Symposium papers
Published on
Counter Archives: Archaeological Ficttion of Embedded Submission
Laboratoire de la contreperformance
Abstract
The lecture-performance entitled Les Contre-archives [The Counter Archives] is a scenic hybrid form of twenty minutes, created originally at the Point éphémère in Paris in 2016, and resumed in 2018. It combines theoretical content and incongruous montages of heterogenous elements (from artistic to popular culture), in which the links between performance and archive are fictionalised in order to deconstruct certain myths relative to art. Through various gestures, the hostesses allegedly hired by the Laboratoire de la contreperformance reproduce a research hypothesis based in a post-patriarchal future where artistic performance has become a form impossible to define. Only re-enactments of emblematic performances based on “counter archives”— objects seen as traces, as material as fictious—would be able to restore the fluidity broken by centuries of obscurantism between the gestures of daily life and those of art, thereby revealing the absolute supremacy of woman in this domain since prehistory.
Laboratoire de la contre-performance [Counter Performance Lab] is a collective of artists and researchers founded in 2014. Working in art institutions (musée Picasso, musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Point éphémère, musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris, Le Générateur in Gentilly) as well as places of research, the Laboratoire de la contre-performance is committed to hybrid formats of the transmission of knowledge, such as lecture-performances.