challenges. That was
before. That no longer exists. Now, it’s something else. But some
ideas from then may be useful now, even if only not to repeat
them. Or to understand the value of dialogue. Or to question the
different forms of ego that dominate us and to continue investi-
gating human creativity. This is very necessary. … And to think
about what we have in mind for constructing our next show.
Excerpt from the performative presentation by Rafael Lamata
about El pasado (The Past, 19 September 2020).5
In the 1990s, in the Spanish historical context, performance

emerged as a practice that intervened directly in contemporary criti-
cism of the commodification of art and the structures that make daily
life precarious. It developed from artists’ critical reflections on the is-
sues precipitating the formalisation of their work, such as market re-
lationships, the work’s conceptual inseparability from social class con-
sciousness and the artist’s personal response to both. These issues, ex-
acerbated by the neoliberal economic policies of the latter decades of
the twentieth century, affect the attainable visibility for certain works
in the art market and in institutions. Accordingly, they touch on issues
that are key to living today more generally.
In this context, what is the relevance of artists working collec-
tively – that is, accepting collective authorship for the ethical,

Rafael Lamata’s performative talk
about The Past, 19 September 2020.
242
conceptual and formal decisions about the production and presenta-
tion of a project?
In her text “Collectivity? You Mean Collaboration”, Bojana Cvejić
contrasts the word ‘collaboration’, often used today in the fields of
dance and performance, with the word ‘collective’, regarded in many
settings as negative and obsolete (2005). Cvejić ironically asserts that
‘we should thank historical collectives from the sixties for providing
food for liberal individualism today.’ She refers to the failed politics of
emancipation of the collective in theatrical and performative practices
in the 1960s as a form of depoliticised libertarian thought. Then as now,
the abstract idea of individual freedom prevails, embraced by the au-
thor-artist at the expense of collective work. The discomfort surround-
ing the term collectivity is, then, another symptom of the politics of ne-
oliberal individualism in the arts.
In reflecting more deeply on the idea of the collective in art, one
can draw on Richard Sennett’s work on the social and political history
of forms of production in the figure of the artisan. Sennett argues that
the craftsman’s knowledge, autonomy and slow production time con-
stitute a practice that promotes democratic attitudes (Sennett 2009).
These ‘lie in the capacities on which human beings draw to develop
skills: the universality of play, the basic capabilities to specify, question
and open up. These are widely diffused among human beings rather
than restricted to an elite’ (Sennett 2009). In point of fact, the CIB’s
members, most with further artistic training, were working full-time
in other jobs. As a habit, they would go to the workshop after work
to engage in doing things together over six years, the time it takes a
craftsman to perfect a skill. Their experiment was put on hold as new
life commitments emerged – their first children. But when the children
were older, they convened once more. At that time, many continued
with other artistic work as well.
The irresolvable questions about art in a context of modernity
are still linked to the artists’ stance on the concept of work. In the case

of the CIB, separating paid employment and art was, of course, neces-
sary to pay the bills, but it was also a deliberate ethical choice. The idea
of the non-productive reconciled the material conditions of their work –
ephemeral, immaterial, with no remains – and their ethical stance on
the market and on life. What emerges is an ecological way of viewing
the relationship between lack and want: a balance between the deter-
mination to not increase and the need to maintain a degree of produc-
tive activity.
To this effect, I cite a recent interview in which Franco ‘Bifo’
Berardi introduces the concept of the frugal: ‘When we started to de-
fine reality as an exchange value rather than a use value, we started on
the road to capitalism, inequity and poverty. Frugal means that pleas-
ure lies not in accumulation but in the time of enjoyment’ (Berardi
2022). In turn, the notion of the frugal links some of the force fields of
art and activism of the 1990s with the urgencies highlighted during the
pandemic – the interdependent, ecofeminist ‘good life’ and the shrink-
ing economies necessary for a post-capitalist world.
Sennett, moreover, refers to Plato’s concept of the artisan,
which comes from the root poiein, or making, with the addition of
arete, or excellence or virtue. Thus, the craftsman embodies the spe-
cifically human condition of commitment to the past and the present,
by doing his job well for the simple purpose of doing it well (Sennett
2009). Craftsmanship, as formulated in classical texts, unites skill with
community. When the CIB was set up, it was out of the desire to oc-
cupy the workshop. A place – what performance lacks in the muse-
um – is the centripetal force of the community. Sennett regards the
workshop as a social institution, the place of specialised work, like
the scientific laboratory. The social history of craft workshops illus-
trates the effort to resolve ‘the modern, perhaps unresolvable con-
flict between autonomy and authority’. For the author, in the labo-
ratory, as in the circus, ‘inequalities of skill and experience become
face-to-face issues’ (Bojana Cvejić 2005).

Workshop of the CIB, 1999–2005.
Model of the workshop

after Rafael Suarez’s
activation at the MACBA
exhibition, December
2020. Courtesy of
Myriam Rubio
245
In this vein, the CIB stands out for its autonomy in economic
exchange. They charge for time invested, for the result of the work,
but not for the sale of objects derived from their performance. In oth-
er words, they uses non-speculative economic models. In the work-
shop, the shows had an admission price, and a bar was set up to defray
the costs of rent and materials. Meanwhile, the museum established
production budget and fees for the activation and the final show, in-
spired by the economic parameters of theatres and subject to collective
agreements. This arrangement emerged not because it is stage work,
but because of the precarious working conditions of the individual art-
ists due to their lack of economic autonomy. From this perspective, col-
lective authorship and its relationship with work, as in the guilds, takes
on a new meaning today.
At the end of her text, Bojana Cvejić lists some of the necessary
conditions for collective artistic work to remain critically relevant. She
raises various issues, such as the interaction that results from working
outside market requirements; equal authorship in a work’s content,
framework, production and presentation; the relevance of the number
of artists in a collective, since it increases the complexity of the inter-
actions; that ‘taking-place’ means contact with the heterogeneity and
singularity of the participants rather than the homogenisation of the
author; that the museum institution should offer these artists space for
production and experimentation as opposed to presentation.
Finally, for the utopian collective that Cvejić envisions, she
makes the following observations:
Perhaps, redefining the ‘working-with’ frame, taking this condi-

tion rather than the autonomous self-validating concepts by in-
dividual author, has the power of becoming a starting point for
experimental collaboration – a collaboration between authors.
One thinks that such collectivity would better be called collec-
tion, if it is defined by a ‘number of working-with-one-another

ones without an essence’. A question would be how a collec-
tion of authors-performers without one author-initiator comes
together. It’s not merely a technical question, as it puts forward
a more important concern. What might be worth doing togeth-
er in dance and performance vis-à-vis society today? (Bojana
Cvejić 2005).
The CIB embodied this vision in the late 1990s. For this reason,
CIB is one of a kind: in its work disguised as anachronism, as expert ar-
tisans of being together. Its methodological proposal, unattainable and
yet contingent, is still valid, especially in its careful disregard for art,
which allows it to disregard the role of the artist and the art market,
but not the consciousness between the two. Working artists – by day
teachers, civil servants, chefs, designers – seasonally, until they disap-
pear, to return.
This text is written in what was, then, a future, turned into an-
other present that passes – subject to indeterminacy. Welcome to the
circus.
ENDNOTES
1 This is an idea taken from the catalogue of the exhibition “Pasos para huir
del trabajo al hacer. Interzona”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Germany), 2004,
p. 3. http://www.deartesypasiones.com.ar/03/doctrans/trabajo%204.pdf:
‘“La fuga del trabajo al hacer/The flight from work to doing” is a terminology
that comes from John Holloway, a Scottish theoretician based in Mexico. It
means, firstly, the flight of capital ... the disappearance of labour in its tradi-
tional model of generating value and surplus value. ... But, as paradoxical as
this may sound, “fleeing from labour to action” implies the need for new and
different forms of social articulation. In this sense, the escape from tradition-
al labour can materialise in searches that free up a creative potential, which,

further, can also be reversed in an artistic production that is outside the insti-
tutions and the market.’
2 A note on La creación del mundo en once funciones: ‘It starts out from noth-
ing to eventually reach a utopian world, the circus universe, a meta-refer-
ential space where the inner circus and the official circus combine their ob-
verse and reverse. Along the way, they have reflected on the appearance of
objects, on the relationship with the other, on sex, politics, social problems,
cleaning and holidays. In an attempt to analyse increasingly complex environ-
ments, the circus explores stagings that are substantially different from each
other. There is an urge to start from scratch in the transition from one proj-
ect to another, which sometimes means moving between extremes.’
3 Excerpt from the letter from Rafael Suarez to the other members, December
2020: ‘For the general theme we’re working on (the future), I wanted to in-
clude in the general process the idea of the accident, the unexpected, even
the cataclysm, the empty board, the erased hard drive. An event that wipes
the past clean, submerged Atlantis. And from here on … I trust that what
can, apparently, be interpreted as a deactivation of space, thanks to the loop
of our logics, will become another model of activation.
I think that in the phase of the process in which we find ourselves,
we need a revulsive to reactivate us. I may have been wrong, but I think
sometimes it’s good to do the acrobatics without the net.
I’m also confident that this action can help to draw us together in the work
process and activate communication. Hugs to all, I love you all very much.’
4 Chapter 1 of the series El futuro. El trabajo colectivo (The Future. Collective
Work) https://futurocib.blogspot.com/2021/02/capitulo-1-el-trabajo-colectivo.
html.
5 Third in-house congress of the CIB. https://www.macba.cat/es/
exposiciones-actividades/actividades/congreso-circo-interior-bruto
CIB blog at https://futurocib.blogspot.com/.

REFERENCE LIST
Cvejić, B. 2005, “Collectivity? You Mean Collaboration”, in Republicart: Artists as

Producers (website), https://transversal.at/transversal/1204/cvejic/en.
Durham, J. 2014, Waiting to Be Interrupted: Selected Writings, 1993–2012, Mousse
Publishing, Milan.
Lepecki, A. 2018, Idiorítmia o en l’esdeveniment d’una trobada, Arcadia, MACBA,
Barcelona.
Sennett, R. 2009, The Craftsman, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Tomás, N. 2022, “Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: ‘No Podemos negar que España es hoy el
país más civilizado de Europa”, El Diario, February 16, https://www.eldiario.
es/catalunya/cultura/franco-bifo-berardi-no-negar-espana-hoy-pais-civiliza-
do-europa_128_8750958.html.
Vallaure, J. 2006, “CIB: de la carpa mental al teatro nacional”, unpublished
lecture.
Westerman, J. 2016, “Project Overview”, in Performance at Tate: Into the Space
of Art, Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London.
Ziemer, G. 2012, “Komplizenschaft: Eine kollektive Kunst- und Alltagspraxis”, in
R. Mader (ed.), Kollektive Autorschaft in der Kunst: Alternatives Handeln und
Denkmodell, Peter Lang, Bern.

VARIATION
ON THE
UNACCOUNTED:
A TRIPTYCH,
BY
MAPA TEATRO
José A. Sánchez
250
Die un- / The un- /
bestatteten, un gezählt, droben, buried, unaccounted, up there,
die Kinder, the children,
sind absprungbereit. are ready to jump.
– Paul Celan (1999, p. 244)
Unaccounted, or incontados, does not exist as a noun in Spanish. And

its very inexistence performatively reflects not only the absence of the
disappeared and murdered, but also the silence of witnesses and sur-
vivors, the victims that cannot be accounted for, who were never giv-
en a voice to tell their story. ‘The Unaccounted’ expresses the difficulty
of representing violence, while also denouncing the reasons for which
certain facts are declared irrepresentable, thus justifying censorship or
waiving the responsibility of representation.
Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden rose to the challenge, as artists, tak-
ing on the role of active witnesses of conflict (Celan 1999, p. 235). In
the Anatomy of Violence trilogy, paramilitary violence, narco violence
and guerrilla violence were poetically confronted in three successive
performances: The Holy Innocents (2010), Discourse of a Decent Man
(2012) and The Farewell (2017). The idea was to chart an historic period
that roughly coincided with the biographic timeline of the Mapa Teatro
251 Variation on The Unaccounted: A Triptych...

