ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with recalling well-known histories of performance, pointing out the importance of the idea of the presence of the artist’s ‘living’ body in both the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and in various forms of ‘live’ arts, including theatre. The performing body, as the very premise of a ‘real’ encounter, was regarded as in no way mediated through fictional role-playing. Nachlass clearly demonstrates that, in our day, we are dealing with a manifest paradigmatic change. Whereas over four decades ago, performance artists stripped theatre of layers of fiction which had mediated between the stage and audience, foregrounding ‘live’ encounter and participation, today’s artists go even deeper, subverting the very foundations of the Western episteme laid at the beginning of modernity. With the intentional absence of ‘living’ bodies of performers, in this reading Rimini Protokoll’s Nachlass performs the limits of knowledge to let a novel epistemic paradigm(s) of knowing emerge.
