OLUWABUKUNMI OLUKITIBI - Excavating a Living Practice

Excavating a Living Practice

Working Archive: Choreographing Relation — An evolving archive of an artistic practice under investigation.

I have recently begun to think of my artistic practice as an organism.

This thought has come to me while looking backwards.

Over the past few weeks, I have been going through old notes, drawings, photographs and videos—fragments from different periods of my practice, some carefully kept and others almost forgotten. I am looking at things I made years ago and trying to encounter them without immediately placing them into the familiar categories of performance, workshop, festival, residency, project or event.

I am trying to look underneath them.

Perhaps this is excavation.

In one of our OBJECT01 live sessions, Lara described the process I had been undertaking as a kind of mining, in relation to Sudaisu Osman's project within the residency. The image stayed with me.

Mining and excavation are not quite the same thing, and I am interested in the tension between them. Mining suggests extraction: something valuable is buried somewhere and must be brought out. Excavation suggests uncovering, exposing layers, revealing what has been accumulated over time.

I don't know yet what I am looking for.

I am not sure there is a single foundation buried underneath my practice, waiting to be discovered.

Perhaps there are only fragments.

Contradictions.

Repetitions.

Things that have been quietly returning.

Things I did without yet having the language to understand why.

So I continue digging.

One of the things I am beginning to ask is: what happens when we try to enter a practice?

During another OBJECT01 session, Greyson shared a thought that stayed with me:

newness can't enter.

I have continued carrying this phrase around.

What does it mean for newness to enter?

And what prevents it from entering?

I began thinking about the ways we create interpretations of our work for other people—to offer a way in, a context through which someone might enter what we have made.

But I am increasingly questioning the word interpretation.

An interpretation can become a map that tells you where you are going.

A portal is different.

A portal offers an opening without necessarily determining the territory on the other side.

This has made me think about my own practice as a space that can shape-shift. Perhaps the challenge is not to create a definitive explanation through which someone can understand the work, but to create an opening through which someone can encounter it.

And perhaps this applies to the archive too.

I am trying to enter my own work again.

Not necessarily to understand what I already know, but to see what else might become visible when I return.

This has also brought me to repetition.

In another OBJECT01 session, during a reading and conversation on Difference and Repetition with Mao Sagor, I found myself thinking about something I know through dance.

Repetition does not return as sameness.

When a movement is repeated, the movement may appear to be the same, but the conditions of its repetition have changed.

Time has changed.

Space has changed.

The body has changed.

The person watching has changed.

The relationship between bodies has changed.

Even the body performing the same movement is no longer exactly the body that performed it a moment before.

So perhaps repetition is not a return.

Perhaps repetition is a way of producing difference.

I keep returning to this sentence:

Through repetition, the next thing arrives.

This is beginning to change how I look at my archive.

The old photograph is not simply evidence of what happened.

The old video is not simply documentation.

The old drawing is not simply a record of an earlier thought.

When I return to them now, they become something else because I have changed.

The archive has not necessarily changed.

My capacity to encounter it has.

This is making me reconsider what I mean by an archive.

I have been calling this object Working Archive: Choreographing Relation, but the title itself remains provisional.

I don't yet know if I am building an archive, excavating one, activating one, or being changed by one.

Maybe all of these things are happening at once.

What I am increasingly interested in is not only what my practice has produced, but what has been producing the practice.

What conditions keep returning?

What gestures keep resurfacing?

What kinds of encounters do I repeatedly create?

What am I inviting people into?

What do I keep doing before I have language for it?

And what happens when I encounter those things again?

This is where the idea of the practice as an organism becomes useful to me.

An organism has a history, but it is not only its history.

It carries traces of what came before while continually changing through its environment.

It responds.

It adapts.

It grows.

It sheds.

It repeats.

It transforms.

So perhaps I am not excavating a dead body.

Perhaps I am studying a living organism through its traces.

This also complicates my understanding of process and performance.

I have often thought about process as the place where changes happen, and performance as the place where we share what is coming from those changes.

But I am beginning to question that separation.

Perhaps performance is not where research ends.

Perhaps performance is one of the places where research becomes exposed—to another body, another gaze, another space, another time.

Perhaps the work continues changing when it is encountered.

Perhaps the process doesn't belong only to the studio.

Perhaps the audience, the place, the conditions of presentation and the relationships formed around the work all become part of what the work can become.

If this is true, then the archive cannot simply document completed things.

It has to remain capable of changing.

It has to allow something else to enter.

Which brings me back to newness.

If newness can't enter, what kind of opening does a practice need?

What does it mean to create a portal into a work without closing down what that work can become?

And what happens when I create that portal for myself?

These are questions I don't have answers to yet.

I am beginning to understand that perhaps I don't need to answer them immediately.

At this stage, I need to linger.

To stay with the photograph a little longer.

To watch the video again.

To return to a drawing.

To read an old sentence without immediately deciding what it means.

To allow a gesture to remain unresolved.

To listen to another artist's thought and notice what it disturbs in my own.

To repeat something without demanding that it return unchanged.

I am becoming interested in lingering as a research method.

Because perhaps understanding does not always arrive through explanation.

Perhaps sometimes it arrives through staying.

For now, this is where Working Archive: Choreographing Relation is.

Not a finished archive.

Not yet a methodology.

Not even a clear object.

More like a site of excavation.

A living thing being approached through its traces.

A practice trying to encounter itself again.

And perhaps, through that encounter, making enough space for something new to enter.