Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans

Project Information

PerformingArchive

Grant agreement ID: 892721

DOI

10.3030/892721

Project closed

EC signature date 28 April 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 196 707,84

EU contribution

€ 196 707,84

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE LYON 3 JEAN MOULIN
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PerformingArchive (Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

More than 200 years after ending its colonial ties to France, the city of New Orleans (United States) offers evidence of how identities are constructed through the repetition of behaviours directly linked to a place's specific history. This repetition can be considered a social performance that has intensified in New Orleans in the fifteen years after the social trauma of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Given the global challenges presented by large-scale migration (seen especially in Europe at the moment), the analysis of identity formation in relation to everyday life and international post-colonial relations merits critical study. The projet “Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans” (PANO) re-examined identity and social imaginaries through a dialogue between contemporary and historical data, using the complicated link between New Orleans and France as a model for future researchers. Working with data from a long-term initiative on francophone identities in New Orleans, the project conducted experiments at The Historic New Orleans Collection. These experiments were used to explore how everyday life in New Orleans produces a peculiar “french” imaginary.

The PANO project included four overall objectives:
1) Analysis of an everyday “french” identity and imaginary in New Orleans. The first objective focuses on analysing the ways that residents’ everyday life practices are consciously labelled ‘french’ in contemporary New Orleans. These practices contribute to the perpetual construction of a social imaginary.
2) Development of archival experiments based on the concept of the “infra-ordinaire”. Developed by French writer Georges Perec, the “infra-ordinaire” becomes the basis for experiments that place previously collected interview data in conversation with new research in the THNOC archives. Inspired by Perec’s creative approach to documenting everyday life, the experiments will use protocols for archival visits and ultimately to determine the selection of materials for an interactive, site-specific performance event.
3) Conduct archival research in New Orleans. The experiments developed in objective 2 are applied to archival documents pertaining to a New Orleans “french” identity/imaginary. The project's research design allows a constant movement between various New Orleans-based “french” imaginaries, thus generating an innovative dialogue that illuminates the performative role of archives and the constructed nature of the imaginaries themselves.
4) Development of an interactive, site-specific performance event and performance book to activate the archival research. The performance event brings the general public into contact with the archive itself, where the performance book suggests personal actions or perspectives for viewing others’ actions in relation to selected artefacts.

The project’s conclusions are linked to the “french” imaginary of New Orleans, the infra-ordinary as a rich context of social analysis and the archive as both a site of history and a concept that invites creative intervention.

To tell or read the story of “french” New Orleans is an effort to make visible its everyday production, to call attention to an imaginary caught in a feedback loop that thrives on remnants and reenactments of the past. The threads that connect what is “french” in New Orleans to what was “French” in New Orleans are imaginary, the link between the real and the imagined being less important than the act of weaving itself. “French” New Orleans captures only fragments of historically situated francophonies, while also representing an invitation to create an imaginary from everyday observations and gestures, both past and present, and thus an invitation to read, think or do the city.

The ordinary offers a performative context in which imaginaries are created and re-created, and requires a project of attention, a project of focusing attention on the everyday as realm of experience rather than category of analysis. Our experience of the everyday and ordinary present happens in relation to the past and reflects our collective archival desire to look back to another time and space.

The archive itself is a place where the meanings of its contents are shifty, sometimes imagined, sometimes even fictionalized, and often rely on the desires of the person consulting and interpreting the archival document. The archive’s contents are also reminders of its absences: there is more that has been erased or destroyed then what has been preserved.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project was organized into eight work packages that produced the following activities and main results:

- Performer l’imaginaire de la Nouvelle-Orléans (https://imaginaire.hypotheses.org/). This project website site has been diffused to both scientific and general publics allowing direct engagement with the project.

- Perpetual protocols: A 24-hour “french” imaginary (http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/perpetual-protocols-a-24-hour-french-imaginary_782709#12/29.9755/-90.0165). This online, open source map invites users to participate directly in the experimental performance protocols developed during the fieldwork process and an interactive, site-specific fieldwork event.

- Protocols for a perpetual imaginary (New Orleans). An experimental, interactive, publication distributed to the general and scientific public via interactive workshops, while also distributed throughout France and Louisiana to francophone cultural organizations as a tool to discuss the social construction of francophonies;
- 1 edited book collection to be published by Éditions Hermann, December 2023, Les archives en performance, la performance en archive: action, méthode, recherche

- 2 publications in peer-reviewed journals (Thaêtre and Post-Scriptum)

- 3 book chapters to be published in peer-reviewed edited collections (United States, Dis-united States, Éditions Pléiades, Dec. 2023) and Les archives en performance, la performance en archive: action, méthode, recherche, Éditions Hermann, Dec. 2023)

- L’archive comme lieu d’expérimentation: construction, création, performance”, a two-day conference that considered research-based artistic experiments within the archive.

- “Performance & Archive”, a two-day, international thematic school that invited researchers and artists to present research, artistic projects and workshops addressing the relationship between the archive and performance.

- 5 presentations at national and international conferences, study days or research seminars in France

- 9 invited lectures, courses taught or performance workshops delivered to Masters students in French universities

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project bridges everyday life, archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary social imaginaries. The use of participatory and site-specific fieldwork methods invited the general public to participate directly in scientific research related to a city’s contemporary identity (ex. “french” New Orleans). This approach might be expanded to involve more active citizen use of institutional archives, as well as creative and collaborative uses of archival documents. Potential future users of the project results include francophone organizations in the United States and in Europe, as well as universities and cultural institutions interested in collaborative, site-specific methods, the study of social imaginaries in public space and the process of research-creation.

Performance publication