Today, I think of choreography as a structure that I use to create links between places, people, histories, artistic practices, and memories. These operations offer new critical and poetic opportunities away from the historically dominant practice of separation, which has been produced by abstracting relations between causes and effects and structures of power. I use fiction, editing and poetic condensation to enhance participation through imagination, both in theater and museum contexts.

With the Monuments series, started in 2014, I engage in speculative history writing without the promise of teleology. These monuments are embodied, performative and temporal. I conceive them as processes of emancipation from positivist conceptions of history and against amnesia. They are thought of as anti-monuments, always numbered below the threshold of 1. They are occasions for resisting oblivion and exclusion with the potential to transform and repair as they invest in the act of creating memory: their very capacity to build narratives through performative archives of poetic documents. When celebrating forgotten artists, aging bodies, rhythms and gestures of oppressed cultures, these monuments compose with fragments and transform traces into new meanings without fixing them as relics.

Valeska Gert was an avant-garde artistic figure. From the early 1920s on, she developed a performance practice combining theater, dance, cinema, poetry and singing, a mixture of expressions familiar to Berlin’s cabaret scene of that time. Gert created radical performance art by experimenting with gender, race, national identity and aesthetics. Despite her artistic fearlessness, provocativeness and anarchic intensity of performance, the importance of Valeska Gert’s role in art and dance history has been disregarded for a long time.

The Valeska Gert Monument proposes that if the past cannot be remembered, then it can still be invented. This temporal monument mainly focuses on works that haven’t been documented, constituting the largest body of work by an artist who almost entirely faded into oblivion. What does it mean to speculate about the life and work of a non-living artist? How can the untraceable be envisioned? What happens if artworks are re-imagined based on a single photograph, poem or title and the belief in historical truth is suspended?

The Valeska Gert Monument draws dynamic tensions between the notions of memory, archive and history and become tools for animating historical (utopian) consciousness through exercising critical, ethical, and poetic empathy. Rather than displaying documents, the monument performs imagination and takes autobiography and fiction as the main fields of investigation. Through extending thoughts, utterances and gestures next to historical associations and echoing expressions, the monument unfolds a trans-subjective space of multiple (physical, textual, vocal, poetic) dimensions.

What kind of value can be given to a fictional archive? How can fiction affect our relationship towards knowledge and its production? What meaning can be constructed if we acknowledge the fact that our relationship to history has a history? Composing with the past from the perspective of the present is different from imagining the past as it could have happened. Beyond fascination and mimesis the desire is to problematize failed historical consciousness and invent new relationships towards the past in order to shape the future (of art and artistic practice). Thus, performativity, as it is used in The Valeska Gert Monument, has more to do with ideas of embodiment and empathy than with reenactment.

What remains in the fish net of History? There were and still are reasons why Gert’s role hasn’t gained more relevance in art history. She was a solo artist, never founded a school, didn’t create a style, didn’t established a dance company. Asking what we learn and how we learn, as well as what we remember and how we remember is crucial for developing non-normative, critical relationships towards the production of knowledge and art. Remembering and archiving is not only for learning about the past. Archives shape our imagination and consequently our future.

© Eszter Salamon, 2018