The Afterlives of Performance - Keynote. With response by Jules Pelta Feldman, followed by a panel discussion with Mariama Diagne, Shelley Lasica and Felipe Ribeiro

Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Performance works—ephemeral, sensitive to site, embedded in history, and often tied to the body of the artist—have long been considered beyond the reach of conservation and restoration. In this presentation, Hanna B. Hölling and Jules Pelta Feldman will introduce the theoretical and practical fundaments of the conservation of performance. Reaching beyond the documentation-based archive, conservation offers a variety of modalities for approaching the long-term care of performance – both inside and outside collections – and their afterlives. Among the questions asked will be, what is performance when examined through the lens of conservation, and how does conservation change in the face of performative forms. Drawing from their current research, Hölling and Pelta Feldman will include examples of established as well as experimental approaches to performance conservation, and also consider the ways in which performance itself serves as a form of conservation.