Mapping and Cross-mapping the Hi:story of Performance Art in Switzerland through Collective Research for Deviant Understandings

Abstract

The essay examines the project ‘revolving Hi:stories. Narrations of Performance Art in Switzerland’, a research endeavor consisting of an exhibition and a research conference in 2022. The goal of the project is to re-write the hi:story of Performance Art in Switzerland from its beginnings until today in a collective way. A crucial strategy for this oral history based research, is the participatory mapping process, where the recordings of oral history are also indexed in diagrammatic forms. First, the project “Revolving Hi:stories” is described and contextualized in the framework of recent discourses on curatorial and activist engagement by scholars like Maura Reilly or Marina Vishmidt. In a second step, the mapping and diagrammatic activities of the project based on Lepecki’s theory of choreopolitics and Elisabeth Bronfen’s concept of crossmapping are thoroughly analyzed. Finally, for the first time, a description of important groups and sites for the activist performance scene in Zurich is given, based on numerous interviews and the mapping sessions in 2021 - which the authors realized together with Chris Regn, Andrea Saemann, Clemens Fellmann and Tancredi Gusman.