From intangibility to materiality and back again: preserving Portuguese performance artworks from the 1970s

Performance art has seen growing incorporation in museum collections in the last decade, and yet Conservation is still struggling to find methods to conserve these artworks, which resist acts of containement. In the context of the present research, three problems hampering progress in the conservation of performance art were identified: (1) Conservation’s scope is often seen in opposition to the nature of performance artworks, (2) there is a lack of an epistemological analysis of Conservation’s documentation methodologies, and (3) there are difficulties in managing the artwork’s networks in institutional contexts. The third problem is beyond the scope of this thesis, as this project was undertaken outside an institutional setting. This thesis therefore sheds light on the first two issues by drawing on agential realism (Karen Barad 2007), an epistemological lens which considers that every act of knowing implies material and discursive entanglements within every agent involved. To answer the first problem, a relational ontology of Conservation, which considers that Conservation practice, instead of being associated only with tangible objects, constitutes and is coconstituted by material-discursive practices, is proposed. Following this reasoning the act of conservation is then presented as a set of decisions, which vary in scale and produce materialisations of artistic manifestations. This thesis argues that cultural heritage works, including performance art, are thus always intangible until being materialised by heritage practices, which are characterised by specific ways of seeing, or measurements. In this sense it will be demonstrated that performance art, instead of existing only in the present, exists in various material ways, which are recursively disseminated over time through practices of memorialisation. To understand the second problem, two performance artworks created in the 1970s by Portuguese artists have been documented for the first time in this thesis. The case study analyses demonstrate how current methodologies are focused on perfomance-based art’s materials instead of its materiality and how that process increases the number of exclusions in the documentation process. Exclusions are then explained as acts of affirmation of the dominant cultural and political discourse and, in that sense, contribute to the invisibility of counter-narratives which not only co-constitute but are an intentional part of the fabric of performance artworks. Aside from implying a constant delimitation in the materialisation of these works, exclusions also immortalise social injustices in the form of, for example, community misrecognition. Participation, understood in the broad sense as an act of yielding authority, is proposed as a way to materialise performance artworks while reducing the exclusions that occur in every documentation process. This thesis argues that a dislocation of authority to peripheral stakeholders is not a loss of authorial power, but a way to multiply the instances of the work in multiple body-archives. An outcome of this dissertation, is a proposal and detailed outline for an innovative methodology for documenting performance art works

What Remains? Dancing in the Archaeological Museum

This research project is an investigation into the various negotiations of temporality that occur when dance enters the museum space. Above all, it aims to probe shifting experiences of temporality when choreography performs as museum exhibit, most specifically when these performances take place within the museum of ancient art and archaeology. Research questions include how we might consider the dance (or the dancer) in the archaeological museum as a counter-archive or, to use performance theorist Rebecca Schneider’s (2001, 2011) reworking of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s term, as a site of ‘counter-memory.’ If and when dance in the museum does become a site of counter-memory, might it then allow new visibility for those bodies - specifically those female bodies - previously misrepresented or rendered partially invisible by history? My thesis argues that live dance performance in the museum possesses the potential to articulate the gaps, the intervallic spaces, between temporalities. My thinking here conflates and expands two recent ideas – Rebecca Schneider’s theorizing on performance as ‘perhaps another word for the intervallic’ (Schneider 2016) and Georgina Guy’s idea of the ‘lacuna’ between the performed and displayed which may be ‘encountered anew and imagined through acts of theatre, exhibition and curation’ (Guy 2015: 184) in the museum. By offering a space to allow for gaps or lacunae to appear, the dancing body in the museum opens up a space for other stories, other histories, to surface. As Tony Bennett (1995) reminds us, the museum is a training-ground to think about temporality, to think about time, differently: dance in the archaeological museum may then be considered a means to think about history differently. This project situates itself firmly in the context of UK and continental European dance and performance studies yet, being naturally interdisciplinary, it also mines the fields of museum studies, ancient history, archaeology, and classical studies. Shifting between the positions of academic, choreographer and dancer, and between critical discourse and the poetic voices of practice, I adopt a collective methodology of a critical analysis review, based on an integration of i) hermeneutic phenomenology after French philosopher Paul Ricœur’s explorations of time and narrative (1983, 1984, 1985, 2004) and ii) feminist inquiry, building on a re-interrogation of a vast body of scholarship in classics and in dance / performance studies in relation to the gaze; as well as a practice-as-research approach. Dance practice is at the heart of this thesis, in the creation and performance of the solo durational choreographic work Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments) for the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Through the practice, I ask how choreography, like archaeology, allows us to excavate the body and the past. Is this a practice about remembering - or dismembering - an ancient form? What happens when this re-/dismembering is put on display and exhibited in the museum? Through examining processes of dismembering and remembering, I claim dance performance in the museum as the ‘fragmentary monumental,’ an action that might be able to resituate women on the inside of power but on their own terms, and, eventually, to enable an alternative means of viewing history

