How Do We Repair?

Abstract

Erin Manning, a participant in goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it, suggests the concept of “anarchive” as a new approach to understanding the archive. She argues that the anarchival “follow[s] the logic not of originality or wholeness, but of emergent process,” focusing on the archive’s futuristic value rather than its quality as a collection of past documents. In this allusive, poetic meditation on an ethos of “repair” as it relates to performance, archival processes, and the work of performance collective Goat Island, Manning illuminates how drawing, sculpting, and architecting can be methodologies of anarchiving, which performatively re-creates the emergent process of the original work.