Visual Pasts, Material Presents, Archival Futures: Postcolonial Temporalities in the Making

Description

Panel 1: Creative Encounters: Contemporary Practice at Work With the Colonial
Paper: Freeing the archive from the Archive: Visualising, Performing and Reading Archives Outside of their Walls


In May 2024, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (FC) in Paris hosted a one-week event in partnership with TheCentre for the Less Good Idea (TCLGI), an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace based in Johannesburg. Throughout the week, TCLGI workshopped and created alongside people from theUniversité Paris 8 – Vincennes, the musée départemental Albert-Khan (mdA-K, Boulogne, France) and the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (mqB-JC, Paris) both during private sessions and public shows. This Parisian multi-institutional gathering allowed all parties to explore, engage and experiment with the possibilities given by the encounter of performance and colonial archives. Thanks to the use of the Pepper’s Ghost, a 19th century illusionary optic theatrical invention allowing to make ghosts appear on stage, TCLGI was playing with various realms and temporalities in order to unravel the various stories kept in these archives. Furthermore, in conjunction with singing, dancing and live music, thePepper’s Ghost was a means to giving new dimensions to the Archive which was not stored away, but experienced collectively.
By looking at these collective and collaborative encounters between archives, artists and public, I wish to interrogate the importance of taking the archives outside of their institutional walls in order to open up the ways in which people and institutions engage with and consider archival collections. I want to explore the potentialities created by the encounter of archives with performative arts in a space akin to a buffer zone – here the Fondation Cartier –, enabling, at least temporarily, for archives to be freed from their institutional weights thanks to the various remedial methodologies that were performed in a space untainted by their legacies.

Period	19 May 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	Norwich, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International