Performative guided visit to the exhibition “Saâdane Afif. The Fountain Archives and Beyond”

The objective of a guided visit is normally to bring light, transparency and knowledge to the viewers, to help unlock everything that the artist and the curator of the exhibition want to convey. The didactics of the visit – i.e., the resources used to achieve this objective – depend on the person guiding it.

Thus, it can be linear, circular, radial, academic, scholarly, creative, learned, false, rational, invented or subjective, with the visitors standing or seated, next to the works or walking through the exhibition spaces, from a single fixed point or in an auditorium with technological visual support (or voice only) and without any direct contact with the exhibited works. It can also be, as here, performative.

If we assume that it is usually the artist, and not the guide, who creates a performance, then… what does it mean to do a performative guided visit?

Xavier Aballí

Activity by Xavier Aballí within the framework of Studio inframince, a programme of activities curated by Erich Weiss around the exhibition Saâdane Afif. The Fountain Archives and Beyond.