The performative-archival practice is a research methodology at the intersection of arts education and the history of education that aims to foster critical knowledge production in both disciplines and the spaces that emerge between them. I developed this methodology to study the images and imaginaries of Nature that are inscribed into and reproduced by object lesson picture books from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, as well as the performances of seeing that produced the subject of the child “at home” in imperial Europe.
The performative-archival practice departs from the premise that archives are situated, limited and constructed. I propose it as a mode of archival engagement that combines visual culture studies inquiry with arts-based research. Studying the visual discourse and conceiving of seeing as a performative cultural practice are key elements of this methodology. Through performative, video and visual arts-based methods such as re-enactment and tracing, the performative-archival practitioner enacts archival documents as performative scores that invite exploration of the archival documents in an open-ended and “undisciplined” manner (Rigney, 2007; Twells et al., 2023). This approach gives air to the subjective, affective and embodied dimensions of engaging with archival materials while considering the cultural, political and social conditions too. By “doing the archive” reflexively, the performative-archival practice incentivises a continuous reimagining of what we come to know through the archives we engage with.
The overall approach to knowledge production and the formation of this research methodology is based on the practice of unlearning, as a post-colonial pedagogical practice. Learning is understood as a relation of power, not as a neutral acquiring of skills or knowledge. Learning and unlearning are conceived of as dialectic, in which unlearning interrogates the canon and the learned power relations, thereby opening spaces for transformation and critical thinking. The term critical is based on the notion of criticality, that implies that as practitioners of culture we are always embroiled in the making of knowledges. A critical distance is not possible nor desirable, but rather a position is sought in which we can “inhabit our problem” and “live it out” (Rogoff, 2003). Criticality invites reflexivity into the research process which syncs up neatly with my take of archive and archival research.
The archives that I visited and from which I draw the documents to study the picture books are archives in the more common, and more traditional sense if you will, of an institution: national archives, municipal archives, university collections, company archives as well as archives with focus on education. These archives are made up of architectures, furniture, regulations and laws, people, practices and discourses. They are made, maintained and disrupted.
To deal with the archive means to deal with how (semi-) literate, modern societies construct their official history. And it speaks to the very conditions of how those societies come to the world and themselves as subjects through such constructed lenses and narratives.
Archives do not merely exist; archives are constantly (re)made. Archival practices, then, are not only caretakers of information, but are invested in the construction, maintenance and mobilisation of meaning and distribution of power. Said practices include, amongst other things, the making of archival documents, their selection and ordering, administering access and the crafting of narratives through archives and archival documents.
I find the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) useful to speak about the different levels on which archival violences are being produced and on which resistance or opposition to it might occur: “Omittance and silencing happens at all stages of the production of historical narratives: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives and the making of history in the final instance (adding retrospective significance)” (p. 26 in Zaayman, 2023, p. 9).
Archival scores
Acknowledigng that histories are made and never done with, I have come to conceive of the archival documents that I work with as performative scores, or as triggers of extra-archival production. Doing so allowed me to question the documents and objects that constitute the archive at play within my research, and through them, expand the ways in which such archival document relates to conflicts and imaginations of the present-day society (Zaayman, 2023, p. 23). This led me to ask: What do these picture books, their images, and their visual pedagogy mean for me and society today? In consequence, investigating and dealing with politics and pedagogies of the visual, the production of racial difference and whiteness, as well as images of Nature became specifically important to my research.
In performance art, a performative score can be described as the set of enunciations, the script, for the enactment of a performance (Fabião, 2013). The performative practice comprises a set of previously stipulated, clearly articulated and conceptually polished actions to be performed by the artist, the audience or both without previous rehearsal. Experimentation is enabled, guided and moved through such scoring. A score may be written, thought, spoken, or, quite simply, an object or image that functions as a tool of information and inspiration (Burrows, 2010, p. 141). In such reading, the score is a source or onset, but whose shape may be very different from the final realisation of the performance (Burrows, 2010, p. 141).
The basic idea that drives the arts-based experimentation is to take up the picture books and/or single images as such score and thereby setting in motion the clusters of a diverse set of objects and their (potential) uses, speech acts, texts, doings, sounds, conventions, affects, bodies, gestures, images and imaginaries, subjects, architecture, skills, routinised behaviours, tacit and consciously employed knowledges – and the relationships created between all those elements. This method approaches the act of seeing as an event or performative act, which emphasises the continuous repetition-in-variance of seeing and archiving (Schneider, 2001; see also Rose, 2011, p. 731). This recursiveness and the potential for unexpected slippages, but also slowly emerging, sticky labouring towards other movements, echoes the process of learning and unlearning.
Discourse and seeing as performative practice: a visual culture inquiry
The visual culture inquiry is central to the performative-archival practice as a research methodology that I have developed for this thesis. Embedded in this theoretical and epistemological field and lines of inquiry, what are concrete methodical steps through which I attempt to study the object lesson picture books and the visual regime that manifests in them and that they simultaneously reproduce? Bal (2003) suggests departing a visual culture inquiry, or the study of visuality and visual regimes, from a simple question: “What happens when people look, and what emerges from that act?” (p. 9). Such a phrasing conjures the visual event, the happening of seeing, as an object of study and the image, that which emerges, is an experienced image, fleeting and accrued to the subject. Differently put, it is the practices of seeing and what those give rise to that are central. Rather than favouring the logic of “discourse, enunciation and voice”, an event-based approach tends to logics of “discourse, practice and place” (Rose, 2011, p. 722). Discourse and practice are not oppositional here but come together as clusters of sayings and doings, human and non-human actors (Rose, 2011, p. 722).
