TY - THES ID - 134967506 TI - The Walking Archive Exploring the walking aspect in archive practices: The case of Walk+Talk AU - Fourtouni, Athanasia AU - Masschelein, Anneleen AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master of Cultural Studies (Leuven) PY - 2016 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:134967506 AB - Abstract: This thesis aims to explore the function of walking in archiving dance practices. The case that will be used is Walk+Talk, a project that was initiated by Philip Gehmacher in Vienna, in 2013 and continued also in Brussels, Stockholm and Reykjavik. In this project, the invited artists were expected to create, each one on their own, lecture- performances under the instruction of the simultaneous use of walking and talking in order to reflect on their own methods and practices. Due to the vast amount of the material created, only the first series of lecture-performances that took place in Vienna will be used and analyzed. The concept of the walking archive is a contemplation consisted of notions taken from the writings of Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour, André Lepecki and Lena Hammergren. The notion of walking as a creative device and the relationship between walking and thinking are not new ideas; this thesis attempts to be a valid account of this connection in relation to the notion of the archive, a complex notion that its relationship with the human body is rather recent. In dance as a performing art, until recently, archiving had been considered only through notation systems. Therefore, in the present thesis, a sub-chapter on the relationship between dance and notation was necessary, along with another one on the current shifts in dance archiving and the problems and challenges related to the notion of the archive. The analysis of Walk+Talk is based in the theoretical model that I call 'a walking archive'. The definition constructed is 'the walking archive', which is a body that expresses a singularity which performs the archive through walking. Walking is an action that functions in time and space. Each singularity expressed through a walking archive has also the ability to affect and be affected by the other walking archives. Spatial poems are created on stage, collections of memories, reflections, expressions of experiences that consist an assymetrical and fragmented whole, #a portrait of a generation#, as Jeroen Peeters successfully has pointed out. The performative aspect of archive is taken from Lepecki's concept on the body as archive, where he explains that the archive can only act and that choreography is a perfect medium to do so. The view of the use of space as the creation of fragmented, invisible poems is taken from Certeau's poetic view on walking and its relationship to language. Also, Hammergren's notion of the 'flâneuse' is a segment of a walking theory that is related to the writing of the history. A 'flâneuse' is someone who during writing about the past, experiences a walking, a wandering with her senses, attempting an embodied approach on the writing of history. This is also a concept that is included in that of the 'walking archive' presented here. The relationship between walking and talking is also explained with Latour's proposition on the notion of the body and especially on his approach on what it means to be an articulated subject: articulation is not only about speech, either oral or written, but it extends to include the notion of embodiment. ER -