Imagining transmission otherwise

This research stream attempts to reimagine documentation methods currently used in forms of conservation and overall transmission.

It labours to pivot documentation and conservation towards approaches that are not only responsive, but deeply entangled with the affective documentation that usually takes place: the bodies and archives of artists involved in experimental performance-based artistic practices, grassroots performing arts institutions and collectives, local cultural organisations, museums, research centres, and universities.

It aims to map out the archives with documentation related to the performance-based paradigms of the 1970s while also fostering the creation of a mutual aid network imprinted by an ethic of solidarity and motivated by collective gestures towards the preservation of paper and media archives.

These archives are typically produced and reproduced through precarious more-than-human networks.

These are networks that bring together institutional agents, stakeholders, and the technoscientific apparatus of production and reproduction of these works at various levels.

At the same time relational and dispersed in nature, these networks are essential in the grounding of the affective landscapes necessary for the continued memorialisation of the artworks under study within RESONANCE (see more on this under Commoning infrastructures).

But the issue of transmission is not only practical – it also sits at a liminal conceptual juncture. On the one hand, it is grounded in practices largely characterised by intangibility; on the other, their variability, relationality, and embeddedness within the broader arts and culture infrastructures qua Becker’s art worlds complicate attempts to capture the performative through standard methodologies. This is particularly evident in frameworks such as the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which, despite its inclusive inter alia formulation, nonetheless ends up producing what it seems to be an artificial separation between forms of cultural practices: art and craft, contemporary expression and traditional knowledge(s), performing arts and performance art, or global and local.

In other words, while tools such as inventorying checklists, significance statements, or archival documentation could serve well to preserve some of the specificities of each performance-based manifestation, these can fail to mobilise the affective register of those practices, or even document the ways in which they, in themselves, perform through material-discursive relational infrastructures. Museums collecting performance-based manifestations, of the likes of Tate of MoMA, just to give a few examples, have been working towards the development of new tools.

Tate’s Strategy and Glossary of Terms for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance is one of those tools. While these museum-bred frameworks do attempt to map out the ways in which artworks are part of an overarching affects-infused production infrastructure assembling material-discursive knowledge(s), skills, and technoscientific production and reproduction means, these tools still tend to maintain some of the unspoken preconditions of transmission.

First, collecting institutions holding these works usually seek to maintain access to, and control over, all means necessary for their production, even when these reside or are maintained outside the institution’s walls. And second, more often than not, information is gathered through forms of capture and enclosure in which a script is produced for each of these performance works, with the aim of translating what is conceived as intangible into code. The metabolisation of what Nelson Goodman could call autographic works – such as historical performances, one could argue – into allographic pieces turns language and the unpredictable into algorithmic forms, which are far more easily digestible for the institutional body. Still, as we are hoping to expand on with the RESONANCE project (Intersecting analytical dichotomies), these dichotomies are not so clearly branched, and there are always ways in which the performance-based works themselves are able to insidiously escape the workings of this processing plant.

Taking place primarily during the project’s last year, this research stream seeks to synthesise the results emerging from other research areas into novel approaches to documentation and transmission. Intersecting analytical dichotomies will foster a capacious understanding of performance-based manifestations that reject strict ontological silos and, in this case, refuse the cybernetic impetus towards codification, which, in turn, can promote a non-binary identification of the selected works. Cartographing theoretical geographies will pivot novel approaches towards the reading of performance-based works and forms of transmission, namely through affect and posthumanist theory readings of these processes. Works studied in the context of Performative resonances will significantly support the investigation on alternative ecologies of transmission and memory practices, while our investigations in the context of Inscribing histories, researching historiographies can unveil the vices of historiographical practices in and as performance and help read through the affective potentials sprouting from the intervals of history.

All members of the research team are involved in this research stream.

How to cite this resource: RESONANCE project team (2026). “About the RESONANCE project: Research Streams,” in RESONANCE: Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979). Available at https://resonance.fcsh.unl.pt/research-streams/imagining-transmission-otherwise/ Contributions (by alphabetic order of last name): First draft write-up: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Hélia Marçal, Ana Pais Review and final draft write-up: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Afonso Dias Ramos, Joana Lia Ferreira, Rita Macedo, Filipa Magalhães, Hélia Marçal, Ana Pais; Last review: 16 October 2026

The content on this website is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license. This means anyone can use this information with appropriate attribution. Under this license, attribution includes giving appropriate credit, providing a link to the license (see above), and indicating whether changes were made. The RESONANCE project is supported by the Programa Regional Lisboa 2030, Portugal 2030 and the European Union (LISBOA2030-FEDER-00914500). This work is also co-funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the references 2023.17624.ICDT (https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.17624.ICDT). In addition, this work is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, FCT, I.P., under the FCT-Tenure programme 2023.11076.TENURE.147, 2023.11076.TENURE.195, 2023.11076.TENURE.193, and in the context of the Concurso Estímulo ao Emprego Científico Individual, with the reference 10.54499/2022.03775.CEECIND/CP1725/CT0045. The research centres associated to this project are funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, FCT, I.P.: UID/00417/2025 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00417/2025), UID/00693/2025 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00693/2025), and LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI 10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020). IHA, IHC, CESEM, ICNOVA, and IFILNOVA are funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UID/00417/2025 (DO: doi.org/10.54499/UID/00417/2025), UID/04209/2025 (DOI: https///doi.org/10.54499/uID/04209/2025). UID/00693/2025 (DOl: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00693/2025), UID/05021/2025 (DOl: https//doi.org/10.54499/UID/05021/2025), UID/00183/2025 (DO: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00183/2025), ond LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI: doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020)