Since the 1990s, an increasing number of artists, curators, dancers, choreographers and other professionals of the cul-tural panorama have looked at reality with an extractive ap-proach: they have used objects already in circulation in the artistic context and re-proposed them in the present by ad-justing them on a formal and/or content level. With the aim of analysing the consequences of these reactivation strategies, the essay intends to outline the importance of the so-called “re-enactment studies” which have hitherto dealt with the subject, and it then discusses the utility of a novel analytical model called “migratory cycle of images”. The latter propos-es to approach a generic act of reactivation in operational terms, identifying the role that images play in the various phases of the process. Finding proper support in contempo-rary philosophical theories such as Object-Oriented Ontology and in the analysis of some exemplary artistic productions, this operation allows to: question the terminology currently used in the field, arrive at the formulation of new nomencla-tures, and, finally, outline the boundaries of the “enactment studies”, along with different prefixes to differentiate the mul-tiform methods of re-generating the existing.