We invite essays for the winter 2014 or spring 2015 issue of "Maska – The Performing Arts Journal" which will be dedicated to exploring the relationship between document and performance.
By focusing on the works of artists dedicated to exploring, collecting, performing, displaying, faking and disseminating documents – often related to documenting acts of violence, war, genocide, dictatorship, and terror –, this issue aims at investigating concepts of the document, documentation, and the politics of historical knowledge in the performing arts. Its objective is to bring into view the positions of those who are producing the documents, the politics and economies of visualization and documentation, as well as the modes of historiography, knowledge production, and (institutional) critique that emerge through the exploration of documents in the performing arts. At the same time, it will direct its attention to the encounters and processes of mediation between documents, artists, and spectators, implying the creation of a space in-between of past and present.
The issue on “Document & Performance” seeks to address these issues with focus on contemporary performance, situated within a larger framework of artistic production and socio-cultural change. We seek essays that draw on new and original research to address the relationship between document and performance, between evidence and performance through specific case studies. We welcome academic papers, performative writing, and experimental essays, located at the intersections of scholarly and artistic practice.
Topics may engage:
- The use of (archival) documents towards the creation of new performance work and the document’s functions within performance.
- Materiality, mediality, and performativity of documents.
- Documentation of major political events in and through performance.
- Performance and historiography, particularly in regard to processes of historicization in post-communist spaces.
- Relationship of performance and evidence production.
- Politics of documents in performance.
- Documents and/as bodies in performance.
- Documentation as performative practice.
- Notions of “documentary performance”.
The issue will be edited by the guest editor Daniela Hahn and the editor-in-chief Amelia Kraigher.
Please send your proposal (up to 300 words) and a short CV to danielahahn@fas.harvard.edu and to amelia.kraigher@guest.arnes.si by January 15th 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by January 31st 2014. Submission deadline for completed essays (up to 20.000 characters) is April 15th 2014.