Performing My Self-archive, My Other Body: An Autobiographical Installation Art Performance is a reclamation of the past arriving in the form of the archive performed for the present. As the first iteration of Moving House performed in 2018 at Calle Wright, this new work needs to be discussed in relation to its previous version. In Moving House, I found myself very much at home surrounded by my body of materials with everything being self-story-bound; with hardly any of the things belonging to an amorphous mass of unattached elements. I was of the conviction that whatever material I was working on at any point of the performance, that whatever material I was handling in the moment, would be a good point of entry to narrate my life as an artist. It was not just a conviction; it was what really happened. I found myself often ending my talks and conversations with thoughts on love and art: “If one does not love the art one is making, what is the point of making art?” It was in the telling of stories that I became very my much alive in the present. More important, it was in the story-telling with things in my archive acting as triggers for remembering, as mnemonic devices, and as bridges helping me connect many of my stories that allowed for the flow of exchange between functional memory (my memory) and storage memory (my archive).

In producing the work as performance, I take the liberty of using scholar Beatrice von Bismarck’s words to state what is specifically performative and critical in my work: “a self-reflexive archival praxis that takes the record-making and generative aspects of archiving as its subject.” And “[b]y usurping their archiving activities, artists challenge the ascendancy of institutions and those who work in them. Self-archiving thus appears to be primarily a political strategy; it represents a counter-model to the institution and its consecrating function…not only exercises its own power, but illustrates and makes visible its conditions.”

“Performance’s only life is in the present” concludes Peggy Phelan in Unmarked, the Politics of Performance. Performance art does not have a past nor a future. As live art, it only has a present with its documentations only prompts to memory, only archival materials. But the archive as a memorial space, as a mode of remembrance, as storage memory, is uninhabited; making the archive antithetical to performance. However in performing the archive, a storage memory (an encouragement of memory to become present), and functional memory (a lived space linked to my living memories and experiences), work together as complementary modes of remembering.

Without using my self-archive to reclaim it for the present, I am dis-membered from my body of autobiographical materials. On the other hand, in performing my self-archive, I “re-member” my past to the present and ­even envision possibilities for the future. Phelan again: “The disappearance of the [subject] is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs to be remembered.” Despite this, in performing the record making and telling of my life story “re-membered” with my body of autobiographical materials, artist and self-archive are one work, one presence. When the performance ceases, the subject disappears but the other body, the body of self-representational materials remains, awaiting to be “re-membered” again by/with the artist in the presence of other living bodies.

A performance of performance’s antithesis, PMSaMOB as a political strategy is an enactment of a critique of the institution of archives consequently taking the form of a parody. Linda Hutcheon in her book A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth-Centutry Art Forms writes “one common denominator shared by” works of parody is the “tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference.” Performing My Self-archive, My Other Body as parody, as Institutional Critique is a performance of turning the archive into archival art; of turning the archive as dump to archive as compost; of turning an excavation site into a construction site; of turning what was originally an amorphous mass of the uninhabited into story-bound materials; of reclaiming the past for the present; of the self-authorizing, self-legitimizing and the self-construction of the subject as artist with the individual now the bearer of the archive, taking the place of the collective one of archiving public institutions and their consecrating functions. Whether institutions or individuals, in conserving very specific material memory and culture, ultimately, whoever authors, authorizes or uses the archive has the power to confer cultural status and legitimacy and the authority to discursively construct particular subjects and history thus defining and deciding what and who enters the cultural matrix.

My archive now installed in a white cube, it is fitting that I now treat it as a laboratory where I can investigate, probe, and research how best to perform it as my other body. This time, rather than simply telling stories prompted by materials in my archive, I hope to engage the audience as discussants to help me think through this project.

Judy Freya Sibayan (b. 1953, Baguio City) is a conceptual artist who has exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and biennales worldwide. Former director of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines, she has been the Museum of Mental Objects and its curator since 2002. Author of The Hypertext HerMe(s), her autobiography published by KT Press in 2014 with a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she is also co-founding editor and publisher of the online Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art (ctrlp--artjournal.org). All three are parodies of the art institution and exemplars of her body of work of institutional critique produced for the past 25 years. She studied fine arts at the University of the Philippines, completed her MFA at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles and her DFA at De La Salle University, Manila where she taught for three decades.