founders. Hence, it comes as no surprise that The Holy Innocents super-
imposes the birthday celebration of Heidi Abderhalden (as a watching
body) on the carnivalesque delirium of the dancing bodies in Guapi. And
that The Unaccounted: A Triptych, a synthesis of the trilogy, begins with
a tableau vivant that reinterprets A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in
October 1947 (1990), by Jeff Wall.
Variation on The Unaccounted: A Triptych was presented in
the Pavilion of the 31st São Paulo Biennial in September 2014 and ac-
quired by the Reina Sofía Museum. It translates the staged work The
Unaccounted: A Triptych, first performed at the Festival Iberoamericano
de Teatro de Bogotá in April of 2014 in the home of Mapa Teatro, into in-
stallation. The staged work lasts approximately an hour and includes five
actors, a magician, three musicians and eight children from a school in
Bogotá. Structurally, the installation is almost identical to the staging of
the piece, while on the inside the children are replaced with automatons
and the actions of actors and guests are replaced with mechanical devic-
es to create a unique and complex Baroque magic box that includes vid-
eo screenings, sound and a music band, lighting and smoke; it is made
up of three wooden cubes (as well as the one reserved for spectators),
which in turn contain three spaces, one for each part of the trilogy, now
transformed into visible plastic layers: the house, the street, the jungle.
When presenting this Variation as part of the exhibition titled
“Apparatus 92: Can History Be Rewound?”, from the Reina Sofía Mu-
seum’s permanent collection, we asked ourselves how to emphasise the
dual nature of the work and therefore the memory of the live event.
The Fiesta
Tell him not to make any noise. … To stand firm in the face of
the enemy and not to move. Tell him that if he doesn’t move,
they’ll disappear by magic. And to be cheerful. Because the rev-
olution is a fiesta. …

Jeff Wall, A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in
October 1947, 1990, transparency in lightbox,
229 × 352.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Mapa Teatro, The Unaccounted: A Triptych.
Bogotá, 2014. Courtesy of Mapa Teatro

These are the words heard in the first part of The Unaccounted,
emerging through the smoke and the tricks performed by the magician
(who replaces the ventriloquist) for the expectant children who make
up the ‘war band’ (frequent in the working-class schools of Colombia).
The voice represents that of Camilo Torres Restrepo (1929–1966), a
priest who championed the best option for the poor, by “Liberation
Theology”, who took part in the foundation of the Frente Unido del
Pueblo and died in his first military action against the army in 1966, the
same year the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was
created. At this time, the choice of violence to destabilise power and
aspire to social justice was enjoying newfound justification in the anti-
colonial fight, supported by the recent Cuban revolution. The guerrilla
fiesta lasted over fifty years and this first part is dedicated to it, the part
that unfolds in the house and is subsequently further elaborated in The
Farewell.1
The second fiesta refers to the celebration of a peculiar carni-
val held every 28 December (the feast of the Holy Innocents) in Guapi,
an essentially Afro-Colombian town located close to the Pacific Ocean.
On this day, the young men dress up as women and hide behind rubber
masks to go out onto the streets and whip their neighbours in memo-
ry of the punishment doled out in times of slavery – a ritual that sub-
verts racial and class domination, gender identity and religious belief.
Superimposed over this remembrance of violence is the most recent
outbreak triggered by the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, a paramil-
itary group created in the early 1980s (with the tolerance or connivance
of the state) to illegally fight the guerrillas who, like the latter, turned
to drug trafficking for financing. Evil is singled out in the figure of HH,
‘Hernán Hernández’, ‘El Mono Veloza’, active from the mid-1990s, who
has confessed to committing over 3,000 crimes, many against farmers,
indigenous people, trade unionists and community leaders.
The alias patrón del mal (master of evil), however, is reserved
for Pablo Escobar, the most celebrated drug trafficking boss, who

256
257
258
went so far as to become a senator and even dreamed of being pres-
ident of the republic. His intended inauguration ‘speech’, supposedly
found in his shirt pocket when he was riddled with bullets on a roof-
top in Medellín in 1993, provides the title of the trilogy’s second part,
set in the third space of the installation, dominated by tropical vegeta-
tion. The elaboration of the discourse shows clear use of the ‘ethno-fic-
tion’ resource, central to the latest projects by Mapa.2 The fiesta (which
could equally be a birthday) is reminiscent of the celebrations organ-
ised by Escobar in Hacienda Nápoles, his luxurious pad spread over
3,000 hectares in Puerto Triunfo, a municipality of Antioquia. At this fi-
esta the coca plant is a living character, natural and poor, demanding its
rights from those who profit from trafficking and corruption at the ex-
pense of so many deaths.
As per usual at parties, there is music; it is provided by Danilo
Jiménez, the leader of a band that survived a failed attempt on
Escobar’s life, but in which his wife died and he lost his hearing, in ad-
dition to other serious injuries. In The Holy Innocents, it was provided
by Don Genaro, a marimba player who is both musician and witness.
There is no music in the first space, just voices, and magic, performed
by Santiago Nemirowski (a figure reminiscent of Rolf and Heidi’s friend,
Hernando Pizarro Leongómez, who led a secret life as commander of
the National Liberation Army, ELN. And like in all parties, there are also
guests: the children and ghosts of the past from the first space, the
celebrants of the Guapi ritual (visible only in the video) and Jeihhco
Caminante, a rapper from Medellín who founded the hip-hop group
La Élite in 2002 to promote a culture of peace and non-violence. They
all share the space with the figures created by the actors, who em-
body the fun and occasionally humourous dimension: Heidi as a coca
plant and playing herself, Agnes Brekke as a TV presenter (in reference
to Virginia Vallejo, Escobar’s lover), Santiago Sepúlveda and Andrés
Castañeda as participants at the fiesta and Julián Díaz as the syncretic
figure of the masked man who voices Maiakovski’s dream (imagined

by Antonio Tabucchi): a witness obsessed with washing his hands. The
clean and tidy space of the house, copied from a middle-class interior
photographed by Jeff Wall, has been invaded by the chaos of the carni-
valesque street and the kitsch exuberance of the tropical hacienda and
the jungle. When the fiesta ends, the ruins are left.
Theatre and the Live Arts
In 1984, the Mapa Teatro founding coincided with the start of one
of the most violent phases of Colombia’s armed conflict. The succes-
sive storming of the Palace of Justice by M-19 and the brutal reprisals
(1985), the terror and massacres in rural areas at the hands of the differ-
ent armed groups (guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitary and army),
the political attacks and assassinations, the kidnappings and torture all
once again abolished the very idea of human dignity and fundamental
rights (Hylton 2003). It was a decade that saw an escalation of the con-
flict that would not subside until the mid-1990s, following the execution
of Pablo Escobar.
In these years, violence could not be represented because it
penetrated the bodies, precluding any distance. During the rehears-
als of De Mortibus: Requiem para Samuel Beckett (1990), the sound of
bombs exploding was recurrent in Bogotá. On stage, bodies said as
much as words, in a performance exercise that manifested the expe-
rience of violence without representing it. The Beckett model urged
theatre to use figures rather than characters and non-representative
acting enabled an approximation to reality without resorting to inter-
posed fiction, unfolding instead through work with the bodies and the
materials. In subsequent projects, this allowed for figures played by
professional actors to be played by people unconnected to the world of
the arts, as guests, experts or witnesses. This happened in Horacio, by
Heiner Müller (1994), directed by Heidi Abderhalden in the Penitenciaría
Central la Picota and subsequently presented in the Camarín del

Mapa Teatro, De Mortibus: Réquiem for Samuel
Beckett. Bogotá, 1990. Photo: Ettore Gaffurri
Mapa Teatro, Horacio. Bogotá, 1994

Carmen in Bogotá. The violence that was happening on the streets and
in the fields of Colombia was rendered present on stage without resort-
ing to virtuous representation techniques, in such a way that the bodies
of criminals, invaded by violence, became poetic bodies accepting their
vulnerability as actors.
Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden were very close to the artist Doris
Salcedo, who was working on her furniture trapped in cement series in
the early 1990s, the same material Mapa chose to steep the costumes
of De Mortibus in, thus conferring its figures with a semi-fossilised ap-
pearance and a movement slowed by the weight of the garments.
And they lived alongside José Alejandro Restrepo and María Teresa
Hincapié, who produced their first collaborations, combining video, in-
stallation and live action. The members of Mapa allowed themselves to
be influenced by these new practices and were very mindful of the way
the stage medium was being redefined on the global scene in the final
decades of the last century, which marked the group’s trajectory in the
second half of the 1990s, resulting in the project C’úndua (2001–05).
The will to experience the formats is present in the heart of the Mapa
Teatro foundation itself and has translated into works conceived for
museum exhibitions created in parallel to the stage productions. The
video installations Camino (1997) and Dormitorio (1998) and Lo demás es
silencio (1999), by Rolf Abderhalden, pre-empt research into this medi-
um, which was integrated into his works in multiple ways in the decade
of two thousand, but also gave rise to successive museum versions of
the staged works themselves, which Mapa has termed Variations.
When, in 2010, Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden (along with Ximena
Vargas, Adriana Urrea and José Alejandro Restrepo) decided to open
a specialised course at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (using
the University Museum in Bogotá as one of the workspaces and as a
location for the presentation of the final degree projects), they called
it a Master’s Degree in Theatre and Live Arts. The ‘live arts’ category
does not replace that of ‘theatre’, which continues to be Mapa’s core

medium, but extends the conception of theatre in an exercise of con-
stant delocalisation. As Rolf himself states in his essay “Live Arts?” that
this is a ‘non-category’ that asserts the centrality of the ‘laboratories of
bodies, voices, texts and textures, images and sounds’ in the produc-
tion of ‘poetic events’; the human bodies, not necessarily present or vis-
ible, do not constitute the privileged means of expression, but are rath-
er conceived as ‘the live matter of thinking and the live thinking of mat-
ter’ (Abderhalden 2018, pp. 801–4). Underlying this proposal is the idea
of ‘life’ as a central value in the political thinking of Suely Rolnik, who
conceives micropolitical action as a will to assert and preserve the ‘cre-
ative power of life’, in all of its multiplicity and complexity, as opposed
to the current forms and values that smother desire, but also materi-
ally attack mere survival (Abderhalden 2018, p.20). Thus, the adjective
‘live’ goes far beyond the idea of what happens live or in a situation of
co-presence and must be interpreted in the context of the physical and
symbolic acts of violence that continue to mark our global everyday
existence and history, in addition to the persistence of a deeply root-
ed narco-power implemented in Latin America’s state forces, armed
groups and organised crime.
The Gesture and the Trace
In its interpretation of live arts production, Mapa uses the term ‘ges-
ture’ to refer to the live action or performance and the term ‘trace’ to
refer to the material memory of this gesture, which may have different
formats: installation, story, publication, etc. The space pertaining to
‘trace’ indicates that ‘something happened here’. Like other Variations
by Mapa, The Unaccounted: A Triptych constitutes both a trace of the
staged piece and an autonomous work in the shape of an animated in-
stallation. This dual dimension stems from the expanded concept of
theatre generated by the live arts: the work of theatre is one of the for-
mats that momentarily fixes the live flow that unfolds in every open

laboratory around an interest or an affect (Rolnik 2018b, p. 20), and
each variation is not merely a trace, but another possible formal mate-
rialisation, which offers an independent account of processes that also
converge in the performance.
A unique characteristic of this Variation is that the work of the-
atre did not precede the installation, but rather occurred parallel to it.
In fact, the point of departure for The Uncounted: A Triptych was the set
design consisting of three cubes, which gave rise to the idea of the ‘trip-
tych’, and the photograph by Jeff Wall, which became first a tableau vi-
vant and later a stage. Moreover, the potential of that material as a vi-
sual installation was detected before the elaboration of the drama, and
the invitation to present it independently at the São Paulo Biennial was
received at a very early stage of the creative process. The activation of
the installation as a ‘trace’ of the ‘gesture’ that was the performance to
some degree implies the conception of a ‘variation on the variation’, a
new layer of sensitive material to continue the poetic unfurling of the
materials, insisting on the project’s live core.
One of the key images to inspire Variation on The Unaccounted:
A Triptych was the reflection of the audience at the end of the perfor-
mance on the proscenium glass that separates spectators from the
space of action (which is kept the same in the installation). The bod-
ies of the spectators are virtually incorporated into the stage space
through their reflection on the glass. The integration of the installation
visitors into the work itself is one of the first means of activation, a first
sign of latency. An idea already implemented by Mapa in the presen-
tation of Variation on Witness to the Ruins in the Museo Reina Sofía in
2016. For the spectators of the installation, a ‘trace’ is provided by the
physical bodies of the other visitors who are figures that evoke the la-
tency of the live bodies that at other times make the ‘gesture’; each vis-
itor is therefore both spectator and vicarious figure, inhabitant of the
‘trace’ and inhabitant, through evocation, of the ‘gesture’.

Variations3
To think about the presentation of Variation on The Unaccounted: A

Triptych in its dual dimension implies an intention to preserve the poet-
ic gesture that was the staged piece. The multiplicity of mediums that
Mapa Teatro has worked with and the specific reflection on how to
translate the event and the gesture for the museum setting provide a
basis to understand this challenge.
a) ‘Variations’ are translations of the poetic gesture into the installation

format. This is what Mapa did when it produced the Variation.
Hence an independent presentation of the same would be
sufficient.
b) ‘Gestures’ are partial activations of the materials. Mapa has pro-
duced some installation proposals with the presence of actors,
such as the Variation on the Holy Innocents in the 2011 Prague
Biennale, which isolates the action of ‘whipping’ and had a me-
chanical version in the Museo de Antioquia in 2015; or La balsada
(Zurich 2021), which salvages an unused material also from the
research for this same work. In both cases, they are enormously
powerful productions in the style of tableaux vivants. But they
present a problem: they mobilise only part of the triptych’s rep-
resentative complexity and, as mentioned above, also result in
independent works, not merely traces.
c) ‘Archives’ are presentations of the materials used to construct the
piece in an exhibition format, rendering them independent from
their representative function. This is what was done in Des/
Montaje: Variation #2 on Discourse of a Decent Man (Medellín,
2016), where, along with other materials, the image and text of
the discourse itself were highlighted, offering visitors the possi-
bility of intervening in the installation by reading the same from
a radio booth.

