Over and Over and Over Again. Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory.

Symposium 16 - 17 November 2017, ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

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Since the 1990s, re-enactment has emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Current re-enactments question the ability of the present to unpack, embody, and disentangle the past. Thus, to re-enact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. To re-enact means not to restore but to challenge the past – to not merely repeat it, but to interpret and translate it – in the present and for the present – or for the future. History thereby enters a special temporal dimension, that of a possible and perpetual becoming, opening a space for invention and renewal.

The symposium investigates the issue of re-enactment through a discussion at once conceptual and practical. How, and to what extent, does recent history engage in a creative dialogue with a more distant past supposedly reactualized through re-enactment? This process of creative repetition branches out into at least three directions: (1) the return/survival of the past understood as generating meaning and values for both present and potential future/s, in terms of what one could call a symbolic archaeology; (2) an epistemological-axiological challenge to the traditional dichotomy between true and false, original and copy; and (3) a performative bodily practice that physically re-stages events.

Methodologically, the notion of re-enactment will be approached from three directions: the archive, the arts, and curatorial practice.

UNFOLD, Nan Hoover: About Reinterpretation and the Importance of Respecting the Variability of Artworks by Vera Sofia Mota & Fransien van der Putt

Preliminary Research 2015-2019.

17 November 2017, 17:30

The variable, ephemeral aspects of a work of art can pose problems for those who want to preserve it. Whether the desired stability relates to issues of presentation, commerce or heritage, the question whether the actual state of affairs can be identified and justified as -the work- needs to be answered. There is a lot of work that speculates on variability. Especially new media - and digital art works tend to travel platforms and manifest themselves by continuously generating new form/content in the course of -, or ‘as’ their existence. The performing arts lack this quest for original object and and sense of loss, cultivated in the visual arts. As Maaike Bleeker shows in her essay Make the most of now: bodies, mayflies and the fear of representation, performance art beliefs to undo powerful discursive frames of validation and interpretation by sticking to the moment of present presence. Jacques Rancière argues in The Emancipated Spectator that pretending to undo dominant perspectives is apolitical: the interest lies in creating new positions and new perspectives. To reiterate the past as an interesting present means that past will be specified and therefore rewritten. Beyond learning to live with the loss, one could suggest with Rancière and Bleeker that the unpacking, disentangling and re-embodying is a challenging, but necessary failure.
Since 2016, we have been researching the oeuvre of performance - and video artist Nan Hoover (New York 1931 – Berlin 2008). Commissioned by LIMA, Amsterdam, in the frame of their project Unfold, we have been looking at reinterpretation as a modus operandi for documentation, preservation and mediation of video - and digital media art. Challenges, impossibilities, gaps and clear limits surface. Clearly, in changing the work you actually start seeing the previous or ‘original’. Where does her work stop and ours begin?

https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/over-and-over/