Output details

TRACE: displaced: 'Post-colonial Cluster Fuck'. Residency: July - September 2009; performance: 28th - 30th August 2009; installation: 29th August - 3rd October.

TRACE Collective (André Stitt, Phil Babot, Lee Hassall) and invited collaborators worked on four projects from 2008-09 to investigate the possibility of creating an archive that resembled live memory rather than a memorial, that constituted “a living document or performed archive” produced through collaborative, site-based performance. Projects were conceived as practice-as-research interventions in contemporaneous international discourse concerning the archive, the documentation of performance and the dynamics of influence and absorption at work in encounters with art, and their impact upon artists and their practices over time.

Deploying processes of “act-archiving” (Bacon) they sought to extend possibilities offered up by art experienced at TRACE gallery between 2000 to 2008 (when the gallery had hosted performances, installations and live work by over 60 international artists). They worked with an architect to realise a freestanding simulacrum of the former gallery to function as a displaced space for the work of inhabitation, or re-habitation, conceived to be at the heart of their methodology. The displaced TRACE gallery would provide a physical and conceptual space around and through which each project would develop.

Building on projects at the National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow, the National Eisteddfod of Wales ,and Coed Hills Rural Artspace, Vale of Glamorgan, the final phase of the project was commissioned by Artspace in Sydney and involved Babot, Hassall and Stitt working with collaborators Tony Schwenson and Eddie Ladd. Development and realisation of ‘TRACE: displaced’ was financially supported by The Arts Council of Wales, the Scottish Arts Council, Wales Arts International, The British Council, the Australia Council for the Arts and other agencies. Texts contributing to a book documenting the project in its entirety (Parthian, 2011, ISBN 978-1-906998-04-2) include an essay by curator, writer and Executive Director of Artspace, Blair French (pp 69-75), who reflects specifically on the Artspace project.