Making the Maldives: exploring how the body holds cultural knowledge

This research explores the weaving culture of the Maldives by focusing on the islands’ traditional embroidery called kasabu viyun. It uses ethnographic information collected during fieldwork in 2018 to explain why it is important to safeguard methods as much as the objects created. It does this by arguing that through the culturally structured physical processes involved in making kasabu, culture and the body are woven together to create an aspect of gendered cultural identity that is not visible in the finished items. By showing how the threads of knowing, body movements and culture tie together in practice, this research will also illustrate how anthropological methods of research can be used in other disciplines - such as heritage - to recognise these intangible elements and the importance of documenting culture for the purpose of preserving and safeguarding it

Heritagising the everyday : the case of Muyuge

Ever since the commencement of the new millennium, intangible cultural heritage, the cultural concept and campaign promoted by the UNESCO has rapidly spread the world. In China, thousands of traditional cultures and everyday practices have been absorbed into the intangible heritage system over the past decade, which is reshaping people\u27s perception and engagement with everyday life and traditions. Intangible cultural heritage as an \u27imported\u27 concept has been highly localised and resituated in contemporary China. I seek to examine how intangible heritage as a prevalent cultural phenomenon incorporates everyday practices into regional and national narratives in China in light of the marketization of traditional culture and the political and cultural agenda of \u27the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation\u27. Furthermore, I attempt to historicise the concept of heritage in China\u27s history of modernisation especially since around the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Through the historicised approach, I aim to demystify the imaginary of heritage and interrogate how cultural heritage turns from something to be reformed in the revolutionary era to something to be \u27protected\u27 and \u27preserved\u27 in the consumer society. Under such scope, l examine in detail the changes of mwywge (木鱼歌),a former popular everyday practice in the Pearl River Delta area, as it successively becomes an intangible heritage ofthe provincial and national levels. Despite its prevalence, muyuge was peripheral, marginalised in the both the cultural and geographical senses. I contextualise muyuge in the economic restructuring of the Pearl River Delta area and analyse the process of an everyday practice being reconstructed as an intangible heritage. Based on fieldwork interviews, policy analysis and media analysis, I particularly examine the reconstruction of muyuge\u27s performing practices, the reshaping of muyuge practitioners and its connection with the restructuring of an industrial town. I argue that intangible heritage is gradually replacing previous values and understanding of folk culture with ideas of capital, market and nationalistic identities, and that the autonomy of everyday life has been dissolved and re-incorporated into the dominant discourse

New Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Cultural Heritage Studies: Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage in the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018

