Documentation Action Research Collective (DARC)

Documentation Action Research Collective (DARC) is an interdisciplinary collective of five international artists working on alternative and collective modes of documenting performance. Tara Fatehi Irani, Ernst Fischer, Holly Revell, Manuel Vason and Jemima Yong bring together their mixed backgrounds and expertise in performance, visual arts, photography, writing and documentation. The five artists each have their specialist approach to documentation through photography, object making, drawing, videos, sound, reenactments and ephemeral installations.

Through practice-based research projects, DARC is exploring the notions of documentation and the archive in performance. They approach the documentation of artists’ work as a creative act in itself, not solely meant for preservation purposes. They produce collective and admittedly incomplete records of live events. Through a process of creative alteration and transformation they aim to reflect an essence of the live experience and its often neglected aspects. Their practice is a collaborative process, a dialogue, a hyper-attentive presence, a responsibility and an art form of its own.

Their projects include Transformance: experiments on collective performance documentation and Sully Nights: a monthly artist gathering and conversation.

Transformance is a methodology in how live performance can be experienced, transformed and translated, employing a range of disciplines in an act of imaginative exchange between artist, witness/documenter, and a wider audience. This project aims to foster a dynamic collaboration between diverse practices in performance and documentation, to blur the lines between the act of performance and the act of documentation. Transformance aims to generate a hybridised live practice by creating and responding through a variety of disciplines evocative of both traditional and alternative documentation methods. This project rejects the notion of the singular perspective in an archive by creating objects and performance responses that belong together in a collection.

Transformance is based around a passion and an interest in exploring what remains (and does not remain) of a performance, and in questioning the seeming contradictions between the ephemeral and the fixed. Through this project, the collective examines modes of subverting conventional expectations of performance documentation. They exercise a connection with other artists’ practice through a participation that produces fluid experimental responses and partial interpretations. Transformance is made from the love of two words ‘Transformation’ and ‘Performance’. It is the name for an active process of exchange and creation catalysed by live performance.

The collective is currently preparing a three hour performance installation followed by an installation of the remains of the live event at Tempting Failure 2018. This will be the latest manifestation of Transformance. The collective is working with selected Tempting Failure artists Moa Johansson, Hollie Miller and Peter Eason Daniels prior to the festival in daylong processes of dialogue, performance, documentation and responses from multiple perspectives to the participating artists’ practice.

The live installation of Transformance will take place on 17 July 2018, 1-4pm and the installation will continue until 21 July at Matthews Yard.

DARC are also hosting one of LADA’s DIY projects this year at Dance4 (Nottingham) in October (and link) where they will continue their Transformance project with selected participants through a series of discussions, workshops and experiments.

DARC Transformance trailer: (choose whichever platform suits you best)

On YouTube

On Vimeo

Categories: Featured Artist


Date Posted: 27 June 2018