History of Performance Art and New Materialism

One of the issues concerning the historiography of performance art is its intrinsic interdisciplinarity, which involves not only languages and analytical aspects, but also disciplinary contexts between art history, theatre history, music history and dance history. The multiple and layered interferences involve the 'life' before the “craft”, its generative affections of processes. These data not only broaden the disciplinary perspectives 'between them' but also call into question disciplinary certainties, transcended by the ways of being of practices, for example in the unexpected disconnections between event, work and documentation. Thus, the question of the archive becomes even more problematic than it it already is – we must never forget its exclusionary processes regarding the unexpected subjectivities indicated over fifty years ago by Carla Lonzi. How, then, can we imagine inductive methodologies and new transdisciplinary genealogies that transform “History” into plural “stories” from the practical perspective of research? The article proposes the adoption of epistemologies and perspectives from new materialism, between posthuman and queer studies, showing how these perspectives allow neglected histories to emerge.