Performance Sources identifies and showcases performance artists in a constantly evolving archive, enriched with interviews, analyses, reflections and news.
Performance Sources recounts and relays what performance has been like at a given time, in a given place, the Générateur, from 2006 to the present day. At the same time, it gradually opens up to new archive sources, with performances produced by Performance Sources partner venues, a network destined to expand over time.
Archiving means categorizing and labeling works that, by their very nature, seek to escape formats, reproduction and expectations. How can we do this, if we want to make elusive works such as performances available to anyone, anywhere, at any time? This is the paradox on which Performance Sources was built.
So why risk it? Because performance art is springing up everywhere, sucking in and inspiring young artists, spreading from art event to festival, everywhere. Memory, then, becomes the solid ground on which to build.
Transforming into resources and fertile humus what might otherwise end up as rubbish. To propagate and share all this visual and documentary material accumulated since the early days of Le Générateur and elsewhere, and not leave it to stagnate unexplored at the bottom of cupboards and hard drives…
The idea that an archive site for performance art is unfeasible makes us want to grapple with this paradox, trying to conceive a moving form, a horizontal structure, open to other sources, other memories, other places, entirely and uniquely devoted to performance art.
In short, Performance Sources resembles a database with deliberately apparent structures, equipped with a number of navigation tools so that each person can find his or her way around and feed his or her own research and curiosity, while also being tempted to get lost in it.
Show the piping, don’t try to dress up or hide the database itself. Raw. Just as it is. No backstage, no raised stage, no curtain.
Multiply access to content, don’t impose a single navigation path, but allow each surfer to move around according to his or her urgency, habits, mood of the day, need of the moment.
Make browsing fun !
