On the thresholds of the ongoing archive for endless performances

Ongoing archive for endless performance is a practical investigation into creating a performative archive in which the movements and tasks written for women in the form of declarative instructions in plays at different times are observed and experimented with. By selecting texts, extracting the instructions from the scene descriptions and compiling them into narratives, this archive explores a range of actions and works that have historically been desired, commanded and expected of women. In this research-based performative archive, based on the idea of remembering and recycling the past, the creators attempt to propose an open space for critique through enactment, intervention and defiance, and to reflect on the politics of scores, which are closely linked to issues of representation, appropriation, accessibility and agency of women. The exposure of the posed acts subsequently reveals the withdrawn acts, which were withheld from women in their experience of mobility and visibility on stage and beyond. In line with the processual approach of the work, the Ongoing Archive has grown over the past two years in Tehran, Mynämäki, Beirut, Berlin, Mannheim and Essen.