Mapa Teatro, Variation on Witness to the Ruins.
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (Exhibition "Fictions
266 and territories"), 2019
d) ‘Live Archives’ are performative lectures that reconfigure the materi-
als used in one of various previous works. In Live Archive (based
on Witness to the Ruins, San Francisco, 2011) in addition to
Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden, Antanas Mokus (former mayor of
Bogotá) and Juana Ramírez (resident of El Cartucho; the demo-
lition of this neighbourhood motivated the project) also partic-
ipated. In Live Museum (based on The Farewell and Of Lunatics
or Those Lacking Sanity, 2019) the actors Andrés Castañeda and
Santiago Sepúlveda and the miner Rubén Darío Rotavista partic-
ipated in addition to the directors.
The options we took into consideration were b) ‘Gestures’ and c)

‘Archives’. Mapa made some proposals in relation to the same:
1. Production of a series of tableaux vivants or short sequences on the

different spaces of the installation performed by the actors from
the original work: Heidi Abderhalden, Julián Díaz, Agnes Brekke,
Andrés Castañeda and Santiago Sepúlveda. Would a transmis-
sion be acceptable? What criteria would be used to select the
actors to whom these sequences would be transmitted? On the
other hand, the guests are, in principle, irreplaceable: the chil-
dren (who are no longer children), Don Danilo (the musician),
Jeihhco (the hip-hop activist), Santiago (the magician). But does
the same not apply to the actors themselves in their role as ac-
tive witnesses and not merely figures? And does this reintroduc-
tion of the human not contradict the function conferred on the
spectators themselves?
2. Exhibition of archives parallel to the presentation of the Variation.
These would be materials projected on the actual staging. They
could be recordings of the work represented, documents or
materials that form part of the process or that were relevant
during the creation process. The possible materials to be used

Mapa Teatro,The Unaccounted: A Triptych.
Bogotá, 2014

Mapa Teatro, Variation on The Unaccounted, 2021
Museo Reina Sofía, Permanent collection

Mapa Teatro, Variation on The Unaccounted, 2021
Museo Reina Sofía, Permanent collection

would include: Pablo Escobar’s speech, the documentary vid-
eo on the Guapi carnival, fragments of the video recording of
the performance in Athens, images of the live statues from The
Farewell.
New questions arise: How do we show the dual nature of The

Unaccounted when the activations are not happening? Would it suffice
to tell this story through an independent audio-visual method, per-
haps offered through a QR code? Would it be possible to consider a
more extensive archive, including the documentation from the process,
work notebooks, etc.? Would it make sense to gather witness accounts
from the other participants in the staged work or people close to the
process?
And a concern, raised by Rosario Peiró, emerges: the represen-
tation of historical violence referred to in The Unaccounted is more in-
tensely expressed in the work of theatre than in the installation. Should
the work of the representation not be directed in this direction?
Representing The Unaccounted4
The challenge would lie in activating the affects that the performance
generated but which are not generated in the same way in the visit to
the Variation. Would it be possible to introduce new presences or doc-
uments capable of mobilising without altering the poetic gesture that
the Variation itself comprises?
The representation of violence in the staged work was rendered
effective through the use of different materials and actions, two of
which do not unfold with same intensity in the installation.
1. The action of the festive bodies which, by exiting themselves

(through the masking, the dance and the pleasure), make them-
selves present in their vulnerability, evoking the actual victims,

but also as an echo of those other bodies outside themselves
seen to be carried away by the delirium of violence to become
the perpetrators of massacres and destruction (however ab-
stract and rational these strategies may seem).
2. Textual fragments, visual documents and oral tales that make it pos-
sible to position the different sequences explicitly in relation to
Colombia’s history of political and criminal violence of the last
fifty years, as well as the traces of other acts of violence.
On the other hand, it would also be worth recovering the wit-

ness experience of the most intense years of violence, in the early
1990s, and reviewing the poetic responses presented in De Mortibus
and Horacio in relation to performance, representation, musicality
and visual art. Taking these reflections into consideration and, on the
basis of the ideas already expounded, two more specific proposals
were made:
1. Execution of a tableau vivant in each one of the three spaces. The re-
cording of the tableaux could be projected onto the actual in-
stallation, now converted into a stage, during the pauses in the
loop programmed for the activation of the device.
2. Installation of three monitors, containing the following materials:
a) Recording of the first scene of The Unaccounted: A Triptych in
Athens (2018), in which the children listen in silence to the text
of Camilo Torres on a radio broadcast that justifies and urges
armed conflict.
b) Documentary of the Guapi carnival filmed by Heidi Abderhalden. It
is, after all, these festive bodies who take unto themselves the
colonial violence, the capitalist violence and the paramilitary
violence.
c) Pablo Escobar’s speech in the logograph by Camilo Uribe. This docu-
ment condenses the delirium of violence in Colombia and

reveals the ‘ethno-fiction’ method, which combines fiction and
reality to mirror the combination of reality and fiction that con-
stitutes Colombia’s social and political history.
These proposals would not exclude other activations or singu-

lar gestures. Nonetheless, at one point in the conversation, a question
that has accompanied us from the start of the process and throughout
this text was raised: Would it not be redundant to try and dramatise
what in itself is already dramatic? Is it not obvious to anyone visiting the
Variation on the Unaccounted: A Triptych that they are entering a the-
atre contained in a museum?
This question could be answered by evoking the participation of
Cacique Juárez Munduruku at a round table that followed the last work
by Mapa, The Moon Is in the Amazon (2021), in Kaserne, Basel.5 Cacique,
who had sat in silence for almost two hours, asked to be given the last
word and, after taking off his feathered headpiece (as a gesture of re-
spect), expressed his perplexity about the term used to refer to what
they had just witnessed: ‘Stück’ / ‘piece’. ‘¿Peça?’, he asked in surprise.
For him a ‘peça’ is a material object with a specific function, and what
they had just seen was something very different, an event which he felt
faithfully reflected his reality and his experience in the Amazon. The
visual and verbal references to the border, the credibility of the vid-
eos and the tales of destruction of what he recognised as his territory
had particularly affected him: that succession of texts, images and ma-
terial choreographies very effectively represented what he knew and
what mattered to him. ‘But to me this is not a piece,’ said Cacique. His
complaint could have been diluted by the translation process, but Rolf
wanted to know more and asked him: ‘And what would you call it in
your language? If it is not a piece, then what is it?’ Without any hesita-
tion, Cacique: ‘Theatre! This is theatre.’

ENDNOTES
1 Jaime Bateman, leader of M-19, who brought to Caribbean culture V.I.
Lenin’s philosophy that revolution is a party: ‘La revolución es una fiesta’.
2 Project 24 (2018), at LACMA, Los Angeles, or Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking
Sanity (2019), Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
3 Based on a digital conversation with Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden and Ximena
Vargas (Mapa Teatro), the following people from the Collections Department
of the Museo Reina Sofía: Rosario Peiró (head of collections), Lola Hinojosa
(head of performing and intermedia arts) and Carolina Bustamante (perma-
nent exhibition coordination) and José A. Sánchez on 4 March 2021.
4 Based on a conversation with Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden on 12 October
2021.
5 The round table took place on 30 September 2021 with the participation
of Rahel Leupin, Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Daniel Maselli and Rolf
Abderhalden.
REFERENCE LIST
Abderhalden, R. 2018, “Live Arts?”, in M. Rodríguez (ed.), Mapa Teatro: el esce-

nario expandido, UNAC, Bogotá.
Celan, P. 1999, “Cambio de aliento” [Atemwende, 1967], in JLR. Palazón (trans.),
Obras completes, Trotta, Madrid.
Hylton, F. 2003, “An Evil Hour: Uribe’s Colombia in Historical Perspective”,
New Left Review, vol. 23, pp. 51–93.
Rolnik, S. 2018a, Esferas de la insurrección, Tinta Limón, Buenos Aires.
Rolnik, S. 2018b, “Mapa Teatro: Creating from an Affect”, in Mapa Teatro:
Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

FRAGMENTS
OF A CO-OP
FESTIVAL
276
I was abroad when I received a call from Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu in
the summer of 1995. He gave me the news about an interna-
tional performance arts festival he was organising in Assos and
asked me to take part in it. The festival aimed to bring together
people who were seeking to develop subjective languages
through either practising dance, theatre, puppetry, design,
plastic and visual arts, or through collaborating with individu-
als or groups with relevant interests. There were no specifica-
tions at all regarding where the performances were planned to
take place. In the end, performances occurred in various spots
around the local environment. There was a possibility to stay in
Assos for three weeks to rehearse. This way, they aimed to sit-
uate the surroundings as part of the performances that would
add new layers to the works. The ultimate goal was to achieve
site-specificity as much as possible (Teker 2008, p. 22).
Choreographer, dancer and educator Aydın Teker was among the

participants of the first Assos Performing Arts Festival held between
October 5–7 in 1995. Written by Teker, the above introduction is an
excerpt from a posthumous article dedicated to Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu
(1953–1999) in the contemporary performing arts magazine gist1
(2008–09).
277 Fragments of a Co-op Festival

Organised under the direction and facilitation of Katırcıoğlu,
the Assos Performing Arts Festival was carried on until 1999. Thanks to
this, the village of Behramkale and the ancient city of Assos located in
Çanakkale became a significant site in the field of arts and culture, and
the collective memory of Turkey. This article recollects the story of the
festival – which was a ‘farfetched endeavour’2 considering the timely
circumstances – through press clippings, interviews, reviews and mem-
oirs. It offers a brief overview of Turkey’s art scene in the 1990s, a peri-
od in which people from different disciplines started organising to form
platforms facilitating socialisation and exchange of knowledge among
cultural producers.
First of all, it would make sense to recall the events that had tak-
en place during the decade to comprehend the history of the festival as
well as the challenges ahead. In the early 1990s, Istanbul had a unique
atmosphere that was both uplifting and encouraging for the people vis-
iting or returning home from abroad.3
There were no historical establishments in the fields of art, cul-

ture, performance, or entertainment in the city. The boundaries
were getting redefined in a positive sense in terms of liberty.
Globalisation was constantly reshaping the city through waves
of migration. There was a search towards one’s own cultural ex-
pression. During this period, the emergence of a different local
creative industry was making itself greatly visible.4
While institutionalisation was not yet in progress, during the

latter half of the decade, a young group of artists set out to generate
an idiosyncratic discourse through a sequence of events (Kosova &
Kortun 2014, p. 101). The exhibition series titled “Genç Etkinlik” (Youth
Action) was committed to displaying anybody’s work as long as they
filed an application. There were no requirements or prerequisites. Thus,
it was both a crucial opportunity and a turning point for young artists

Aydın Teker, Assos Yolu (Road to Assos)
(feat. Aydın Teker, Erica Bilder, Perry Yung), 1995
279 Assos International Performing Arts Festival, Turkey
Photo: Levent Öget
to make a name for themselves. From 1995 to 1998, the exhibition was
organised according to a conceptual frame, subtitled as “Borders and
Beyond”, “Territory-Deterritorialisation” and “Chaos” in chronological
order. The exhibition that had taken place in 1999 was organised with-
out a conceptual frame. All editions received significant attention and
participation.
Furthermore, in 1996, a band of young artists gathered around
the idea that ‘timely art should employ aesthetics as an object of in-
formation just as how it sources from other fields of knowledge and
disciplines’ (Inal 1997).5 This common perspective served as a point
of departure for the foundation of DAGS Interdisciplinary Young
Artists Association. The first notable undertaking of this group was
the “Performance Days”, held in the same year in Atatürk Cultural
Centre’s [Atatürk Kültür Merkezi] Room A. In the four-day-long event
were familiar names who previously took part at the exhibitions such
as “Genç Etkinlik”, “Öteki” (The Other), “Ah Güzel İstanbul” (Oh,
Beautiful Istanbul), and Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu performed a piece titled
Sofra Sanatı (Culinary Arts). The second edition of the “Performance
Days” had taken place in the historical Darphane building with a pub-
lic programme including two panels titled “Performance Art” and
“Interdisciplinarity in Art”.
The Assos Performing Arts Festival served as an important mile-
stone in the latter half of this decade. Moreover, it earned a significant
place in the history of non-profit collective organisations as an initia-
tive of artists daring enough to operate outside Istanbul, cultivating
knowledge exchange and cooperation amongst themselves. It is most
unfortunate that regardless of the Festival’s significance, the archival
activities were undertaken by individual efforts. Any structural art-his-
torical survey is, thus, yet to take place apart from talks, interviews giv-
en by its community, or workshops conducted by former participants.
The only research that paid justice to the festival was Özgül Akıncı’s
postgraduate thesis in the field of cultural studies: “Remembering the

