On Smoke and Fog: Performance Revisioning, Remembrance and Reclamation

This thesis, On Smoke and Fog: Performance Revisioning, Remembrance and Reclamation, critically evaluates two research residencies (September 2017 to August 2019) and a series of performance works titled Notes for a Performance. The practice-led research looks to establish performance art practice as a vital means of engaging with heritage sites and archives. Considering how performance art practice can extend and embody heritage sites and archives by applying an anachronic methodological approach to historical material. The hypothesis being that to reveal the archive one must recognise the layers, loops, folds, and cracks of history. That to understand historical collections and heritage sites, artists must acknowledge the impossibility of truly defining fixed historiographic narratives. That any reading of history can only be understood in the present and embodied ‘now’ as defined by François Hartog as Presentism and Hayden White and Frank Ankersmits narrativisit philosophy of history, and that performance art is the ideal way to articulate this.

The performance works re-imagined the overlooked and uncatalogued in the sites and archives, presenting a ficto-factual reading of the past that montages the historically known and the unknown alongside cultural references, collective memory, and meta narrative structures. Working with un-catalogued and partially catalogued collections the performance series embody the historical variables in these disordered and fractured archives. The performances mined the multi-directional presence of the historical sites supporting a contemporaneous fictioning (as defined by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan) that collates past, present, and future.

The performative qualities of smoke, fog and mist are applied in the performance works to create an obfuscated and temporally disjunctive embodiment of the historical material within a contemporary art space. These miasmas are discussed in the thesis in the context of collective memory, cinema, and transmission of affect (as defined by Teresa Brenan). The Notes for a Performance series, accompanying publications and thesis contribute new knowledge in the fields of chronopolitics and performance art practice, situating the research in relation to these contemporary art forms and creative meta-narrative writing.