Folds in time - Performing the archive

Folds in time: Sharing pop/sub/counter cultural history using artists as storytellers. The digital world and all its aspects have dramatically altered our ability to share cultural collections. More and more material is collected daily; digitised, tagged, codified and stored. Methods for sharing collections online have become more sophisticated, allowing access to an unprecedented quantity and variety of cultural material. One of the challenges for institutions holding such collections is finding innovative ways of connecting this material; contextualising it within broader stories; and, most importantly, sharing it. By using artists situated within the histories, we can create opportunities for meeting this challenge. These artists, both participants and observers, bring invaluable wealth to the discussion: an intimate knowledge of the site; creative and aesthetic sensibilities informed by practice that was embedded in the time/place; and agency in the story. To effectively share these stories in a noisy world requires innovative approaches. One of these is the use of performance as a curatorial device for cultural history. The story and the style and structure of the performance, define how historical materials are engaged. An example will be evoked: It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Humidity, a 2015 live theatre performance which attempted to tell the story of the Brisbane underground music scene in the late 1970s, using live and recorded music and sound; projections of film and photographs; memoir and monologue. There are great advantages in the emotional potential created in such a public story-telling event. The connections between artist, audience and story all add to an enriched individual experience. And it is these individual experiences with culture which are at the heart of the health of communities. They are at the heart of the artist/audience relationship which drives the cultural industries. They are at the heart of our attempt to make sense of ourselves, one another and the lives we find ourselves in.