Assos International Arts Festival through the İconic Memory of Hüseyin
Katırcıoğlu: Reading the rural-urban divide through gender, humour
and reflexive ethnography” (2008).
Seeds and Principles

‘It’s useless to whine about the discontents of the field. If you want to
turn things around you have to do it yourself.’6
‘Based, spontaneous and risky’
Katırcıoğlu described the programme on the festival’s statement text

along with several interviews by employing adjectives such as based,
spontaneous and risky (Koyuncuoğlu 2000, p. 14). The quotes below
shed light on his subjectivity and idiosyncratic use of these words.
In his 1996 essay published in the theatre magazine Tiyatro…
tiyatro, Katırcıoğlu referred to the authentic representation that he ob-
served in most theatres of the time as ‘Anadolu Kitsch’. He noted that,
unless approached critically, plays based on the geography of Anatolia,
its mythologies and poets might fall into addressing ‘desultory senti-
ments’. In his opinion, dealing with these subjects requires keen ob-
servation and craftiness to reshape the past and add a relevant dimen-
sion to the present to create contemplative opportunities. And yet,
most of the works in this genre, naively or for the sake of convenience,
fall short in this regard because of an inclination towards kitsch that
stems from ‘the burden of common emotions sought to be conveyed’
(Katırcıoğlu 1996, p. 24). Opposition to such a sense of locality is in line
with curator Vasıf Kortun‘s thought and criticism, which outlines an un-
derstanding of art that doesn’t go beyond ‘regurgitating traditional re-
gional archeology (“Anatolian civilizations”) through substitutive forms
and means’ (Kortun 2014, p. 26).
Keeping these in mind, it might be useful to turn back to the
starting point of the festival. In an interview dating back to 1995,
Katırcıoğlu expressed his disappointment regarding a previous edition

Rehearsal for Simurg (Simurgh), 1995.
Assos International Performing Arts Festival, Turkey.
Photo: Levent Öget

Simurg (Simurgh), 1995.
Assos International Performing Arts Festival, Turkey.
283 Photo: Levent Öget
Rehearsals at Assos were photographed by Levent Öget

of the ‘Istanbul Festival’ (known as Istanbul Theatre Festival). A sub-fes-
tival (or section) to include alternative plays was in the works, and di-
rector Dikmen Gürün7 was the only participant from the committee to
participate in the play titled İzmir’e doğru (Towards İzmir) presented
by Katırcıoğlu. Despite Gürün’s efforts, the so-called alt-fest could not
make much of an impact, as it followed conventions and usual patterns
by the book. In the same year, Katırcıoğlu participated in a programme
on national television (TRT 2) named Gündemde Sanat Var (Art on the
Agenda) for an interview with professor and curator Ali Akay, sharing
how the festival was put into motion with Truva Öyküsü (Troy Story)
(1993), a play he directed himself. In the ruins of the ancient city of
Troy, the temple of Cybele and the play staged around it8 attained an
experimental quality in their relationships with its surroundings and the
audience. The village youth, actors from Istanbul Municipal Theatres
and local and foreign dancers and actors were all part of the show. This
time, the narrative, for centuries centred around the lives of male he-
roes, was being told through the perspective of envious Goddesses and
mourning widows.
Nadi Güler elaborates about significant events that had taken
place earlier on:
In 1992, at the International Theater Institute’s meeting held

in Turkey, several important foreign theatre actors conduct-
ed workshops. Ellen Stewart’s work on Yunus Emre was
among these, which was later on performed at Hagia Irene
and brought to Ellen Stewart’s famous theatre La MaMa
E.T.C. (Experimental Theater Club) in New York. The cast com-
prised Ayla and Beklan Algan, Erol Keskin, Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu,
Mustafa Avkıran, Levent Güner, Kaan Erten, Zişan Uğurlu,
Aslı Öngören and Nadi Güler alongside international actors.
The show was presented to the American audience in a two-
week programme following a rehearsal period that lasted for

Truva Öyküsü (Story of Troy), 1993. Photo: Levent Öget

a month. After getting critically acclaimed by the Village Voice
and the New York Times as ‘the most beautiful oriental tale we
have seen since Scheherazade’, the cast of this sold-out play
performed another show titled Troy Story in the ancient city
of Troy in Çanakkale the following year. Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu
had a house in Behramkale, Assos for many years. After this
production came to an end, he started organising the Assos
International Performing Arts Festival (Güler 2008, p. 30).
In turn, Katırcıoğlu attaches importance to generating a lan-

guage that disavows practices of sheer imitation, both in the festival
and in his independent productions. Even though his primary goal was
to create an experimental space, he sought out common principles and
qualities in the works and practitioners. For instance, a certain level of
professionalism was required from all parties: ‘First of all, works should
not consist of verbality alone. When the whole thing runs through
words, the audience (and the artist) becomes constrained within that
form. Second, the artists should attempt to transcend the limitations
of space. In fact, the contemporary theatre is currently proceeding
through this trajectory.’9
Focusing on the development process rather than the final
work, local and foreign participants settled in Behramkale three weeks
in advance. Some of the participants came with an idea in their mind,
while some works were developed later on in practice. They set out to
thoroughly observe their surroundings to get acquainted and nego-
tiate with the people of the village. Once the selection of the venues
and spots was done, they set off with the rehearsals right away. At this
point, the following excerpts are critical to accurately describe the dy-
namic nature – stemming from collectivity – of this work.
Many women from the village sewed the costumes in their

homes, others made lunch, props were produced in the el-

ementary school while actors were rehearsing in their own
places. The elderly from the village would correct the per-
formers according to the traditional folk dance Harmandalı.
Japanese musicians with Yamaha keyboards would have a
hard time catching the off-beat rhythm of the original score
while finger-counting the notes and complaining about the im-
possibility of pulling it off. The production van would go back
and forth between sites to solve the practical issues. When it
was finally time to call it a day with the rehearsals, we would
visit the livestock to feed them with Süreyya, one of our help-
ing hands from the village. … Aydın Teker working on her
project with a shepherd and herd of sheep on the old arched
bridge at the entrance of the village, Mustafa Kaplan trying
to find his balance with an Indian dancer on a seesaw on a big
boat, theatre company Kumpanya making yet another ver-
sion of Everest My Lord in an abandoned cabin on the hill afar
from the residential area, Sabine Jamet having her take on The
Little Prince with puppets alongside children from the village
(Güler 2008, p. 31).
Excitement grows as the festival weekend approaches. I, on the

other hand, am feeling rather blue. Because the sensation that
fulfilled me the most was the process after all. This is something
unique to Assos. For three weeks, an American director be-
comes an actor in the play of a Turkish director, a French dancer
is running projects with the village children, a shepherd passes
by the stage and thus becomes part of the play. There are even
some directors who have completely revised their predeveloped
projects after getting here. … And the traces of all these pro-
cesses could be found in costumes and decorations which were
produced here on the site in a matter of three weeks (Cengiz
2008, p. 42).

Hüseyin Bahri
Alptekin with
Arhan Kayar,
Küresel Depresyon
ve Donald Duck
Sendromu (Global
Depression &
Donald Duck
Syndrome), 1997.
Assos International
Performing Arts
Festival, Turkey.
Courtesy of SALT
Research, Hüseyin
Bahri Alptekin
Archives

When it was finally time to perform in front of the audience, the
common aim was to bring all these efforts to life:
The festival should not be about attending a show for a deter-

mined timeframe and then simply returning to daily concerns
of life. … The thing is that you should be invigorated through-
out the day by the work, not only during the performance but
also before and after the show while walking on the street. We
achieved this in Assos. During those three days, everyone – art-
ists, locals, guests – shared this experience. People were rush-
ing from one event to another to not miss a single minute of it
and to catch up with the other before one ends.10
His wife and foremost collaborator, Dilek Katırcıoğlu, described

the festival in the most accurate way possible:
He brought the audience and the participating artists to

where these stories originated. … In such an environment,
so rich both in terms of nature and history, it was possible to
perform works at any given open-air site. People from the vil-
lage were not only helping and sharing their resources but
also took part in performances. Actors from various different
countries and disciplines met and influenced one another over
the course. Local materials were sourced to produce props,
decors, and costumes. Even though nobody made any money
out of it, everyone was so hyped to work together as if they
were mesmerised by the euphoria of collectivity (Katırcıoğlu
2008, p. 51).

Constituents
‘Assos Festival was not like any other festival that we have grown used
to, it was rather a celebration that was brought out from thin air through
the collective efforts of a band of art militants’ (Keskinsoy 1996).
The festival in Behramkale was produced with collective efforts, in ways

that are in contrast with contemporary production processes. The fes-
tival crew, led by Hüseyin and Dilek Katırcıoğlu, comprised artists, de-
signers, architects and actors who were also well acquainted with one
another, coming together in social contexts and exchanging thoughts
frequently. Collectives, dancers and musicians hailing from abroad also
adapted to this work method very quickly. Asiye Cengiz took respon-
sibility in the organisation and in the plays as a volunteer every year.
Selçuk Gürışık and Çağla Ormanlar were in charge of the decor and cos-
tume designs. Alongside Nadi Güler, Şule Ateş, Zişan Uğurlu and Levent
Öget, as well as Katırcıoğlu‘s father, mother and neighbours, the pri-
mary component of the process lay in the local people. They all took
part in the performance site spanning the village from the harbour
called İskele to the Temple of Athena on the hilltop, as well as behind
the scenes: ‘Everyone chipped in by any means they could: carpenter
Ahmet Emin saved the day whenever needed, grocer Hasan supplied
essential goods, İnci let us use her restaurant as if it was the festival
canteen. From the excavation professor to village women coming from
Paşaköy to sew the costumes day by day, everyone was memorable
and crucial’ to make things possible (Cengiz 2008, pp. 41–2).
One of the most substantial supporters was Hilmi Selimoğlu,
the owner of the hotels Eden Beach and Eden Gardens. The festival was
made possible thanks to his generous contribution in covering the food
and accommodation needs of the participating artists during the entire
programme.
Thanks to the efforts of the artist, dramaturgist and critic
Emre Koyuncuoğlu, there was even a critical daily publication about

the festival titled Neo-Athena. Gatherings were held after dark,
and Koyuncuoğlu edited and proofread the collectively written re-
views. … Dilek (Katırcıoğlu) was putting the pages together as the
first thing in the morning and sending it to a nearby village called
Ayvacık with a copy machine. She would return before midday to
fold the pages with Hüseyin, his mother and father. Then we would
hand these out wherever the daily activities were planned to begin
(Koyuncuoğlu 2000, p. 14).
The End of Assos Performing Arts Festival
As there were no bodies to apply for funding or sponsorship to sus-

tain the activities during that time, the festival had to start from
scratch every year financially. It was realised with extraordinary efforts.
Katırcıoğlu underlined this lack in the first festival, as a festival cannot
carry on only with the support of the region and artists; it also needs
producers.
In the second year’s programme announcement published in
Tiyatro…tiyatro magazine, Katırcıoğlu mentioned that ‘despite the dif-
ficulties in finding financial resources due to the ongoing political and
economic uncertainties’, the programme was barely realised at the last
moment with the support of some companies and individuals.
At the beginning of its third cycle, it was finally possible to con-
sider the festival ‘rather as an established organisation that has a prom-
ising future’.11 However, in an interview published in the daily newspa-
per Cumhuriyet a few weeks later, Katırcıoğlu stated that the struggle
for Assos was to continue until its fifth year despite the circumstances;
this timeframe would be enough to tell whether it would be possible to
settle or not.12 Indeed, the festival was organised uninterruptedly in the
following years, exactly as planned, and came to a conclusion ‘before it
would become neither a tourist attraction nor a self-destructing activi-
ty’ (Koyuncuoğlu 2000, p. 13).

In Memory of Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu and the Festival
‘Before anything else, Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu was a constructor. He
built houses, relationships, performances, and an unforgettable life’
(Uğurlu 2008, p. 20).
After the festival came to an end, Katırcıoğlu focused on new

works and projects. He realised a solo performance named Sünnetli
(Circumcised) (1998–99) in the newly opened Babylon, which later be-
came Istanbul’s staple arts and cultural events centre and concert hall.
In the following months, he performed the work in many cities across
Europe. At the same time, he was undertaking another project to trans-
form the old Kasımpaşa Flour Mill in Istanbul into a performance cen-
tre. Most unfortunately and unexpectedly, he fell off of a roof he was
repairing and passed away.
This text will come to an end with a work by Naz Erayda, who
participated in the second year of the festival as part of the theatre
company Kumpanya with a performance titled Everest My Lord’dan Kısa
Bir Bölüm (An Excerpt from Everest My Lord). The work, titled Three
Hours for Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu (the play of timetable), takes the collective
production that occurred in Assos as a point of departure and is dedi-
cated to Katırcıoğlu’s memory.
***
On Three Hours for Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu (the play of timetable) by Naz

Erayda
I wrote, Three Hours for Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu (the play of timetable), in-
spired by his death.
This play of timetable is a conceptual play. The text of the play
that I think is staged, not the play to be staged.

