We are currently doing a two-month residency at Fleetstreet Theater in Hamburg. Our starting point is the construction of two archives: an archive of “Performance on TV” and an archive of “Art after the End”:
Performance on TV: a growing archive of performance art as it is portrayed / represented on television. This might, among other things, be artists making work for or showing their work on TV, it might be people talking about performance art on TV, or it might be fictional performance artists or art appearing in TV series.
Art after the End: In many postapocalyptic or dystopian narratives, we encounter remnants of ‘our’ culture that has ended: art, artefacts, books, music, etc. Only very rarely, it seems, is any ‘new’ art produced after the apocalypse. Here, we catalogue these remnants, which are often gathered in archives, museums or collections, serving as a reminder of what was lost. What is their relevance for the postapocalyptic present?
To start with, we will pursue these two inquiries separately, but a hint at how they might be related can be found in a text we have written a while back: How to Prevent the Apocalypse with Performance Art.