Project acronym: HiPArtDoc

Project ID: 747881

The Marie Sklodowska-Curie project „Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977” introduces a new historiographical approach that accounts for the dynamic development of performance art and its theories through the history of performance documentation. Focussing on the role of performance documentation in the conservation and presentation of performance-based art from 1970 to 1977, “Between Evidence and Representation” will examine the different strategies undertaken to provide duration and mediated access to definitionally ephemeral and immaterial events. Through the scrutiny of performance documentation and the variations within its identity as both artwork and document, the project introduces an innovative methodological viewpoint that accounts for the process of containment of performance within the traditional framework of visual arts. Goal of the research is to show how this process actively shaped the history of performance art in the early 1970s, filling a gap in the historiography of performance art and performance documentation.

Tancredi Gusman is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of Theatre Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2016 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Milano for the EU-Cooperation Project: Senses: the Sensory Theatre. New Transnational Strategies for Theatre Audience Building, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme. Within this framework he was also responsible for the TEMPO Observation Centre. He studied Philosophy at the Università di Pavia and in 2012 he obtained his Ph.D in Theatre History Studies at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” with a Dissertation on theatre criticism in Germany between the 19^th and the 20^th century. He is translator of the Italian edition (2014) of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen and he recently published the monograph: L’arpa e la fionda. Kerr, Ihering e la critica teatrale tedesca tra fine Ottocento e il nazionalsocialismo (2016) [The Harp and the Sling. Kerr, Ihering, and the German Theatre Criticism from the End of Nineteenth Century to National Socialism]. Between 2013 and 2015 Tancredi worked for Theater Neumarkt in Zurich.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 747881.