Restaging, De-closing, Versioning: Unfolding Temporalities of “the Archive”

Abstract

The research project Restaging, De-closing, Versioning seeks to approach the archive not as a sealed repository but as a living, unstable constellation in which knowledge is constantly negotiated. Since the 1990s, archives have received sustained attention in the arts, and today they are reaccentuated through decolonial and queer perspectives. Against this backdrop, the project explores how previously untouched or silenced stocks of knowledge are transformed through critical aesthetic practice. Here, decay becomes a generative impulse—not as loss, but as the softening of order, a temporal drift that opens space for other constellations. Decay calls for alternative practices of care and attention—practices that accept dissolution, nourish fragility, and tend to what is slowly transforming. What does it mean to care for materials that are themselves in the process of fading away? Whose values and aesthetics shape such acts of care?

Restaging becomes a way of letting what has faded return in altered constellations— gestures and voices re-emerging as resonant echoes toward the future. De-closing loosens the sedimentations of neglect and exclusion, opening cracks where suppressed histories seep back. And in Versioning, decay reveals itself as the very condition of variation, a fertile disintegration through which archives circulate, shift, and proliferate—never identical, always becoming. To engage artistically with archives thus means to inhabit the folds of decay—where sound, image, and text overlap, where bodies and memories refract, where the apparent solidity of knowledge softens into fragile textures. Queering the archive names not only a critique of normative boundaries but also a mode of care: an attunement to the resonances that emerge in fading, undoing, and transformation. Restaging, De-closing, and Versioning are not only methods but temporal gestures. They disturb archival certainties, opening possibilities for re-inscription. In their slow erosion, decay introduces delays, ruptures, and asynchronous rhythms—temporalities that resist linear progression and align with queer refusals of normative time. Activist and process-based archives such as Living Archive, Decolonial Archive, and The Dynamic Archive embody this orientation: they do not conceal fragility but expose it, working with incompleteness, dissonance, and the folds that decay generates. They model practices of care that acknowledge fragility, sustain what is vulnerable, and allow the unfinished to resonate as a promise for futures yet to come.

In a lecture performance interweaving reading, dialogue, and presentation, the principles of Restaging, De-closing, and Versioning will not only be discussed but made experientially tangible. Through concrete examples, these gestures unfold as both theoretical orientations and artistic practices.