Inspired by the announcement of a European Year of Cultural Heritage, the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage (ESACH) was established in 2017 by students at the University of Passau. Today, ESACH has become the first still-growing interdis-ciplinary and cross-generational network in the field. ESACH cur-rently brings together young researchers in the field of culture and heritage from all kinds of academic disciplines and is made up of members from various European universities and research centres, such as the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Property Law at the University of Opole (Poland) thanks to Dr. Alicja Jagielska-Burduk. ESACH’s main goal is to highlight the perspective of the younger generations with regard to cultural issues of European and national importance. Where various cultural institutions already show interest in collaborating with younger generations, we aim to establish a mutual exchange and active involvement as future decision makers. Within the network, the main questions are: How do we engage with the past elements of our culture(s)? How and why do we protect culture as a genuine element of a contemporary cultural system? What do younger generations state as heritage and what ways do they see to safeguard and experience it? ESACH stands up for a participatory way of involvement and is eager to take part in the cultural discourse at European and national levels. Until now ESACH members have been given the opportunity to contribute their ideas in several European events organized by the respective stakeholders. In June 2018, the ESACH Message as part of the “Student Summit” was presented during the high-level policy debate on the occasion of the Berlin European Cultural Heritage Summit. Present, amongst others, were Monika Grütters, Minister of State and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Germany) and Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport (Hungary). In November 2018, ESACH has been actively involved in the annual meetings of the German Cultural Heritage Committee and the Swedish National Heritage Board in Strasbourg and Stockholm. This book brings together fifteen articles by twenty-two authors from Portugal, Germany, Spain, Greece, Brazil, USA, Romania and Turkey. This sharing of knowledge, culture and heritage studies through various disciplines shows the richness – and new perspectives – generated by the common passion for cultural heritage. The new perspectives and the sharing feeling are also present in both images on the cover. The "view of Lisbon" (Portugal) was drawn in the sixteenth century; it shows a disappeared Lisbon through the eyes and the colours of a German engraver. In the “Azulejo (tile) wainscot” we have the perfect example of foreign influences in the artistic creation of a Portuguese painter. These reinterpreted decorative patterns were affirmed over centuries as a feature of Portuguese identity. In the words of the “Berlin Call to Action”, we fervently hope that “The 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage marks a turning point for Europe’s ever-growing movement for cultural heritage. We must build on this momentum to recognize and unfold the positive and cohesive power of our shared cultural heritage and values to connect Europe’s citizens and communities and to give a deeper meaning to the entire European project. The time for action is now.”info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ways of feeling: The transformation of emotional experience in music listening in the context of digitisation

This dissertation argues that digitisation and Internet technologies are changing the emotional experience of music listening and explores the ways in which they may do so. I have conducted a cyberethnography of Internet users and perform a language analysis of their experiences. I synthesise this approach with the field of somatechnics, in order to understand the body as always-already positioned in relation to the techno-social schema

Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

Conversing tradition : Wagilak manikay 'song' and the Australian Art Orchestra's Crossing Roper Bar

This thesis is an exploration of tradition as event in the present, realised through the dynamic expressions of manikay (song) in contemporary contexts. Particular focus is given to the collaboration between Wagilak songmen from Ngukurr in Australia's Northern Territory and the Australian Art Orchestra, known as Crossing Roper Bar. Inquiry into various musicological, performative, narrative, philosophical and historical aspects of Wagilak song and Crossing Roper Bar, draws together abundant examples supporting the thesis that tradition exists as a dynamic interplay, a conversation, between the past and the present, between individual subjects and situations, and amid ongoing iterations of performance. Through involved, creative articulation, tradition is known and sustained into the future. This is true of conservative performance contexts and those dramatically envisioned. Crossing Roper Bar is a laudable approach to musical engagement amid diversity in Australia and this thesis documents some of the history, intentions and achievements of the project. Descriptions of the differing musical cultures of individuals involved mirrors my exploration of tradition as substantiating, effective history (Gadamer) shaping our horizons of performance. Consecutively, the creative possibilities of unique, vocative expression within orientations of situation and orthodox form are also appraised. A dynamic picture of tradition as discursive play emerges, engaging individuals amid an excess of perspectives, forms, motivations, contexts and technologies. Musical and contextual analysis is directed by an interpretation of the Yolngu hermeneutic of tradition resonant with philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. This allows the development of an explicit understanding of Crossing Roper Bar as a part of Yolngu ceremonial tradition, present articulations of performance shown to be legitimate iterations within an ongoing, orienting ancestral groove. Challenging prevalent notions of intangible culture, such tradition is not ossified heritage: the ancestral text is known as it is tangibly engaged and disclosed within the lives of present generations. Investigation into the musical and personal interactions between different individuals and cultures in Crossing Roper Bar begins from musical analysis that pursues: textures of sound, textures of situation and layered media; the animation of musical forms; the vocative expression of individuals. This thesis draws on diverse sources including extensive fieldwork and ongoing relationships with the Young Wagilak Group and the Australian Art Orchestra, as well as the writings of Yolngu leaders and other academics. The conversation generated presents, itself, an image of discursive engagement with diverse perspectives - a key motivation behind the Crossing Roper Bar collaboration. Subsequently, a rich demonstration of tradition emerges as something more vocative than essentialist, as something that speaks uniquely into our lives and is simultaneously sustained by creative articulation and performance