Conference: Material Goods

In Collaboration with Kampnagel

Since the 2000s, the “material turn” in science and art has led to a paradigm shift. Accordingly, work processes and their materialities (researched and used documents, rehearsal recordings, archiving of productions) have increasingly been brought into focus and artistically reflected in dance and performing art. Thus, in the performative arts, which are considered “ephemeral” and in which the body has been negotiated as the supposed sole agent, the role of material and its documentation and archiving is becoming much more important. 

This paradigm shift is framed within a major transformation of the concept of artistic work. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that artistic work processes such as researching, noting, documenting, and archiving, which previously shaped the artistic work process but were hardly relevant for the recognition of the artwork, now become required in project applications. Research processes should be disclosed and documented. Stage performances should be represented in the media. And, if necessary, the production materials should be made accessible to the public. This new orientation of artistic work processes means that the concept of work must be realigned.

With the paradigm shift towards materiality, contemporary dance and performance art have shifted the focus to the relationship between the ephemeral and the permanent, the medial and the material, the physical and the substantial. In parallel, a number of research directions have emerged in scientific areas, such as science and technology studies (STS), praxeology, cultural-scientific materiality research, and the so-called new materialism. In various approaches, they have ascribed intrinsic value and meaning to objects, substances, materials, and have challenged an anthropocentric view of the concept of the performer. The conference aims to connect such developments and reflections in dance and performance art with those in science.

The conference transfers the guiding questions of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” to dance and performance art. The questions to be addressed are:

How are artistic artefacts (in dance) created by means of written artefacts, and which material traces are created in the process?

How are working practices in (dance) art (e.g. writing, recording, embodying, visualising) constituted and how do they become materialised in script and image?

Which cultural differences exist in these work processes?

Please register via email at franz.cramer@uni-hamburg.de