This timetable consists of descriptions for all elements, pro-
cesses and the relationship between these that are necessary for a
play to actualise.
The costumes that all the actors will wear, the props they will
use, the make-up they will do, the use of sound; the spaces each ac-
tor will be present in, with which ambient sound, and with which
sense of light, can all be read in this timetable.
Descriptions of when and what the players will do in very
short time intervals (for example, every five minutes), their move-
ments, behaviour, words and sound in these time units are included
in the timetable.
I present the play of timetable as a conceptual theatre to the
reader/audience. It’s up to them to transform the play from from the
conceptual and turn it into reality.
ENDNOTES
1 Gist was a semi-annual magazine aiming to create a trace of works and art-
ists who adopted an innovative, creative and alternative understanding that
stretches imagination across the field of contemporary performing arts (the-
atre, dance and performance). Although its founding members were already
closely acquainted with each other since the early 1990s, it wasn’t until 2008
that their dream came true. Yet, it could only last for three editions, follow-
ing the first issue published in January 2008. The magazine was published
by Garageistanbul and edited by Naz Erayda from the theatre company
Kumpanya.
2 Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu, “Assos’un taşı toprağı sahne”, interview by Sevil Özkan,
Pazar Radikal, 17 August 1997.
3 Katırcıoğlu returned to Istanbul from London in 1991, and established the
theatre YA DA, where artists from different countries would come together
during each show. YA DA’s first play was İsmene by Yannis Ritsos, in which
he worked with Zişan Uğurlu and Şule Ateş, and was staged at a local disco-
theque called Taxim Night Park.

4 Vasıf Kortun, SALT’s MANASTIR web project translated by translated by Ezgi
Yurteri, https://saltonline.org/projects/manastir/.
5 İnsel İnal, “Performans Günlerine Dair”, 2. Performans Günleri exhibition
booklet, ed. Nadi Güler, 1997.
6 Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu, “Komedisiz trajedi olmaz”, interview by Nilüfer Kuyaş,
Milliyet, 17 February 1997, 20.
7 Gürün would continue to follow the Assos Festival in the coming years and
invite several groups to present their works as part of the İstanbul Theatre
Festival.
8 “İşlerinden bazıları,” gist, July – December 2008, 48.
9 Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu, “Tarih, kültür ve sanat Assos’ta”, interview by Aziz
Çağlar, Hürriyet Gösteri, September 1996, 46–7.
10 Hürriyet Gösteri, 46-47.
11 Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu, “Assos’un taşı toprağı sahne”, interview by Sevil Özkan,
Pazar Radikal, 17 August 1997.
12 Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu, “Beklentiler arttı, olanaklar aynı”, interview by Gül
Erçetin, Cumhuriyet, 2 Septepmber 1997.
REFERENCE LIST
Cengiz, A. 2008, “Festival mutfağından sesler”, gist, July–December.

Katırcıoğlu, D. 2008, “Dili aramak”, gist, July–December.
Katırcıoğlu, H. 1996, “Anadolu Kitsch”, Tiyatro…tiyatro, August–September.
Kosova, E. and Kortun, V. 2014, “Siyaset”, in Ofsayt ama Gol, SALT, Istanbul.
Koyuncuoğlu, E. 2000, “Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu Demek ‘Alternatif’i Üretmek
Demektir”, Tiyatro…tiyatro, January.
Keskinsoy, E. 1996, “Görsel Nane Ruhu…”, Express, 9 September.
Kortun, V. 2014,“Yörüngeden Çıkan: Bir Başka Beriki” in 10, Istanbul: SALT, 2014, 26.
Teker, A. 2008, “Assos Yolu”, gist, July–December.
Uğurlu, Z. 2008, “Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu ve yaşamı üzerine düşünmek”, gist,
July–December.

OHO –
BETWEEN THE
MAGIC OF
DIGITISATION
AND
FINANCIAL
LITERACY
Igor Španjol
298
Although contemporary art grows old very quickly and is constantly
changing, Jacques Rancière’s statement that art is not merely a product
of history, but also a historical category in itself, is applicable to recent
developments and trends evolving in the here and now. This means
that art only exists within a special order of identification that allows us
to observe objects and performances as part of a unique experience,
not in terms of the reception of a work of art, but as the actual making
of the experience within which a work of art originates, a making that
involves institutions, venues of exhibiting and performing, ways of mak-
ing the works publicly accessible or reproducing them, as well as modes
of perception and affective experience, concepts, narratives and de-
bates that identify a work and give it meaning. In short, art is not some
timeless activity, but a historical structure (Rancière 2015).
In the past two decades, we have witnessed two major social
changes that seem contrasting at first glance. The first is the global
financial crisis; the saving of the banking sector that the crisis sparked
has seriously undermined the welfare state and wrought havoc in the
public sector in Slovenia and some other countries. Those public cul-
tural institutions and artists that have survived the budget cuts have
been forced to identify and pursue new survival tactics between mar-
ket populism and ruin. While this change is all about shortages and
austerity measures, the other change advocates prosperity, offering
up innovations and giving the appearance of being the better option.
299 OHO – Between the Magic of Digitisation...

We are talking about the magic of technology, the imperative of across-
the-board digitisation and general online accessibility. The neoliberal
politics of austerity has made the digital paradigm all the more attrac-
tive, while any refusal of technological innovations is considered almost
tantamount to resisting the ideals of the Enlightenment. The story of
the technological turn has overshadowed the more depressive story of
the political and economic downslide, while in reality the two phenom-
ena are very much intertwined. Almost like the new COVID-19 pandemic
with the transition to teleworking on the one hand and the ecological
and energy crisis on the other.
Rather than start off with a full-formed idea of the final projects
beforehand, cultural politics usually structured institutional projects
as they evolved, collecting and composing everything technologically
possible that seemed potentially useful. Their activities are thus most-
ly based on the more or less creative uses of technological and other
resources, which led them to the view that an integrated functioning
of all of the technical components (various machines, computers and
electronic devices) is the most decisive factor for a project in achieving
the desired effect. This is, in a way, a phenomenon that reaches beyond
the specifics of geography and time and cannot simply be defined qual-
itatively. Thus, on the one hand, Nam June Paik realised an important
segment of his early production precisely by testing all of the techno-
logical possibilities available to the audio-visual reproduction industry
developed at the time, while the formerly momentous Ars Electronica
Festival in Linz transformed over time into an amusing test site for the
latest technological developments.
For example, during the renovation of the Moderna galerija
building in 2008 and 2009, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of
Slovenia provided no suitable replacement exhibition spaces and practi-
cally ceased its funding of the museum’s public programme; it did, how-
ever, (co-)finance the digitisation of museum collections and archives
as a priority task. Prior to that, with the help of significant financial sup-

port from a private Swiss foundation, Moderna galerija digitised a val-
uable donation in the archives of Marko Pogačnik,1 a founding member
of the OHO Group, the most interesting and important neo-avant-garde
art movement in Slovenia in the 1960s (Zabel 2007).2 This overtaking of
private initiative will prove prophetic a little later.
In 1965, Tomaž Šalamun3 initiated the idea that the young gen-
eration around OHO should consolidate and confirm itself by publish-
ing a book, an anthology. The book, titled EVA and edited by Iztok
Geister Plamen4 and Marko Pogačnik, was published in 1966 and in-
cluded experimental, visual and concrete poetry and other texts by
Pogačnik, Geister, Šalamun, Franci Zagoričnik,5 Braco Rotar6 and Taras
Kermauner.7 They collected part of the necessary money from impor-
tant representatives of art and culture, who were asked for contribu-
tions. EVA was the first in the extremely important series of OHO books
and perhaps the first strong collective statement of a new artistic gen-
eration. It was also important as a proof of new optimism and energy in
a depressing cultural and political situation.
Perhaps the most interesting achievement of this early period
was the specific OHO book, which followed the basic demands of re-
ism (Zabel 2007, p. 107).8 A book is usually understood as a mere vehicle
for a text and, so to say, disappears when we read it; an OHO book, on
the other hand, is designed in such a way that the text does not have
a privileged position (some of the books, as Pogačnik’s Item Book, one
of the most beautiful of all OHO works, have no text at all); the text is
only one of the elements of which the book consists, and it is the book
itself which is now the object of our attention. For example, with the
so-called book on the ring we notice only the mere appearance of pag-
es and letters, while the text is completely dispersed and can be recon-
structed only with difficulty. In the so-called topographic series (‘top-
ographic poetry’ was, at that time, a synonym for visual poetry), the
book became completely independent, and the text cannot be separat-
ed from it at all.

Marko Pogačnik, Iztok Geister, Book OHO, 1966.
Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

The OHO books appeared as a part of the so-called Edition OHO.
This series started in 1966 with Pogačnik’s Item Book and Pogačnik’s
and Geister’s OHO. Most books were published in 1967 and 1968.
Edition OHO included books of a very different nature. Some of them
were quite usual collections of poetry with illustrations; in others, the
relations of texts, images and pages became more complex. In later edi-
tions, we can follow a strong tendency towards deconstruction of the
text. The so-called book on the ring presents only one or two letters of
the text on a single page. Some books have no text at all. Edition OHO
continued with the ‘topographic series’ and the series of small boxes
that, in most cases, contain a number of paper cards with texts, images,
imprints of different objects, etc. A very interesting case is Pogačnik’s
box that includes a number of different paper circles. On each of them,
one letter from a poem by Geister is printed. Besides books and box-
es, Edition OHO also included other items, such as a tape with two
songs by Naško Križnar,9 Milenko Matanović10 and Geister, several se-
ries of matchbox labels, etc. In the summer of 1966, the Municipality of
Ljubljana granted the Edition OHO a public sales area under the arcades
next to Zvezda (Star) Park in Ljubljana. There, it was possible, usually on
Tuesdays and Friday afternoons, to buy books and other self-published
series and products at the OHO sales desk.
Quite often, the beginning of OHO is connected to the publica-
tion of the book OHO by Geister and Pogačnik and to the untitled text
they wrote at that occasion, and which is now often called “The OHO
Manifesto” (Zabel 2007, p. 107).11 Geister’s and Pogačnik’s book OHO
(the work which gave the name to the entire movement) has a rath-
er complicated structure; the reader leaves through it, turns it around,
opens it left and right, unfolds it, all the time discovering texts and illus-
trations. Within the principles of reism, the book moves away from the
classical book structure because it abolishes certain perceptual mecha-
nisms. It is designed multidimensionally, as it does not consider a linear
structure but a circular one. The book thus has no real beginning and no

end. It allows the viewer to rhythmically scroll through the pages that
open and reveal; the scrolling process is designed to be endless. The
book intertwines the relationship between the drawings by Pogačnik,
poems by Geister and the space embodied in the form of the book.
The original edition of the book series is unknown; only a few
copies have survived. When one of the L’Internationale12 partner mu-
seums showed interest in buying the book, given its rarity and unique-
ness, the gallerist consultant from whom we asked for advice valued it
quite highly, at 12,000 euros. The gap between the market’s valuation
and the museum’s understanding of the book as archival material and
not as a work of art has proven to be insurmountable. Despite the ef-
forts of all the partners involved at the time, the book never ended up
in the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) collection.
The unfortunate story was recently concluded by Pogačnik himself,
when he reprinted the book in numerous copies in cooperation with
a local exhibition centre. However, this seemingly unusual move can-
not be blamed for inconsistencies in terms of original OHO logic: it is by
multiplying objects of the same kind that makes us aware of their com-
pletely individual nature.
We could, of course, count the books of the Edition OHO among
the so-called artists’ books, and recently they have indeed been pre-
sented in such a context, and not without reason. The OHO artists
were not without information about the movements in contemporary
art, where artists started to produce books and other prints as a par-
ticular artistic medium. The Fluxus artists have been particularly im-
portant in this respect. On the other hand, the books produced by Ed
Ruscha since 1963 have been recognised as pioneering work in the field
of artists’ books. We could therefore take the OHO books to coincide
with the pioneering efforts of artists working with books and prints.13
Already in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such printed matter was been
recognised as a particular art form, called book art, and later, after the
title of a 1973 exhibition in Philadelphia, artists’ books, a term that has

