Opening the nothing, or how live art challenges the archive, and vice versa

How to archive live art performances? How to capture the fleeting
moment of a live piece of artwork? How to outwit the power of archival images?
How to prevent the fetishization of archives? These contradictions have led us,
almost naturally, to challenge live art spectators and to preserve the spirit
of live art in the very process of archiving.

Triggering the memory to lose it even better: such would be the
principle prevailing on the installation of archive boxes which contain images
carefully chosen by each of the programming team of the different festivals.

Being in the presence of a living archive and putting it in danger
simply by consulting it. Halfway between the artist who has irreparably
delivered his secret without any possible reiteration, and the historian
constantly opening boxes from the past, the audience will be free to choose its
own attitude.

Opening these boxes will eventually destroy the images they contain. The
photographs will disappear under the daylight. The spectator, curious to
reminisce a live art performance and the instant lived through it, will make
the image its own and thus make it disappear as it was in a single movement.

What to do? To open or not to open these boxes? This dilemma turns
the spectator responsible for his own actions, single actor of his memory.

“A piece of art,” says Malevich, “has to come out of nothing. It does
not proceed from anything being, even from a nothingness in being, but from the
nothing it opens. Its manifestation takes place in the openness as long as it
opens under the form an artwork’s nothing, which existence, every time unique,
is an entrance in presence into openness.” (in Ouvrir le rien: l'art nu, Henri Maldiney, 2003, Klincksieck) (Béatrice Josse)

Organisation: City of
Women; In collaboration with: Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana.

Exhibition
was produced in the framework of “A Space for Live Art Project”.