‘Performing the Ethnographer’ - Experimental ethnographic case studies towards new materialist archival performances/performed archives.

Abstract

This dissertation project concerns itself with an anthropology of performativity and the archive. It proposes ethnographic field research with archival and performance art projects, launching a re-reading of the seemingly contradictory  ontologies of performance and the archive, and how they may interact. It seeks to produce a body of experimental ethnographic research, including field research and ethnographic fiction, on how this interaction may be appropriated and documented towards a methodology of conservation and exploration of emergent moments of performance art and prefigurative political experiments. Through exploring the work of one queering art and heritage common in Athens ‘Communitism’, and a performance art collective in Vienna ‘The Toxic Temple’ via ethnographic fieldwork I seek to produce case studies of how performance and archiving interact as worlding processes, via doing archives of  performances and performing as an archival act. In the case studies, which I will produce as a participant observer, I will experiment with ‘performing the ethnographer’, ethnographic research as a performance art practice, to both explore what fieldwork can lend to the theoretical and practical intersection between performance and archive ontologies and to challenge the colonial dynamics of ethnography and
ethnographic archives.

Short biography

Demi Spriggs works at the interface between art and anthropology, and is concerned with what ethnography can be as a performative modality. She has participated in a number of arts collectives between Athens and London, and is a member of a rolling performance group based in Vienna concerned with performing a plastic worshipping cult, and an art-workers collective in Athens that occupies abandoned industrial buildings and works with producing intersecting and overlapping narratives in liminal spaces. Demi has published with De Gruyter, Becoming Magazine, Engagee Magazine, and SOBER, and is working towards developing a body of ethographic fictions and experimental scientific essays.
Her personal arts practice circumvents notions of ethnographic futures, heritage production, alternative ways of feeling knowing, plural ontologies, and shows up as mixed-media installations. She has participated in a number of residencies and group shows and is currently working on preparation for two projects: A Restrospective on the Anthropocene, that shows a future archeaologists historical reenactment of human societies as a museum/archival piece, and How Metal is your Ecocide, a seed-scavange and invasive species botanical garden and a sound installation as a take on the production of scientific knowledge.