since then been generally used. However, we should keep in mind that
the books and other editions from Edition OHO were not meant as an
attempt to develop a new art form (e.g., book art). Rather, they were
developed independently, and as a result of the application of the reis-
tic theory on the traditional medium of the book, putting the medium
in the place of the subject of the work. In a sense, the OHO book could
also be understood as an expansion of the idea of the visual and con-
crete poetry from a single text to the book as a whole.
The OHO films must also be mentioned when we talk about the
market, editions, digitisation and the relationship between public and
private interests. Films were present in all periods of OHO’s work. The
list of OHO films, compiled by Naško Križnar, includes (besides docu-
mentation of OHO’s actions and projects) around forty short films that
were shot from 1964 to 1970. They were shot mainly by Križnar (who
also documented several OHO projects, Happenings, etc.) and Marjan
Ciglič;14 but Geister, Pogačnik, David Nez,15 Matanović and others also
worked occasionally with film. Similar to literature, we can trace two
complementary tendencies here. The film camera often functions as a
representative of the reist attentive eye, which notes and contemplates
things; some of these works demand quite a lot of discipline from the
audience. On the other side, OHO films also explored the interior pos-
sibilities and the nature of the medium itself; films of this kind are not
‘transparent’ anymore, nor do they represent the eye, but instead be-
come ‘things’ themselves. Some of Križnar’s films, for example, have a
severe rational structure (some of them even consist only of written
texts) and are thus ‘things’ in a similar sense to that of a ‘topographic’
poem. We should also mention the projects – among them, Križnar’s
film White People (Beli ljudje, 1970) is certainly the most characteristic –
that could be understood as a kind of film equivalent to a Happening.
As for the documentary films, it is important to say that they are often
more than just a document. The film camera often offers the only pos-
sibility to transmit an action to the audience (the action would be

otherwise limited only to its participants and would lose the dimension
of communication essential for art); sometimes such a project even
includes the camera as its integral part (this is certainly the case with
some conceptual projects from the 1970s).
Moderna galerija financed the restoration and digitisation of
Križnar’s 8 and 16 mm films of the OHO period. As part of the project,
we offered the author a fee for one series of films from the digital edi-
tion of four, while keeping the originals himself. In this case, the remain-
ing three editions could be sold to other interested museums. Some
museums showed an increasingly serious interest in the OHO produc-
tion, after the Moderna galerija appropriately valorised and intensively
presented it at numerous solo and group exhibitions of individual mem-
bers of the group, as well as at thematic exhibitions and exhibitions
from our collections.
After the digitisation was finished, under the pressure of a pri-
vate collector from abroad, the author changed his mind and withdrew
from the agreement. He decided to sell the original films and the re-
maining digital copies to a private collector, leaving us our edition for
educational and exhibition use. The purchase was part of the collector’s
wider march through the heritage of the post-war avant-garde in the
countries of the former Yugoslavia. The fetishism of possessing orig-
inals and all possible remaining editions of the films, in stark contrast
to the contemporary ethical customs and professional standards of
the art system, also contradicts the original OHO idea of the democra-
tisation of artistic production. Moderna galerija continuously provides
access to the films to visitors of the exhibitions, festivals and academ-
ic researchers of the OHO production, while at prestigious internation-
al exhibitions such as 2019 Venice Biennale, the films appear as works
from the private collection. Symptomatically, on this occasion, two min-
iature documentary photographs of David Nez’s Environment Realized
with Rolls of Toilet Paper in the Woods were digitally enlarged and print-
ed to spectacular size. Nez made an ephemeral environment with very

David Nez (OHO), Environment Realized with Rolls of Toilet
Paper in the Woods, 1969. Courtesy of Moderna galerija,
Ljubljana

simple means – by throwing rolls of toilet paper over bushes and trees.
This is clearly a process work and could from that point of view be com-
pared to Richard Serra’s splashing of lead – using, of course, a totally
different context, referential background and relation to the surround-
ings. This temporary intervention, based on the idea of Land Art, was
made within the so-called Summer Projects of 1969, which fully devel-
oped a shift from mere fascination with materials to relations and pro-
cesses. With these projects, the OHO artists left the gallery space and
started to work in the open air, first in the city and then in the land-
scape. The Summer Projects introduced or fully developed a number of
new, important aspects in OHO’s work. One of them was the new im-
portance of documentation: many of these projects were not only very
short-lived, but also attained by very small groups of people, mostly by
the group members and a few of their close friends, so documentary
photographs, drawings and explanatory texts became the only possi-
bility to present such works to public. Nez made several projects in the
landscape using mirrors. He was interested in reflection, in the idea of a
material object that visually almost disappears and, at the same time,
causes a disturbance in our perception. This idea was best formulated
in a project where he used three vertical mirrors installed in a field. The
real form of this work is, in fact, the documentary photograph. On it,
the mirrors create a puzzling rhythm of actual views and reflections.
The main part of the discourse that has been developing along-
side the use of digital and new media technologies in artists’ archives
refers to the problems of the gallery display of conceptual art or per-
formative practices. On the surface, these problems may seem to be
merely new or not so new manifestations of the old issue of the mu-
seum representation of avant-garde art practices, but at least in case
of the OHO art, the discourse seems to entail something more: com-
munication between protagonists was an essential feature and com-
ponent part of the art practice. Since OHO art was not as much about
later institutionalisation as direct blending with the art system, the

critical-theoretical consideration of the medium in relation to art his-
tory and its contemporary institutional instruments, which accompa-
nied the birth and growth of the OHO movement, represents a specific
quality and a constitutive element of this art practice.
Contemporary artists’ archives demand a series of changes at
the symbolic level and at the level of signification. In more traditional
institutions, the curators are expected to select works in the conven-
tional way, thereby saving the visitors time and facilitating orientation
in and navigation through the infinite number of documents, which
include secondary material and irrelevant testimonies that are often
declared art. The curator should be a producer who, based on his or
her theoretical findings, develops new display formats in the museum,
which are not possible in traditional archives and libraries. Most of the
artworks in history are locally bound, which means the spectator and
the artwork itself share the same space. Even with contemporary art-
works this is important – in an installation you share the same space.
For the first time with digital platforms, the spectator and the work are
dislocated, separate; they don’t share the same space. Therefore, it is
important to look for works and the criteria that are appropriate to this
condition. In short, the issue for curators is no longer whether to ex-
hibit artists’ documentation or not, but how to do this. From the muse-
um’s point of view, the issue of the intimate nature of the archive does
not seem to be an obstacle for the collective experience and specta-
cle of a gallery display or inclusion in a permanent museum collection.
When they first emerged, museums were intended for the research and
presentation of art and, to be honest, they were never meant to abide
by the demands of artists. Although they still try to dictate what art is,
contemporary art museums follow current art production and become
involved more and more often in that production. New digital technolo-
gies, archives and collections invariably influence practically all museum
activities. Usually, there is a renegade in every major museum, whose
interests make him or her focus on documentary material. To guard

against the tendency of the museum towards the mausoleum – or tem-
ple for acolytes only – we need to figure out how to make the digital
space as interactive, multimodal, associative and responsive (intelli-
gent) as walking into an exhibition space that contains the real things.
Media technologies are not only a tool and material, and there
the online context is often understood as part of the content of an art-
work. In addition, artists invariably emphasise the importance of the in-
timacy of the connection with the archival material, which is unique and
therefore unsuitable for the exhibition context. Such work’s natural
home is not the internet, and for this reason a great deal is lost, particu-
larly from those works which are not in close affinity to the above-men-
tioned digital trends, when they are captured in the somewhat artificial
digital medium and then, bereft of their original context, are exhibited
as an artefact in a gallery space. But on the other hand, due to the su-
preme and prestigious status of the art institution and its valorised ar-
chives (according to the theory of Boris Groys), an art museum display
remains a completely relevant form of conceptual and performative art
presentation (particularly of its documentary side). Naturally, the insti-
tution must accept the truth of what is taking place in contemporary
art trends, which means that the white cube must in a certain sense
open up and redefine itself as an educational and inclusive centre of
contemporary art. This entails the introduction of the necessary hard-
ware and communication links which would facilitate a suitable pres-
entation, life and enactment of contemporary art from the second half
of the last century.

ENDNOTES
1 Marko Pogačnik (b. 1944) is a sculptor, dedicated to the expanded field of
art. In 1971, he co-founded the agricultural and art community known as The
Šempas Family. Since 1979, he has been developing projects dedicated to
Earth healing. He developed the method of healing called ‘lithopuncture’, its
key manifestation being the signs called ‘cosmograms’. After 2004, he de-
veloped the concept of ‘geopuncture circles’, the extensive megalith com-
positions created together with his partners at different points of the world.
Since 2016, he has been active as a UNESCO Artist for Peace.
2 The history of OHO is not very long, but it is extremely rich and complex.
OHO has gone through many phases of development. Practically all the es-
sential aspects of its work have changed or modified: members, ideas, princi-
ples of organisation and artistic practice.
3 Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure
of post-war neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe and internationally ac-
claimed absurdist.
4 Iztok Geister (b. 1945) is a Slovenian writer, poet, essayist and ornithologist.
He is best known for his avant-garde poetry from the mid-1960s and 1970s.
5 Franci Zagoričnik (1933–1997) was a poet and essayist, one of the major ex-
ponents of the Slovene literary avant-garde of the sixties and is considered
one of the pioneers of concrete and visual poetry.
6 Drago (Braco) Rotar (1942) is a Slovenian sociologist, poet and essayist.
7 Taras Kermauner (1930–2008) was a Slovenian literary historian, critic, philos-
opher, essayist, playwright and translator.
8 The notion, based on the Latin word res (thing), was coined by Kermauner,
who first used it in an essay on Šalamun’s poetry. The idea of reism was then
further developed especially by Geister and Pogačnik, who became the main
‘ideologists’ of the OHO reism. They accepted the notion not only as the
name for a new artistic movement, but as the designation of a complex, the-
oretically based system which does not only define a specific aesthetic and
approach in art, but also affects even the smallest details of everyday life.

9 Naško Križnar (b. 1943) is an ethnologist and archaeologist. He was a mem-
ber of the OHO movement and founder and head of the Audio-Visual
Laboratory at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of
Sciences and Arts (1982).
10 Mienko Matanović (b. 1947) is an artist with a lifelong practice of collab-
oration. He was a founding member of the OHO. In 1986, he founded the
Pomegranate Center near Seattle, Washington, where he lives, on similar
principles.
11 Along with the OHO Book, “The OHO Manifesto” was published in 1966 in
the student newspaper Tribuna. The “OHO Manifesto” is not a manifesto
in the usual sense of the word. It does not declare the beginning of a new
movement nor its main aims and principles. It is very important for the un-
derstanding the ideas of the OHO members, but it was not intended as a dec-
laration of a programme. The appearance of the book OHO and the publica-
tion of the “OHO Manifesto” were not radically new steps, but rather a con-
tinuation of a rich and interesting activity that had started already in 1965, in
some respects even earlier, and has clearly reached the form of a connected,
albeit plural and heterogeneous movement.
12 L’Internationale is a confederation of modern and contemporary art institu-
tions focused on a non-hierarchical and decentralised internationalism.
13 For example, Ed Ruscha published his famous work Every Building on the
Sunset Strip in 1966.
14 Marjan Ciglič (b. 1944) is film and television director.
15 David Nez (b. 1949) is an artist, writer, astrologer and ritual magician. He was
a founding member of the OHO.

REFERENCE LIST
Rancière, J. 2015, “Skopje: Time, Narrative, and Politics”, Identities: Journal for
Politics, Gender and Culture, vol. 11, pp. 7–18, viewed 3 December 2021, http://
www.identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/article/view/291/203.
Zabel, I. 2007, “A Short History of OHO”, in Igor Španjol (ed.), OHO, Moderna
galerija, Ljubljana.

