Paper short abstract:

This contribution is based on my Phd research in Art & Anthropology, leading together an art practice (visual art & "performance") with a theoretical writing involving notions of Memories, Traces, Archives, Environment, Lanscapes and Bodies. Based in Iceland.

Paper long abstract:

The discussion on "bodies & archives" will be based on 3 aspects :

- My body as an archive : implying notions like "Performance, Performativity, creativity like a knowledges's foundation" :

Based on my hikking experience as an visual artist to connect one fjords to other without any roads into the icelandic mountainous area remote and deserted. My body experienced the performance by teaching me my limits creating a virtual archive of my own body/soul. Haunted by my childhood memories sedimented into it, I collected the traces from past history about area to create a unique archives based on elders's memories and landscapes traces. Knowledges founded on a weaving mode by ways and returns between practicing and theorizing.

-Elder's bodies as archives : implying notions like "Performativity versus Productivity and personal narratives" : Elders's childhood memories create an alive but uncertain archive, designing a memory constantly moving and narratives from their past history also their culture. As a specific farming's type implying a body performance as climbing into the cliffs for eggs's gathering or sheeps's grazing into the mountains. How the mountainous environement created for the teenagers a self-perception of performing and memories based on bodies performances.

-The Absence : Considering archives into the concept "image-memory" (Ricoeur 2013), we will discuss the reconstruction of some elders's memories into images by that way allowing a symbolic re-inscription of the person into the place it were constrained to abandon. The archive becomes a way a healing the trauma of exile and abandon : "How to continue to be present where we are absent ?" (Amar 2008).