Dave Colangelo – Powerpoint Slides – Key Concepts
Interfacing, Accessing, and Performing the Archive in Public
Access: Making the archives accessible
(Colangelo, York University, 18)
Performance: The performance of information, it is the event of producing both a history and future archive.
(Colangelo, York University 19)
Site-Specific Screening and the Projection of Archives:
Robert Lepage's Le Moulin aimages
Bruno Lessard
Robert Lepage's Le Moulin aimages
Bruno Lessard
Bruno Lessard’s Moulin Reading Key Concepts:
I. Introduction
Key Concepts:
Paul Ricoeur’s Definition of the archive (Lessard 73)
- "The moment of the archive is the moment of the entry into writing of the historiographical operation. Testimony is by origin oral. It is listened to, heard. The archive is written. It is read, consulted. In archives, the professional historian is a reader."
Foucault (Lessard 73-74)
- According to Foucault, You must memorize the monuments of the past, transform them into documents and lend speech to those traces which in themselves are often nonverbal, history is what transforms documents into monuments
LeGoff (Lessard 73-74)
- According to Le Goff we need to dismantle, to destroy this montage, to de-structure this construction and analyze the conditions in which were produced these documents-monuments
II. '''le me souviens': La Querelle des Modernes et des Postmodernes"
(Problems with the history)
(Problems with the history)
1. Theoretical perspective: claims to be neutral, but actually erases ideological orientation & de-problematizes events in history (Lessard 75)
- No content; “not a word of explanation”
- De-problematized in the minds of those who create and in those who watch
2. Collective appropriation of images by the public (Lessard 75)
Where are the images from? How were they created? Who decided to use these images?
3. Historical reconstruction (Lessard 76)
- Problem in retelling history from a “neutral” perspective; trying to avoid the cliches
- “New visual texts”: available for everyone to write their own historical narrative
> Spectators: Depends on the number of images they can actually identify
> Observers: Open-ended historical representation
4. Historical content vs. spectacle (Lessard 76)
- Spectacle: The display lacks soul - only remembers powerful images but forgets the rest afterwards
- Historical content: whitewashed to prevent controversy
III. (Re)Animating History: Site Specificity and Relationality
Key concepts:
- Meyer’s Two types of sites (Lessard 78-79)
- Literal site: “an actual location, a singular place”
- Functional site” “may or may not incorporate a physical place”
- Moulin is between functional and literal, it is informational, a subcategory of the functional site, since it combines both a visual artistic representation of something with an actual physical place
- Vaugeois vs Dube (Lessard 78)
- Vaugeois has a bias toward the written document; Dube has a strong focus on open-endedness
