Peppers Ghost. The Archive & Performance with Bronwyn Lace and Anna Seiderer
How do we begin to look at an image collectively? What are the ways in which a visual archive – entrenched in the heavy histories of colonialism and rendered silent through an extractive approach to photography – can begin to speak? In provoking and surfacing the narratives embedded in these archives, is it music, performance, improvisation and collaboration that can become vital tools for re-reading images in a contemporary way? These are questions Lace and Seiderer continue to ask themselves in their ongoing collaboration as artists, activators and researchers across various spaces and platforms. Using experimental, performative and playful tools for exchange and dialogue between artists and thinkers whose practices are devoted to the material traces of history the two are interested in deepening their artistic and academic reflections on the issues of remediation, analysis and reuse of filmic materials produced in controversial and complex contexts.
Within this process Lace and Seiderer have been invited to engage with a collection of photographs from the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn in Paris. The photographs, which are autochromes – the first photographic process that allowed for the reproduction of colour – were made in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1930 and are part of a larger project, the Archives of the Planet, funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (1860-1940). Lace and Seiderer will speak about how the projection of digital versions of these autochromes into a Pepper’s Ghost, a 19th- century theatrical illusion mechanism that makes use of a half-silvered mirror, projection and live performance – became a hugely productive tool for engaging with – through music, dance, drawing, live narration and more – the photographs, that might have remained otherwise silent and inactive in the archive.
The two will share the way in which free spirited, open and collective responses to images through myriad sounds, gestures, and materials can become tools for layering, agitating, rescripting and expanding upon the people, places, landscapes, rituals and knowledge systems represented in the images and films. In engaging the archive in an active, collective, and interdisciplinary manner, new possibilities and tactics are able to emerge. Collapsing and unfolding time through performance becomes a means of destabilising the authority of an image. De-objectifying and dehumanising those present in the image. The act of embracing the incidental and the fragmentary becomes a way of working around the gaps and mistranslations in the historical narratives that accompany these images, pursuing instead the emergent material traces surfaced through the body, the voice, the ensemble. The introduction of language – be it linguistic, musical, or visual – can allow one to give a voice to a silenced image, while the use of physical performance and gesture can challenge, animate and expand upon a frozen or recreated moment.
Bronwyn Lace is a visual and performance artist. Site specificity and responsiveness are central to her practice. Lace’s focus is on the collaborative relationships between art and other fields, including physics, history, museology, philosophy and literature.
In 2016 Lace joined William Kentridge in the founding and animating of the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa, today Lace is the Centre’s steering force and its international liaison arm. In 2020 Lace co-founded The Zone: a collective that calls for the development of an entirely novel transdisciplinary and deliberative approach to inquiry and curation across the arts and sciences and beyond based in Vienna, Austria. Lace lives and works between Johannesburg and Vienna.
Anna Seiderer is senior lecturer at the Department of Arts at University of Paris 8/Vincennes and researcher at the laboratory Arts of Images and contemporary arts [AIAC/EPHA]. She’s member of the editorial board of the journal Slaveries & Post~Slaveries. She has just
published Traces du dé/colonial dans les collections de musées, avec Margareta von Oswald, Félicity Bodenstein et Damiana Otoiu (eds.), Horizon d’attente, Paris (2024) and curated Moving archives at Villa Medici in the frame of the short residency of Academy of Traces. Together
with Bronwyn Lace, she’s running the seminar Arts|Archives|Performances, questioning the performativity of colonial film and photographic archives.
Reading links
https://lessgoodidea.com/thinking-in-2020-2024#/thinking-in-archives-2022/
https://lessgoodidea.com/how#/may-2023-how-the-peppers-ghost/
https://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/801