The Archive Of Disappearance: Practice-Based PhD In and Through Composing, Performing, and Unfolding

The Archive of DisappearanceA Practice-Based PhD in and Through Composing, Performing, and UnfoldingThis doctoral research investigates how contemporary artistic practices—particularly conceptual and performative works—disappear, reappear, and transform across time, contexts, and bodies. Situated at the intersection of artistic research, queer theory, performance, and architectural thinking, The Archive of Disappearance proposes disappearance not as loss, but as a productive and critical condition through which artistic knowledge, memory, and meaning are generated.The project is grounded in a research-through-art methodology and unfolds through three interrelated phases: Composing, Performing, and Unfolding.Composing assembles heterogeneous materials—archival documents, anecdotal memory, ephemera, and embodied experience—into provisional configurations that resist linear historiography and challenge notions of originality, authorship, and permanence.Performing activates these compositions through embodied, collective, and time-based practices. Performance is treated as a mode of research, where artworks exist only temporarily and generate knowledge through presence, movement, and relational encounter.Unfolding accompanies practice through writing and reflection, not as retrospective documentation but as a parallel inquiry articulating the affective, temporal, and spatial dimensions of the research.A central case study is the remake and activation of Parangolé Capa 21, Xoxoba by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. Through the creation of a “copy of the original copy” and its activation in public, institutional, and festival contexts, the research examines how historical artworks can be reactivated without being fixed or monumentalised. Oiticica’s Parangolés are approached as mobile, wearable architectures that blur distinctions between body, artwork, and environment, foregrounding participation, movement, and context as sites of meaning production.From a queer methodological perspective, the project draws parallels between the survival strategies of queer lives and the trajectories of artworks within neoliberal and institutional frameworks. It asks the central research question: When is art? Under what conditions is art allowed to appear as itself? By engaging concepts such as cruising, ephemerality, and collective activation, the research challenges archival logics based on permanence, visibility, and accumulation.Within architecture, the project expands the notion of space-making beyond buildings, understanding space as something produced through gesture, choreography, and collective presence. The final doctoral object—a box inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise—functions as a spatial and epistemological apparatus, akin to an architectural model, which can be unfolded, rearranged, and activated.The Archive of Disappearance contributes to artistic and architectural research by proposing disappearance as a valid epistemological framework and by articulating queer, embodied, and performative approaches to knowledge production.