GLOSSARY OF
TERMS
314
ANATOLIAN KITSCH, in artist and director Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu’s terms, re-
ferred to plays (and performances), which use old conventions that
appeal to excessively sentimental or melodramatic emotions while
narrating Anatolia’s stories, legends and tales. According to old for-
mulae, a typical theatrical kitsch would be based on overly familiar
stories and be designed from the beginning with one purpose only:
to provoke superficial feelings and to offer something for anyone,
targeting the ‘second’ (collective) tear Milan Kundera points out in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In that sense, the Anatolian pla-
teau is full of inspiration that can count as a blessing and/or a curse
for a storyteller. According to Katırcıoğlu, it only appears as a bless-
ing if the director (the artist) would like to use the material in a way
to enrich, refresh or renew worn-out perspectives. (AA)
ANARCHIVE would be a useful and respectful term to collect in the muse-

um of those performative, processual or relational artistic practices
that were not conceived with the idea of being preserved, includ-
ing those that are developed in the expanded field of pedagogies
and activism. The anarchive defined by Nancy Garin (Anarchivo Sida)
would be ‘a way of subverting the archive on these practices that
resist oblivion, but also the order, administration and normalising
management of circulation, generating active, affected and affective
archives, archives localised, precarious and dissident archives, that
do not draw continuous lines, that admit gaps, silences, absences,
that respect the impossibility of archiving that these practices con-
tain in themselves’. On the other hand, Toni Serra, in his reflections
on the OVNI Archive, maintains that another of the tools provided by
the anarchive is its subjective intentionality and its collective nature.
315 Glossary of Terms

Unlike large archives, there is no purchase of funds, nor extractive
will, but a deposit that is created and self-managed in collaboration.
A place for consultation, meeting and discussion – ‘Not as a result of
an external gaze that fixes an object of study and analyses and clas-
sifies it, but as a rhizome of intertwined memories, which emanates
from the community and the ties it has established’.
References:
Nancy Garin is part of Anarchive Sida (AS). The definition is an extract of
a personal conversation from April 2022. Toni Serra (Abu Ali) was an artist
and founder of OVNI (Unidentified Video Observatory), www.desorg.org.
The quotes are from the article ‘Open the Vision’, Anarchivos, p. 13, Duar
Msuar, September 2016. (MR)
BREATHING ARCHIVE is a term introduced by visual and performance art-

ist Otobong Nkanga to describe an archive in which the conserved
live performance works evolve over time. In a breathing archive,
the works are not deprived of the air that keeps them breathing, as
Nkanga states, but have a life and shift in response to the amount
of oxygen there is in the space at the time. The breathing archive is
a living entity that always needs active care, as the archived materi-
als should be allowed to change as well. From this perspective, ar-
chiving does not mean taking the works out of circulation, leaving
behind only a series of tangible relics to be consulted once and in
a while. Instead, the rhizomatic web of which these works were al-
ready a part should be acknowledged and reinforced, expanding the
connections between material forms and embodied (re)activations.
(LB)
CUSTODIANSHIP is a way of supporting the long-term, ongoing performative

project by the art institution, without acquiring it for the collection.
It allows the involvement of the artist in the process of curatorial

and practical maintenance and preservation of the work and thus
offers a more flexible model than ownership. It is appropriate for the
open-ended projects which are activated by the artist and/or involve
the use of the work by constituents. It is especially well suited for
supporting vulnerable works, for example those in the public space,
with complicated legal status, within a dissonant political environ-
ment or costly maintenance. A good example of such a relationship
between the artist and the institution is the custodianship over the
iconic work of Polish public art Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue by
Joanna Rajkowska. (ZC)
FRUGALITY could be proposed to describe an ideological position of certain

artistic practices, among which performance is often found. We can
address frugal as a term that updates the critique of the use value –
of the material in the ‘povera’ concept – by including the relation-
ship between utility, desire and pleasure. We take this term from the
perspective opened by Franco Berardi when he says that ‘frugality
means focusing on the concrete usefulness (and pleasure) of things
and bodies. Capitalism is based on the transformation of objects and
bodies into signs of abstract value: the commodity. Consequently,
things and bodies are signs of value and we must consume more and
more to confirm our purchasing power. If social activity is aimed at
the accumulation of abstract value, satisfaction becomes impossible.
If we focus our attention on need and desire, we can create (frugal)
conditions of production aimed at satisfaction.’ (MR)
GESTURE in Mapa Teatro’s terms can be understood as the ‘artistic gesture’

or ‘poetic gesture’ that highlights the live dimension that underlies
the production of a work, be it material, audio-visual, conceptual or
performative. It takes into account whether it is the result of a com-
plex process of elaboration or a specific action inscribed in a particu-
lar context. The ‘gesture’ hinges on the commitment of the artist

as an initiator or mobiliser of the sensible and of meaning. It might
be the individual gesture, the body’s gesture, or it might be a collec-
tive gesture, a communal gesture made by several bodies or more.
In this sense, this is about multiple singularities becoming involved,
deriving from the flesh but also from memory and thought, in the
elaboration of a poetic response to a reality that affects them and
that must be subjected to displacements so that it may also affect
others, so that gestures can continue to be produced. The concept
of gesture has various genealogies. It refers to the everyday ges-
tures through which we express ourselves without words and which
are ephemeral and require co-presence. It refers to the action as a
mute-sign, as it appears, for example, in the work of Samuel Beckett.
Finally, it refers to the affective gesture, that sense that allows us to
qualify our actions as a ‘gesture of honesty’, a ‘gesture of generosi-
ty’ or a ‘gesture of resistance’. (JAS)
IDEOLOGY is a form of social consciousness. In the context of a bipolar world,

both modernism and socialist realism laid a claim to being universal-
ly valid. Eva Cockroft describes how innovative eastern art was used
to strengthen the position of the West, regardless of the actual role
and significance it had in its original context. During the Cold War,
Western art proclaimed itself a universal value, while modernist art-
ists in the East were considered representatives of a general artistic
approach; the particular contexts, meanings, and traditions in their
work were deemed unimportant. This stance was far from neutral: it
was closely bound to the ideologies of, and the power relations be-
tween, the two systems, as is evidenced by the cases of politics be-
coming directly involved in art. Thus, technology produces pure ide-
ology in artistic use, while in other uses it produces something else
as well. Rastko Močnik points out that this ‘something else’ is actu-
ally ideology in its purest form precisely because it looks natural and
self-evident. Also, the concept of the white cube in museum archi-

tecture is related to creating a specific atmosphere and an invisible
ideology which used to represent the noblest and most progressive
aspects of modernism. Its basic ideological functions and aesthetic
effects still work. (IS)
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT is a term that helps in understanding

Franz Erhard Walther’s case. The (re)activation of action-
based arts requires information and knowledge. An institution wants
to capture that. The challenging part is that knowledge cannot be
reduced to information. Information is the what, knowledge is the
how and why, the human abilities. Mathieu Weggeman (2000) in-
troduced the formula K = f(I * E S A): Knowledge is the sum of
Information (times Experience, Skills and Attitude), to show infor-
mation only becomes knowledge when it has been processed with
experience, skill and attitude. It is not information systems or books,
but people who are the greatest sources of knowledge in organisa-
tions. The knowledge gained in practice and from experience can of-
ten not be captured in a system. Information management is about
data, and ICT solutions contain data. Mikis de Winter observes that
managers like to focus on systems and processes as things are easier
to deal with than people. His advice on how to tap more effectively
into that knowledge would be to connect with the person through
dialogue – about their lessons from previous experiences, personal
skills and attitude. Sincere questions make knowledge come to life
and flow. (CK)
Reference:
2009, ‘Kennis, daar zitten twee benen onder: In gesprek met Mikis de
Winter’, in D. Depassé and E. La Roi, (eds), 15 praktijkverhalen over kennis-
management, Rotterdam, Essentials Media, 2009, in which they reference
Weggeman, M. 2000, Kennismanagement; de praktijk, Schiedam, Scriptum.

MODERNITY is an analytical concept and normative idea, globally dominant
and closely linked to the ethos of aesthetic modernism. In the cab-
inets of curiosities, the time of human creation and the time of na-
ture are identical and collected into some sort of fragmentary en-
cyclopaedia. It is this very incompleteness which made possible the
many layers of different world views, not governed by the rules
of scientific historiography. Supposedly, our world is inhabited by
abstract signs that no longer refer to some tangible reality, or, as
Douglas Crimp put it, we only experience reality through images.
Due to the dynamic nature of the political and economic systems
and the accelerated flow of information, it is no longer possible to
uphold the rough division between an intellectual, chronological or-
der of the measurable world and the subconscious, subjective and
emotional nature of the creative process. Today more than ever be-
fore, art is a productive part of social and economic exchange. (IS)
MULTISENSORY is a term that relates to a series of questions. How sounds

and words can make the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end
and put you in a state of alert; how a scent can evoke someone’s
presence and appeal to deep-seated emotions and even spread
chemical signals; how fingertips are stimulated by the sight of a pho-
to of tree bark – this network of (un)conscious information is trig-
gered by sensory stimuli that makes new connections or rewrites
existing ones. The more connections, the more comprehensive the
impression, the more value this experience can have and the greater
it can influence thinking and behaviour. If this knowledge is applied
to the museum as a social powerhouse, a multisensory presenta-
tion of artworks can act as a catalyst for the intended transforma-
tive power of art. By providing multiple entrances to an artwork, you
help visitors with special physical or sensory characteristics, as well
as others, to engage with the artwork. Displaying a finished object

outside its original context can be hermetic for the visitor. By provid-
ing a sensory context, that barrier can be dissolved. By activating art
multisensorially, art activates the visitor. (CK)
NON-HUMAN ACTOR is a term borrowed from Bruno Latour’s actor network

theory, which he uses to describe the specific agency of things that
have an impact on their surroundings. For him objects are in fact
complex networks of material, symbolic and social entities, not mere
tools or props in the hands of humans. It is well suited to describ-
ing artistic objects in the collections that unveil their performative
nature by the way they provoke active spectatorship. The theatri-
cal metaphor used by the sociologist catches the double meaning
of both being active and acting – playing changing roles, rather than
sticking to the artist’s initial idea. It can be useful for reinterpreting
the collections from the perspective of performance studies and
finding the proper methodology to preserve evolving works such as
public or community art projects or post-artistic practices (relating
to the concept of ‘arte util’). (ZC)
POETICS IN THE DOMESTIC in performance art means bringing the art realm
into the domestic. The exploration of ordinary everyday life and the
transformation of routine actions into symbolic acts created a meth-
odology for María Teresa Hincapié practice. Art became the guide
for her existence, not only providing a framework for the artist’s cre-
ativity but also influencing her ethics and understanding of politics.
Moreover, María Teresa Hincapié understood the planet as a home,
therefore the poetics of the domestic affect the relationship be-
tween nature and humans. The planet is an extension of what is inti-
mate and needs to be taken care of. (CS)
PROTOTYPE is used by visual and performance artist Otobong Nkanga to refer

to archival materials belonging to live performance works that can

evolve over time and space, according to changing political, climatic,
social or personal circumstances. A prototype is an archival material
or prop that is not fixed but can be reproduced, recycled, adapted or
reworked according to the variable performer or changing context.
Prototypes can be material relics but can also be digital information
or digitised material that serves as instructions for imagining past
performances, for reinventing a work in a renewed context, or for
being informative in itself. (LB)
TRAINING is a term used by a Colombian artist María Teresa Hincapié, who

was active in the 1980s and 1990s. She had a very particular defini-
tion of the performative which she used to call: ‘training’. Hincapié
was coming from the poorly finance theatre and was an actress at
Acto Latino (from 1978 to 1985), which she abandoned, exhausted
by the game of representation that was unable to channel her ex-
pressive urgency – which is allowed by other genres such as dance
or accommodated by more hybrid spaces such as the exhibition.
María Teresa Hincapié developed an artistic practice which resisted
specific categorisation, instead, oscillating between life, creation in
movement and the search for the mystical. (CS)
VARIATION is a term used by Mapa Teatro from a music context. A musical

variation is a composition consisting of several associated parts
where the same theme is repeated in different forms, as sub-themes
or variations, but maintains the same harmonic pattern. Mapa
Teatro’s processes of creation are not chronological, sequential
or linear. Each project may be taken up years after it was initiated,
even if it seems the project has been fully formalised or closed. This
occurs when new archives, images or narrating bodies are found,
which reactivate the artistic powers of the project in another way, as
if a new musical tone, or variation, were emerging. In this sense, it is
about establishing a relationship with time, with the times required

by the material found and produced. This spiral-like creative process
allows new works to be developed while previous ones are taken
up again and updated or amplified through new resonances. This is
done through dynamic and organic forms, such as a live body that
continues to grow, producing mutations, vibrations and variations.
A previous stage work might become a radio piece, a work of cine-
matography or an installation; and an installation can be activated
live afterwards. The entirety produces something like an orchestra-
tion, full of theatricality. (LH)

ABOUT
THE AUTHORS
324
AMIRA AKBIYIKOĞLU is since 2008 a programmer at SALT in
Istanbul. In 2019, she co-curated Our Blissful Souvenirs, the most
comprehensive exhibition of Nur Koçak. In 2021, she contributed
to the Ipek Duben retrospective The Skin, Body and I, together with
Vasıf Kortun, Farah Aksoy (SALT) and Sezin Romi (SALT). She is cur-
rently working on a research project focusing on performance art
history in Turkey beginning with the late 1980s and going through
the 1990s.
PERSIS BEKKERING is a writer. Her recent publications and projects

include essays, art criticism and fiction in Dutch and English. Her
debut novel Een heldenleven (The Life of a Hero), published in 2018
with Prometheus, was shortlisted for the ANV Debutantenprijs.
In 2021, her second novel Exces followed, of which an excerpt is
published in English translation by the Jan Van Eyck Academy in
Maastricht, titled Last Utopia. She teaches creative writing at ArtEZ
University of the Arts in Arnhem (NL).
LOTTE BODE is a researcher and journalist. She conducts research

on archiving performance art within an institutional framework at
the Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV), an organisation working
autonomously at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M
HKA). She has published in Performance Research journal. Bode holds
a master’s in theatre and film studies and a master’s in journalism.
She also works as cultural journalist at the Flemish public broadcast
station VRT, for which she creates content on the Flemish literary
scene, prepares and provides interviews and background stories on
the Flemish arts scene and co-creates video series about artists.
325 About the Authors

