ABSTRACT
Can performance art exist beyond the live? Drawing on vitalism and new materialism theories, this chapter looks at the ethics of the conservation of performance through practices of difference, mediatization, complexification and memorialization. Is the live in performance the only way for performance to be alive? Can performance be animated through objects, media, memories? How are the virtual and the actual aligned through practices of care? This chapter explores the notion of vitalism in new materialism and how it leads to forms of affirmative ethics. It will look at practices of intra-action between live performance and its remains. Focusing on the affirmative ethics of a vital understanding of conservation of performance, this approach will allow for identifying the theoretical inclusions and exclusions of current thinking in conservation of performance, allowing for a re-evaluation of performance art’s ontology as an affirmative, vital, and plural ethico-onto-epistemo-logy (Barad 2007).
