Performing the Archive

During her residency, Annelieke delves into the cassette archive of her mother, a pianist — layering the recordings with echoes from the family timeline. Through a hauntological exploration of home footage, past and present start to collide. When the daughter of a performing musician looks at her mother — the first to ever lay eyes on her — a hall of mirrors unfolds.

Is a recording a performance towards the future? On one cassette, her mother — at the same age Annelieke is now — speaks to a fortune teller, a medium who tells her about what is yet to come. How to perform the archive in order to invoke it? Is the performer of the archive a medium themselves?

Performing the Archive explores the repetitions woven into family history, the mother-daughter relationship, female identity across generations, and the fragile boundaries between memory and sanity.

For a sonic collaboration, Annelieke invites sound artist Baz Laarakkers into her research — together they dive into recordings of stage art and ways of performing the archive.