sábado, 1 de dezembro de 2007

PERFORMING HERITAGE: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

International Conference: 3rd -5th April 2008 University of Manchester, UK

Source:
http://www.plh.manchester.ac.uk/conference.htm

PERFORMING HERITAGE:
RESEARCH AND PRACTICE


"We are pleased to announce that the Performance, Learning and Heritage project will be hosting an international conference in April 2008. The conference will take place at the University of Manchester , and will provide a forum for discussing how research and practice in the field of museum performance/live interpretation can inform one another.

The Performance, Learning and Heritage project is an AHRC funded investigation into the uses and impact of performance as a medium for learning in museums and at heritage sites. The scope of the project is international, and since 2005, the team have been researching case study sites and carrying out a detailed mapping of practice (For further details click here). 2008 marks the final year of the project, and presents a timely opportunity for debate and knowledge exchange in this fast developing are of performance and interpretive practice.

Areas to be covered by the conference, and in which we encourage submissions, include (but are not limited to):

• Making connections : the intersection of performance/performativity, site specific practice and notions of heritage;

• Gauging impact : audience response and longer-term impact, the place of interactivity, and community outreach;

• Reports from the field : accounts and findings from research and evaluation projects in the UK and abroad. Some sessions at the conference will be devoted to the emerging findings of the PL&H research and the implications for future practice and policy making; but we are keen to hear about, and compare notes with, other research projects across the globe;

• Developing practice : examples of practice – live and recorded – to illustrate the range of performance practice and provide opportuni tie s to interrogate that practice; workshops from practitioners and academics are invited as a means of exploring how research and practice interconnect;

• ‘research at the heart of practice' – the focus will be on research as it informs practice, practice as it informs research and (not least) practice as a means of research in the museum/heritage sector.

The conference will consist of a variety of presentations: keynote addresses; academic papers (20 minutes + discussion); performances (e.g. short performances that illustrate innovative or experimental performance styles, or different approaches to interaction); workshops by practitioners or academics (e.g. exploring ways of translating research into practice, or of using performance as a research tool); panel discussions (3-4 linked papers); and round table discussions (involving short prepared ‘provocations' on an agreed theme with maximum time for debate). Most sessions will be 90 minutes duration (3-4 papers per session) unless otherwise arranged."

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My contribution (VOJ):
LIFE AND ARCHIVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE EXOTISM OF OUR WESTERN CULTURE


Dominated by a fundamental lack, our culture is obsessed by the idea of freezing life and put it into an archive. Since the Greeks, we have been looking at the other in order to absorb it, to digest it. Our interest by the other as a fixed image (as in anthropological discourse, or photography, for instance) comes from a desire of filling a gap of ourselves, a basic need of self–identification and fulfillment. But to try to record and to retrieve everything (heritage production) is more than a utopia, it is pure madness. Also, we have detached humans from nature and we have tried to submit it, and again to put it in museums and at the same time to make museums in the nature (natural parks). All this tension between fixed matter (text) and unpredictable, living experiences (improvisation, creativity) reappears in theatre and performance, and in archaeology too. Traditional archaeologists wanted to recover the past. Now archaeologists desire (and are asked) to enact past sites (filling them with narratives, events and people) in order to give life again to a dead body they have invented. This paper will explore these well known paradoxes of modernity, ending by a reflection on tourism as a massive symptom of this exotic, strange obsession of capturing the other and freezing it into a “museum”, an archive”, a record, the phantasmic shrine of (our lost) totality. On the altar the perpetual candle of “information” shines over a never ending pilgrimage of consumers, people eager of fragments of “real life” prepared to be “taken away”.

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