The proposed volume grows out of the international conference of the same name which was held in Vercelli on November 11-12th, 2010, an innovative event which invited leading performance studies scholars to address the issues around performance archiving within four different frames and set-ups devised by such international artists as Claudia Castellucci (Societas Raffaello Sanzio), Massimo Bartolini, Cesare Pietroiusti, and Lois Weaver.
[See: www.lett.unipmn.it/affective]
The four resulting panels saw the dynamic unsettling “in situ” of the very notions of archive and affect whose coupling was tested in the papers presented. The suggestion was that, given the time-based and site-bound contingency of performance events, the notion of archive and its related documentary practices need to be questioned, re-mapped and displaced in order to leave room for the powerful affective memory traces that such events can engender.
How can a certain inescapable archival drive accommodate, or negotiate with, other forms of memory-making, stock-taking, embodied testimony, retelling, selective forgetting and so on? The desire to preserve, save and record for the benefit of those who were not there, or who could in no way have been there (the future?) seems to constitutively fail to preserve the singular relationship with the present as the only timely kairòs of performance. Yet, the affective charge sometimes released and transmitted by a performative event exceeds the boundaries of an enclosed and exclusive present time. It reaches out, though not necessarily into an envisaged or knowable future. Can the future shape of those affects still be configured or performed as an archive? The practical and theoretical challenge we would like to pose is to think affect and archive together, even though this could mean opening both to an ontology, and a politics, beyond immediate recognition: an affect desiring a future, an archive insisting on its present. one framing the desire of the other: in other words, an affective archive.
Though bearing the same title, the proposed volume refrains from offering the proceedings of the conference. Instead of archiving the string of words originally spoken by taking them out of the context of the artist-led frames that were in place in Vercelli, the co-curators of the event, now the editors of the "Affective Archives" volume, will solicit and capture further echoes of that conference. Accordingly, its four original panels will serve as launching pads or springboards (one of the panels took place in a wintry open-air swimming pool) for a conversation involving people who had not spoken before, but belong nonetheless to the same conversation. This is our way to archive not the content of the conference, but its movement.
The book structure will thus repeat (though also diverge from) the four panels of the conference, carrying forward those strands of thinking-in-process that revealed themselves as especially productive.

Introduction

In the process of becoming the editors of "Affective Archives" the former curators of "Affective Archives/Archivi affettivi" will remember and dismember the original context of encounter, proceeding to highlight certain key questions linking event, affect, memory and archive in the performing arts today. In seeking a fruitful exchange between theory, praxis and embodied reflection, "Affective Archives" is conceived as a shared effort to keep the historicization of performing arts alert to the eventness of their becoming and to the frail encounters that are still possible at a later time and in another site of appearance. This is how archive and affect can be joined in a relay of discontinuities which open out the original event to a non-communitarian horizon. Neither a genre nor a concept, affective archive is offered as an open, non-specific naming for a set of memorial practices arising out of the very special disappearance of an art event.

1 Witnessing

This section will address the crucial moment of the affective encounter with the performance event and its survival by means of archival strategies, modes of transmission and creative recollections. The essays will attempt to investigate how the time and space of the encounter with performance survives, or is made to survive, in memory; question the archiving subjectivity of the spectator in her double status of witness and performer of what will remain as that performance; problematize the archival drive embedded in performance and its temporal projection toward future affective recollections. Performance recollection is often driven by a desire to engage in some sort of transmission: the witnessing to/for somebody else. There is thus a theatre of witnessing: the protocols and frames through which the witnesses step in and give their own testimonies. There is also an arena of witnessing, where different subjects and testimonies compete for acceptance and validation; the self-archiving by artists also comes forcefully into play. A wealth of genres may construct different levels of truth about performances: from confession to autobiography, from repeat performance to visual display, from ekphrasis to theoretical meditation. What does it mean to witness in each of these specific modes, both written and non-written?

2 Forgetting

This section will address specific instances, practices and poetics of performance in relation to forgetting. Forgetting always works in relation with memory; by subtracting, it constructs a certain shape of the remembered event; indeed, forgetting can be as forceful as a fixation and as material as a visible trace; the erasures of forgetting can follow paths akin to the displacements of dreamwork. The essays in this section will reflect on forgetting with regard to archival strategies and forms. Is forgetting comparable to silence in its effects? If silence can be eloquent, can forgetting say something, too, or be shown as wielding power? Forgetting can be read as a political strategy of control (what must not and will not be officially remembered) but also as one of resistance, a tactical selective memorization disavowing or willfully ignoring specific instances of value attribution with its consequent historical and economic valorization: a tactical procedure of survival for marginal practices. Although forgetting seems to run counter to the investment attached by affect to some kind of survival (affect seeking effect), it can also be actively sought in performance as a way of clearing ground, foregrounding blankness and so on. If performance is not properly remembered, can one say that it has failed? Conversely, does an affective archive that embraces forgetfulness fail to meet the demands of archival memory? To whose benefit?

3 Recalling

This section will address the sound trace as a peculiar form of performance remainder, as well as sound in performance contributing to the spatial signature of the event. How can this signature work affectively to shape a memory that is not just sonorous but also spatial? Recorded sound, in particular, has often been linked to ghostliness and recall, so that an affective archive proceeding from sound rather than from visuals might provide alternative ways to recall the past of performance. Essays might propose singular encounters with sound archives of performance; extract or uncouple sound from image in an attempt to generate new sensorial archives; recall performance by listening to remembered ambient sounds and/or human voices; explore oral performance and its affective stimuli towards further repetition, recital, recording; and so on. What is the difference between ambient sound – creating space and context – and the power of address in the human voice – engaging interpellation and subjectivity? It seems that the challenge of an affective archive of sound might lie in the gaps between inner voice and public recall: a listening together.

4 Missing

This section will investigate ways in which archives are accessed, interrogated, sustained or contested by those who missed a performance. Are these belated and posthumous spectators only professional historians or critics? What different motivations or affect might lead them to a mediated return to an unwitnessed scene? On the one hand, the essays will focus on the recirculation of un-original affects in response to the encounter with performance remains evidenced or collected in existing archives; on the other, they will investigate and experiment with performative gestures of recombination of archive materials as a way to assert new archiving subjectivities. Both the dawning of an affective archive and the troubling of accepted documentary evidence question the naturalization of historical knowledge and the historicization of performance. At the very least, they reveal how any archive production is a performance in itself, and how the mediation of the archive has to be taken on board as both enabling and disabling

Please, send an abstract (500 words) and a title of your proposed essay fitting one of the abovementioned broad sections by September 16th, 2012.
Send your proposal to all of the following email addresses:

pustianaz@gmail.com
annalisa.sacchi@gmail.com
giulia.palladini@gmail.com