Situated Agencies

This PhD project explores the relationship between embodiment and site-specificity through a documentation and mediation process. Using approaches from site-specific performance, performance documentation and screen performance, it addresses different forms of agency (e.g., the human agency of the performing body or the material agency of a camera) to map, sense and document a specific place. In this process, a special emphasis is given on how to uncover the multiple layers of a place through three different dimensions: the documentary, the historical and the fictional. The documentary dimension through capturing events that happen in real-time and space, the historical one through pointing to certain facts and/or discoveries and the fictional, through developing and staging actions for the camera.

In this PhD project, these dimensions serve not only as parameters for creating, collecting, and recording a performance material. They also serve as a guideline for designing a series of performance laboratories (in collaboration with other artists-researchers) in which the following questions are central: How can we deal with a place as primary documentation source? Which artistic strategies are needed for developing and expanding the narrative agency of a camera? And how can we employ documentation as both an artistic-research and dramaturgical tool? 

The claim that through the co-presence of the performing body and a camera, a place can be (re)inscribed with new meaning, appears here as an approach to site-oriented performance documentation practice. Consequently, this PhD interweaves writing with audio-visuality, bodily traces with staged actions, performative moments with memory, all at the same time, through situating and playing with a multitude of agencies.