THE CIRCULAR PERFORMANCE ARCHIVE
The aim of The Circular Performance Archive (CPA) is not so much to store as it is to make visible, to share and to reactivate knowledge arisen through artistic research processes at residencies. It is an attempt to ease and strengthen the connectivity between artists working with the similar themes, locations and/or methods.
Art residencies offer a very specific space for artistic research as they often bring artists together and enable fruitful discussions about creative ideas and processes and, thus, facilitate spontaneous co-creation based on the identification of common artistic ideas or methodologies.
However, the shared knowledge as well as the connectedness which occurs within the duration of a single residency-stay is rarely shared outside of the specific context. Very often the local residency directors are the only ones who will be able to identify similarities in ideas and approaches among residents across residency periods and, thus, possible connections between artists and/or artistic projects. The residency directors could in this way end up as a doorkeeper of ephemeral information which might never be shared and activated – at least not in its full potential.
The ambition with this digital archive is to enable the artists themselves to document their artistic research/process, to inspire, to reach out, to build relations and to re-create in an inclusive way – across residencies and art forms. Artists are given a unique opportunity of making their own research and practice visible to others – not only to those who have visited the same residencies but also to artists from a broader international context. The hope is that this will lead to new collaborations and expanded communities.
The Circular Performance Archive is characterized by its fragility and incompleteness. It depends on the artists’ willingness and courage to document and share experiences, findings and knowledges from within an artistic process.
The digital character of the archive leaves no space for tactile elements or bodily experiences, all of which can only be referred to insufficiently in language. Therefore, this archive also contains an immanent call to meet physically in order to re-active and develop shared thoughts and to deepen the insights in artistic practices.
Each post in the archive is a fragment, a visit card from an artist, who contains so much more than what can be experienced here. But it is an introduction. An opening towards a circular archival movement.
Visit the archive here
The 2/12-25 we hosted a seminar on archiving – you can find the program here. We recorded all sessions and they can be found on BIRCAs Youtube channel here.
We have made a publication with reflections and examples on archiving – it can be found digital here
See full overview of BIRCA’s residencies and more documentation in the annual reports here.
The Circular Performance Archive is a project initiated by BIRCA (Bækkelund International Residency Center for Artists) and developed by Susanne Danig and Bente Larsen. We have invited the Earthwise Residency Center to be the first to test the archive with us. Artists Andrea Deres and Carolina Bäckman (Danish Dance Stories) are consultants on the project, which is also supported by performance researchers Karen Vedel, Laura Louise Schultz and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, all from University of Copenhagen. The archive has been realized though a grant from the Bikuben Foundation.