Breathing Air into the Archive

Abstract

Museums are increasingly interested in acquiring and preserving live performance art pieces even if it confronts them with tantalizing dilemmas. Still too often, performance art is forced into rigid formats or pre-existing cataloguing systems that take the life out of the work, turning it into a reified relic. In this contribution, we ask how cultural institutions like museums and archives can breathe life back into the performance art they aim to preserve and present. We argue that a profoundly dialogic interaction with the artworks and, if possible, with the artists is one of the primary conditions to achieve this goal. To develop this claim, we focus on the performance practice of the Nigerian-born and Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga, who herself reached out to the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MHKA) to examine how her performances could enter into the collection of the museum while ensuring their afterlife would still be alive. Central in our discussion stands ‘the breathing archive’, a notion the artist herself mentioned in one of the interviews we conducted with her. We demonstrate how the breathing archive serves as a particularly productive figure to rethink the museal incorporation of performance art practices like Nkanga's as it makes fairly unusual connections between performance, air and archivization. Moreover, this approach exposes the need to supplement archival theories mainly developed by Western thinkers with decolonial strands of thought. Especially relevant in this respect is the work of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and the African American artist-theorist Ashon T. Crawley who – much in line with Nkanga's poetics – each foreground breath as a driving force for humankind and creative imagination. This article ultimately reveals how breathing air into the archive is a deeply political project that requires our attention perhaps more than ever.

Notes

1 For a useful overview of the ongoing debates on the inclusion of live performance art in museal and archival collections, both from an institutional and scholarly point of view, see Giannachi and Westerman 2018.

2 In his essay ‘Progressive striptease’ (2012 [2006]) art critic and curator Sven Lütticken offers an insightful demystification of live performance art’s initial aspirations to escape from the capitalist values, such as progress and novelty, driving the art market.

3 Since 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) has been host to the Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV), which was established as an autonomous organization within the museum in order to develop an active archiving policy by offering to artists or to their heirs the required expertise and practical services for archiving their legacies. Otobong Nkanga’s request to collaborate with M HKA to archive a selection of her performances was an important impulse for CKV to initiate a research trajectory on the archivization of live performance art.

4 Nkanga’s use of a score was inspired by Allan Kaprow, who created texts that captured only the ‘central metaphor’ of his happenings, in order for them to be ‘reinvented’ according to the changing circumstances. Nkanga herself reinvented Kaprow’s Baggage and called her version Baggage 1972.2007/08.

5 The installation Taste of a Stone and the performance Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok were both presented at the courtyard of the Bait Khalid Ibrahim Heritage Area. The phrase ‘Itiat Esa Ufok’ references the location because in Ibibio, Nkanga’s mother tongue, it means ‘the stones of a courtyard’.

6 Even though we are not exploring Otobong Nkanga’s work from the angle of new materialism here, it may be obvious that her practice has much to offer to the current interest from other artists as well as scholars in foregrounding the agency of matter as an ethical incentive to recalibrate the position of humankind within the environment.

7 The clearest sign that ongoing debates on the archive are primarily Western-oriented can be found in the fact that Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s theorizations of the archive (resp. 2002 [1969] and 1996) are in most cases the main point of reference. This centrality of both Foucault and Derrida in the critical discourse on the archive is corroborated by Marlene Manoff’s synthetic overview of how the archive moved to the centre of attention in the humanities from the late 1990s (see Manoff 2004).

8 As a part of a broader modernization trend, immaterial cultural heritage is increasingly being digitalized and made public, for example through UNESCO’s inventory programmes. Without denying the importance of such endeavours, Susan Keitumetse warns that sharing the heritage of African communities must entail that they themselves benefit from this, especially since Western concepts like ‘intellectual property’ are much less institutionalized there (Keitumetse 2006, 2019).

9 In Soziales Vergessen (Social Forgetting), Elena Esposito argues that the main feature of modern memory is forgetting, as exemplified, for instance, by the fact that archive or library catalogues provide entrances to information without containing the actual information in themselves (Esposito 2002). For a similar perspective on the role of forgetting in the digital age, see Mayer-Schönberger 2009.

10 For more on the antagonistic relationship between history and memory, see Cubitt 2007.

11 Two significant anthologies that critically explore the role of the archive in performance art and dance in the wake of artistic re-enactment are Jones and Heathfield 2012 and Franko 2017.

12 For a more elaborate discussion of participatory archives, see De Laet 2020b.1

13 For a more extensive critique on Derrida’s theorization of the archive and a further elaboration of the notion of the anarchive, see De Laet 2020a.