Between performance and archive: when the document is the artwork

This essay is a fictionalised dialogue that, while adjusting to publishing guidelines, also takes liberties in favour of fluency and style. Laura and Paul are fictional characters who discuss the work Goddesses: looking or looked at in relation to the ontology of performance and its documentation. Laura’s conclusion is that while curatorial practice and art history would dwell on the photographs alone, designating Goddesses’ images as their intentional, activating agent, and reading them as static objects, performance studies would tend to discuss the visceral experience of the performative moment of enactment, dwelling on this experience as proof of our access to a body of action. Both tendencies seem inadequate to the kind of art being analysed; an art that is not only a final object, but that in its performativity, also involves a lasting materiality foregrounded with the process of artistic production. The images belong to an exhibition that took place at Arts Connection in Miami, FL in January 2024. The performative writing is inspired by and pays homage to Peggy Phelan and Daniel Arasse.