Springe direkt zu Inhalt

9 July | Roundtable: Past Perspectives on Contingent Futures for the Performing Body – Anarchival, Anarchitectural and Queering Practices

Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.

Against the backdrop of theories of the archive as a hegemonic institution and the performative turn, academics, archivists, activists and artists have developed approaches to confront this dispositif through archival counter-practices and counter-archives. The notion of 'anarchiving' encompasses strategies of undoing the archive by not only reading archival material against the grain, but by challenging it as a medium conceived to store and preserve a classified and fixed past. Taking into consideration practices that defy archiving and/or were disregarded by its mechanism, especially those pertaining to the body, 'anarchiving' repositions archival material as dynamic, unfixed and historically contingent. In the act of rereading, reordering and reassembling the materials in question, these practices contest the very notion of a 'canon' or 'corpus'.

This roundtable discussion centred on the relationship between anarchival perspectives and the (performing) body in the arts, bringing together case studies on what alternative readings and new insights can be generated by returning to archival material that has been pressed into service to attest to a dominant narrative of art history. 

With Jack Halberstam (Gender Studies and English | Columbia University/EXC 2020 Distinguished Fellow of Global Literary Studies 2025), Friederike Schäfer (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters), Caroline Lillian Schopp (Art History | Johns Hopkins University) and Jennifer Sichel (Art History | University of Louisville).

Image Credit: S. Messner 2025 for EXC 2020 using a photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash.