Tracing Practices - questioning and circulating archives comes out of our collaborative performative act of creating Living and Lasting and is built around its score, which searches the gaps in public archives. As an institution, the archive can be seen as a "major gesture" that attempts to arrest the past for posterity, while also enabling circulation of knowledge and practices. In our research, the visit to the Danish National Archive in Copenhagen made us aware of what we already have in our shared store of experiential knowledge which by its very nature is speculative, transitory, sometimes undocumented, and often transmitted dialogically; in other words, not containable in cardboard boxes. The Archive revealed the limits of what it could hold and called us to draw on elements from our practices of choreography, performance art, film, and writing, to reflect on the act of archiving.
The minor gesture questions what counts and is given value. In this sense, we build on the theoretical development of the ‘archival turn’ by questioning the archive’s materiality and its impact. Our performative interest in creating transformative spaces makes us search for what the archive performs and what is left in its margins. We examine the archive as a catalyst for memory work drawing on autoethnographic strategies and situated knowledge while being informed by other artists’ works, such as Annie Ernaux and W.G Sebald.1 As in Ernaux's concerns to recognize oneself within social structures by way of “reconnaissance,” we engage in acknowledging and making visible that which is often hidden or ignored by the gesture of placing ourselves into the archive.
In 2014 when we performed our first collaborative work Four Approaches to the Journal at the Nordic Summer University held in Saudarkrokur, Iceland, we attended Erin Manning’s presentation where she introduced the ideas that led to her book The Minor Gesture (2016). In the exploration of what our living archive might hold, we are inspired by the subversive notion of the minor gesture.2 This refers to what easily escapes attention, such as the impact of the regulations and structures of the archive on a research process, but also the gaps: what the archive does not hold.