Spiritual Archives. Communication, Healing and Politics of Performance
Keywords:
critical spirituality, performance art, performance as research, healing, politicsAbstract
In this essay, I present the concept of “spiritual archives” as a relevant and innovative tool to analyze and critically understand performance's political power and healing potency. I argue that this concept contributes to the discussion about our ways of categorizing sources of knowledge, which means that the spiritual archives are an episteme, a legitimate way to obtain information about the world. First, I develop the concept in the context of the discussion about “valid” sources of information for research in Performance Studies, which comprise, so far, the archive and the repertoire. Then, I explain four characteristics of spiritual archives by applying the concept in an analysis of my performance art piece Medium. I end by explaining human communication in the context of spiritual archives and their political potency.
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