Conserving Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Second Annual Colloquium organized by SNSF Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, Bern University of the Arts.

What does it mean to conserve performance, to sustain its life into the future? What is performance, if investigated as an event, process, object, documentation, and as an ongoing life, a way of world-making or of producing knowledge? What does performance become, as glimpsed through the lens of distinct disciplinary perspectives?

This online colloquium brings together artists and scholars of performance studies, anthropology, art history, musicology, and conservation to approach the question of the ongoing life and afterlives of performance. In this second annual colloquium organized by the research team Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, we will pursue these questions in a series of lectures by prominent guest speakers, followed by a round table conversation. There will be a chance to engage with the speakers during a Q&A.

This colloquium is part of the ongoing research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at Bern Academy of the Arts. The project focuses on the questions of conservation of performance-based works, their temporal specifics, the involvement of the human and non-human body, and the world of their extended trace history, memory, and archive. Explored are notions of care, the ideals of traditional conservation and their relation to tacit or explicit knowledge, skill and technique. Taking as a starting point the necessity for conservators to access and deepen this area of study, and unlike queries that situate these questions within other disciplines, in this project, we approach performance as a necessarily conservable form.

This event is generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Department of Materiality in Art and Culture, Bern Academy of the Arts.

Artist Gisela Hochuli is developing a Zoom performance, titled, In Strange Hands II, on the basis of instructions sent by the audience. When signing up, all attendees are asked to contribute a short, written event score or instruction for a performance.