ZOFIA CZARTORYSKA is a curator, researcher and international pro-
jects manager at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She gradu-
ated with a degree in arts management from Maastricht University,
and in art history and sociology at the University of Warsaw. She is a
co-curator of the critically acclaimed exhibitions Why We Have Wars:
The Art of Modern-day Outsiders at MSN, Warsaw and I’m No Longer
the Dog at the Silesian Museum in Katowice, among others. She was
part of the research project Lifting the Curtain: Central European
Architectural Networks, presented at the 14th Venice Architecture
Biennale. In the past, she worked as a broadcast journalist for Polish
Radio. She is a recipient of the Huyghens Scholarship of the Dutch
Government and the Prize of the Gessel Foundation.
CLÉMENTINE DELISS is Global Humanities Professor of History of

Art at the University of Cambridge and an associate curator at KW –
Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where she directs the
Metabolic Museum-University. Her practice crosses the borders of
contemporary art, curatorial experimentation and critical anthro-
pology. Between 2010–15, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum
in Frankfurt, instituting a new lab for post-ethnographic research.
She was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study Berlin and
has taught art theory and curatorial practice at the École nation-
ale supérieur d’arts de Paris-Cergy, Karlsruhe University of Arts
and Design and the Hamburg University of the Arts. Her book The
Metabolic Museum was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production
with KW (2020), and in Russian translation with Garage Publishing
(2021).
LOLA HINOJOSA has been Head of the Performing and Intermedia

Arts Collection at the Reina Sofía Museum since 2014. She joined
that institution in 2006 to participate in the creation of the Film and
Video Collection. Her main fields of research are performance art,

moving image and gender theory, on which she has published nu-
merous articles. She has curated exhibitions such as Fictions and
Territories: Art to Think the New Reason for the World (co-curator,
Museo Reina Sofía and MUNTREF Buenos Aires, 2016–17); Secret
Lives: The Author through Objects (Community of Madrid, 2018)
and Ignacio Gómez de Liaño: Forsaking Writing (Museo Reina Sofía,
2019–20).
CHANTAL KLEINMEULMAN works at the Department of Collections,

Library & Archives in Van Abbemuseum. She is closely involved in
the acquisition process of the art collection, recording artwork
information and making it available to the public. She’s current-
ly working on digitising the collection archive and researching ac-
cessibility and functionality of performance documentation. She
researched and co-wrote the catalogue raisonné Ian Wilson: The
Discussions (2008) and has contributed to collection publications.
BOJANA KUNST is a philosopher, dramaturge and performance

theoretician. She works as a professor at the Institute for Applied
Theatre Studies in Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she is
leading an international master’s programme in Choreography
and Performance. She worked as a researcher at the University
of Ljubljana and University of Antwerp (until 2009) and later as a
guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2009–12). She has
lectured and organised seminars, workshops and laboratories in
different academic institutions, theatres and artistic organisations
across Europe, and has worked continuously with the independ-
ent artistic initiatives, artists, groups and activists. Her research
interest is in contemporary performance and dance, art theory
and philosophy of contemporary art. She has published Artist at
Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism (2015) and The Life of Art:
Transversal Lines of Care (2021).

JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ is an essayist and professor at the University
of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM, Cuenca, Spain). He is author of
Brecht y el expresionismo (Brecht and the Expressionism, 1992),
Dramaturgias de la imagen (Dramaturgies of Images, 1994), Práctias
de lo real (2007; Eng., Practicing the Real [2014]), Ética de la repre-
sentación (2016; Eng., The Bodies of Others [2022]). He is a founder
of the ARTEA, and the master’s in Performance Practice and Visual
Culture (UCLM and Museo Reina Sofía). He curated projects such
as Desviaciones (Madrid, 2001, together with Blanca Calvo and La
Ribot), Situaciones (Cuenca, 1999–2002), Jerusalem Show (Palestine,
2011, together with Lara Khaldi). He directed the performance
The Words of Others, of León Ferrari, together with Ruth Estévez
and Juan Ernesto Díaz (Los Angeles, 2017). http://blog.uclm.es/
joseasanchez/.
CLAUDIA SEGURA is a curator and cultural producer based in

Barcelona, where she is a curator of exhibitions and collections
at MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) since 2019.
She was director and chief curator of NC-arte in Bogotá, Colombia
(2015–19); a coordinator of cultural initiatives at the Fundació ‘la
Caixa’, Barcelona (2010–12); and an external curator of the Mardin
Biennial, Turkey (2014–15). She was mentor of the Sala d’Art Jove,
Barcelona (2014) and at the Cano Laboratory at the Art Museum of
the National University of Colombia (2018). She was editorial coordi-
nator of Florae 2015, the magazine of Flora ars + natura, Bogotá, and
she writes regularly for diverse specialised arts platforms. Segura is
part of various research platforms including De vuelta y vuelta and
Para abrir boca.
IGOR ŠPANJOL studied sociology of culture and art history at the

Faculty of Arts, University in Ljubljana. He has been working as a cu-
rator at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana since 1999. Significant

projects include a trilogy of Slovenian art from 1975–2005 (with
Igor Zabel), an exhibition of the collection of the Museum of
Contemporary Art Metelkova (with Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana
Piškur), Crises and New Beginnings: Art in Slovenia 2005–2015 (with
Bojana Piškur and Vladimir Vidmar) and retrospectives by Tomaž
Lavrič, Marko Peljhan, Marko Pogačnik, Tadej Pogačar, Vadim
Fishkin and Tobias Putrih. He was a curator of the Slovenian Pavilion
at the Venice Biennale 2019.
MYRIAM RUBIO studied visual arts at the University of Barcelona

and at the Winchester School of Arts, University of Southampton,
as well as a postgraduate degree in aesthetics and art theory at the
Instituto de Estética de Madrid (UAM). Her research interest focus-
es on performance, processual art and collective methodologies in
contemporary art. She currently works as a curator of academic pro-
grammes and assistant researcher at the Museum of Contemporary
Art of Barcelona (MACBA) where she has worked in different roles.
She was a coordinator of Exhibitions and Collection Departments
(2019–21), and academic coordinator of the Independent Studies
Program (PEI, 2011–18), under the direction of Xavier Antich, Paul
B. Preciado, Marcelo Expósito and Pablo Martínez. She previously
worked in Public Programs (2000–11) with Jorge Ribalta in the pro-
gramming, production and diffusion of projects related to public
programmes, exhibitions, cinema and education.
JOANNA ZIELIŃSKA is an art historian and performance curator.

The ideas of performative exhibition and performative artwork
are fundamental in her curatorial research. Her practice is centred
around theatre, performance, performative literature and the vi-
sual arts. She is also interested in stirring a discussion on the iden-
tity and activity of twenty-first-century museums. This approach is
less bounded by a physical space than by the idea of community,

the influence of new media and the public sphere. Currently, she is
working as senior curator at M HKA Antwerp. In 2015–20, she was
the head of the Performing Arts Department at the Ujazdowski
Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She is also the for-
mer chief curator at Cricoteka, the Centre for the Documentation of
the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Kraków, Poland and the former artis-
tic director at the Znaki Czasu Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA)
in Toruń, Poland. Since 2011, she has been working on a long-term
research project on the artist’s novel, in collaboration with Spanish
artist David Maroto. Its central question is how a literary genre such
as the novel becomes a medium in the visual arts.

331
PERFORMING Project Leader:
L’Internationale
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COLLECTIONS editorial policy, the publisher is at
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Published by
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www.internationaleonline.org
This publication extends the
Graphic Design: discussions begun during a
2022
Fontarte / Artur Frankowski, number of physical and online
Magdalena Frankowska meetings held with the mem-
ISBN 978-91-527-1341-9
bers of the collection work-
Copy-Editing: group of the project Our Many
Managing Editor:
Aaron Bogart Europes (2018–2022). We would
Joanna Zielińska
like to acknowledge their con-
Coordination: tribution to this publication of:
Authors:
Aleksandra Urbańska Amira Akbıyıkoğlu, Tanya Barson,
Zofia Czartoryska, Sebastian
Persis Bekkering
Translations: Cichocki, Lola Hinojosa, Agar
Lotte Bode
Sandra F. Kileen (translation from Ledo, Chantal Kleinmeulman,
Zofia Czartoryska
Spanish of the text “Variation on Isabel de Naverán, Rosario
Clémentine Deliss
the Unaccounted: A Triptych by Peiró, Bojana Piškur, Myriam
Lola Hinojosa
Mapa Teatro”) Rubio, José Antonio Sánchez,
Elaine Fradley (translation from Claudia Segura, Igor Španjol,
Bojana Kunst
Spanish of the text “(Dis)appear- Katia Szczeka, Aleksandra Ur-
Myriam Rubio
ing without a Trace: A Case Study bańska, Jan de Vree and Joanna
José A. Sánchez
of Maria Teresa Hincapié” and Zielińska.
Claudia Segura
“What a Museum Can (Not) Do”)
Igor Španjol
Anda Macbride
Joanna Zielińska
With support of the Creative
Cover Photo: Europe Programme of the
Artists:
Courtesy of Otobong Nkanga, European Union
The Circo Interior Bruto
From Where I Stand: Glimmer,
Co-Op Festival
2015.Installation view at M HKA.
Mapa Teatro
Photo: Christine Clinckx
María Teresa Hincapié
Otobong Nkanga
Special Thanks: The European Commission’s sup-
OHO
Katia Szczeka port for the production of this
Ria Pacquée
publication does not constitute
Joanna Rajkowska
The publisher would like to thank an endorsement of the contents,
La Ribot
all those who have kindly given which reflects the views only of
Franz Erhard Walther
their permission for the repro- the authors, and the Commission
Among others
duction of material for this book. cannot be held responsible for
Every effort has been made to any use which may be made of
obtain permission to reproduce the information contained therein.
332
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Slovenia); Museo Reina Sofía and together with them is pre-
(Madrid, Spain); MACBA, senting the programme Our
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Many Europes.
333
334

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PERFO

24 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE PERFORMANCE

122 SOME THINGS LAST A LONG TIME: THE CASE OF

178 HOW TO DESCRIBE WHAT A MIRROR LOOKS LIKE?

200 (DIS)APPEARING WITHOUT A TRACE:

222 WHAT A MUSEUM CAN (NOT) DO: PERFORMING

250 VARIATION ON THE UNACCOUNTED: A TRIPTYCH,

276 FRAGMENTS OF A CO-OP FESTIVAL

298 OHO – BETWEEN THE MAGIC OF DIGITISATION

314 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

324 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

What is the content of the book?

The publication Performing Collections, compiled in three parts, brings

When did it all start?

One important reference point for Performing Collections is the tem-

Nowadays, one speaks time and again about the theatralization

Suddenly there is a ‘discovery’ of different ‘contemporary histo-

Performance and Performativity

Performativity itself extends the notion of performance. It is a fea-

From this perspective, then, what seems important is not so

When I talk about performance, I refer to the whole series of

The publication Performing Collections is intended to broaden the re-

Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow

Breathing and Oxygenation or the Metabolism of the Contemporary

Many discussions today concern the role of the museums in the

Collecting is more than just a way of transmitting knowledge; it

What labour is needed to have a performance collection? Should

Where Is the Work, or a New Working Methodology?

In times of transformation, a fundamental question remains to be

The traditional, static model of the Western museum reproduces co-

Bojana Kunst: There is no coincidence that we are starting this

25 What Does It Mean to Have...

27 What Does It Mean to Have...

29 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: The idea of nomadic performance is not so much connected to the

BK: The first approach to this question would maybe to go back

31 What Does It Mean to Have...

35 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: I looked into the collections of different museums, through our

37 What Does It Mean to Have...

BZ: Maybe we have to first start with the question of what do

JZ: We should also mention that digitisation has become an important

41 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: What do you mean by that?

BK: It is not only ephemerality which causes the difficulty to

43 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: We have to consider whether this idea of preservation makes sense

45 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: In my research, I’m trying to look for different ways of collecting

BK: We return to the problem of what it means to keep perfor-

47 What Does It Mean to Have...

JZ: I realised that while we develop various performance strategies,

BK: … and the notion of labour. This is often forgotten, the

1 See the website http://badco.hr/en/home/.

Azoulay, A. 2019, “Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism”, Verso, London.

49 What Does It Mean to Have...

La Ribot: At the age of fourteen I began my training as a clas-

LH: Tell us about the Piezas distinguidas series.

La Ribot: The Piezas distinguidas were and are short or very