Restoring History, Recreating the Past: The use of archives in performance-lectures by contemporary artists

This essay explores the notion of a performative dimension of the archive, activated by artists who present performance-lectures through the weaving of narratives using photographs, films, documents, letters, fragments of diaries, and other memorabilia. In conjunction with these materials, artists such as Egyptian Heba Y. Amin, Brazilian Mabe Bethônico and Portuguese Joana Craveiro employ spoken word to speculate through archival gaps, producing alternative readings of historical events. Positioned at the intersection of art, history, and literature, these artists draw on their discoveries to reflect on the notions of narrative, power, and memory. By intertwining archival research with performance, they create spaces where the past is questioned and reinterpreted, opening up new possibilities for contesting hegemonic discourses. By examining Amin, Bethônico and Craveiro’s works, I aim to illuminate how their performance-lectures reveal the performative potential embedded in archival materials, underscoring the need to revisit and reimagine our historical narratives.