Pedagogies of seeing, such as the object lesson method, and educational tools such as the picture books, constitute social practices and their material culture that jointly produce meaning, organise social relations and constitute meaning-making subjects. Society is not simply the context or background against which a cultural practice of image-making can be analysed, but the making of a visual object is considered a cultural practice in itself. Simultaneously, visual cultural practices are not merely determined outputs or mirrors of prior societal conditions, but rather a Visual Culture approach insists on
"the constitutive role of culture in sustaining and changing the power relations enacted around issues of gender, sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, colonialism and its legacies, and the geopolitics of space and place within globalization. It examines these in terms of the ways of seeing, imagining, classifying, narrating, and other ways of investing meaning in the world of experience, that cultural forms and practices provide." (Lister & Wells, 2000, p. 62)
I find mobilising performative acts of seeing or visual events in that manner compelling because it moves away from thinking the visual in terms of language and relies more on the processes that animate the various elements embroiled in visuality, including sayings, doings, human and non-human actors (Rose, 2011, p. 737). Emphasising the practices of looking opens to consider the clusters of doings and sayings, often a routinised behaviour and actions, mental and physical activities, emotions, things and their use, skills and knowledge that are involved in that.
Studying performances of seeing means to bracket a certain performance, to render it as a whole. It is the methodological lens that organises the quotidian and pedagogical practice of looking at picture books or seeing an image as a performance and visual event. Studying cultural performances shares many methodical similarities with a visual discourse analysis that considers the compositional, social and technological modalities of reception/audiencing, production, circulation of images as well as the material objects themselves. Going beyond iconographic and iconological analysis of images, cultural and epistemological logics and visual practices are being studied while the visual manifestations or aesthetics of the discourse are being taken seriously; rather than disregarding the visual forms as empty or simply functional, here they are understood as deeply cultural and material.
It is the performing acts of seeing that produce the seer and the seen; the subject and the image; the child and the picture book, and “as performative, practices both discipline these positions but slippages in their reproduction also occur” (Rose, 2011, p. 731). The emphasis on performance pushes against the fixation of the subject and invites multiplicity of ways of seeing, while not losing track of the conditioning factors that make up a gaze.
Visual culture studies and practice-led inquiry are closely interconnected and converge in the performative-archival practice proposed in this thesis, too. Arts-based research in education is considered a type of qualitative research that employs artistic procedures may they be literary, performative or visual and “account for experiential practices in which both the different subjects (researcher, reader, collaborator) and the interpretations of their experiences reveal aspects that are not made visible in other types of research” (Barone and Eisner 2006 in Hernández, 2008, p. 92). Arts-based research does not seek certainty and predictability but rather the enhancement for perspectives, the pointing out of nuances and uncommon ways of looking at the phenomena of interest. It is concerned with capturing the ineffable, that which is difficult to put into words (Hernández, 2008, pp. 107–108). Deepening and widening the conversation about educational premises and practices by paying attention to what often goes unnoticed or is taken for granted is another characteristic of arts-based research, according to Barone and Eisner (2006 in Hernández, 2008, p. 94). Arts-based research can be used to make the ordinary appear extraordinary insofar as it provokes, innovates and breaks down resistance, leading us to consider new ways of seeing or doing things (Hernández, 2008, p. 109). This links well to the notion of unlearning that builds the base of my inquiry. Here, arts-based research is mobilised as one mode through which unlearning can occur. Due to its demand for our sensory, emotional and intellectual attention and its working also with embodiment and embodied responses, unlearning engages the researcher, reader/viewer, collaborator in all her being.
I have developed arts-based research strategies within this project to investigate and inquire the method of the object lesson and the imag(inari)es of nature articulated within its various manifestations. Different exercises of my individual practice, as well as in workshop settings, set in play the performative score ‘seeing an image’: narrating seeing an image; reconfiguring images on semi-transparent papers; re-enacting an image.
The enactment and repetition of a performative act, its circumscription or delimitation in a scenic or particular context, can highlight what often goes unnoticed and routinised in the performative act and thus open up possibilities for critical questioning. I tune in with the question that Taylor poses: “How does performance transmit knowledge about the past in ways that allow us to understand and use it?” (Taylor, 2006, p. 67). This implies exploring “how performed, embodied, practiced make some ‘past’ available as political resource in the present by simultaneously enabling several complicated multi-layered processes” (Taylor, 2006, p. 67). For Taylor, this means that performance can be about something that helps us to understand and critically position ourselves towards the past, but also how knowledges, epistemes, practices, organisational structures and politics are being kept alive by certain performances. Both aspects are interesting for me when thinking with the method of the object lesson: how can performance be way to understand and position myself towards the method of the object lesson that speaks to and works with the complexity inherent to its epistemology, its logics, its manifestations? How can I inquire the still alive epistemic residues, knowledges, practices, structures, politics, habits that are linked to the object lesson in the present?
Moreover, I worked with video and visual essays to explore the possibilities of unlearning ‘seeing’, departing from the object lessons picture books. Taking the image seriously in its aesthetic and socio-cultural dimension as well as its material affordances is the intention of these visual and video arts-based strategies through which I investigated images through images.