ACTIVATIONS: A FLUXUS SYMPOSIUM – Friday, February 27, 12–7 PM CET

This public symposium takes place at Hochschule der Künste Bern, Fellerstrasse 11, 3027 Bern.

PROGRAM

ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKERS

Activity and Activations: Tim Ingold in Conversation

What does it mean to say of artefacts and artworks that they are formations of active materials, rather than compounds of matter and form? How does activity unfold through the different life-phases of an artwork: its birth, maturation, transformation, circulation, institutionalization, conservation and potential disappearance? And how might we rethink the idea of activity within conservation, in a way that escapes the logic which so often positions traditional or historical artefacts as inert and unchanging? In this conversation, social anthropologist Tim Ingold engages these and related questions from an anthropological perspective.

Tim Ingold has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organization in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie at the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024). Ingold is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to anthropology. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology University of Aberdeen, UK.

Judit Bodor

[Re]activating the archive: The past, present and possible futures of Artpool Art Research Center

What is an active archive, and how does it happen? What distinct preservation challenges does it face? Can activation support conservation, and vice versa? This paper examines Artpool Art Research Centre, Budapest, as a preeminent example of an active archive. Through my twenty-five years of engagement with Artpool, I situate artist György Galántai’s concept within a broader Fluxus context, highlighting the active archive as a practice that generates, circulates, preserves, and reactivates experimental artworks since the late 1970s. Case studies, such as the 1998 reactivation of Robert Filliou and Joachim Pfeufer’s Poipoidrome and the online remediation of Artpool Radio on artpool.hu will show how Artpool developed as an institution-as-artwork and node within The Eternal Network connected to ‘permanent creation’ (Filliou 1968) and correspondence art (Welch 1995). Finally, I introduce my current work with Artpool and other international partners to take a networked approach to curating the Attic Archive (Horobin, Anderson, Aitch, ha 1980) as a future-facing strategy to maintain generative activation as a conservation principle.

Judit Bodor is a curator and academic whose research focuses on post-1970s counter-cultural, time-based, and networked art through curating artists’ archives. She currently leads Curating the Digital Attic Archive, an international project using open-source methods to reconnect and activate a dispersed artist’s archive, building on her 2021 project Curating Living Archives and her practice-led PhD (2013-2017) on exhibiting the Ivor Davies Destruction in Art Archive. Her work appears in volumes including Performance in a Pandemic (2021), What Will Be Already Exists (2021), The Explicit Material (2019), and Left Performance Histories (2019). Judit is currently Programme Director of the MFA Fine Art and the MFA Curatorial Practice at the University of Dundee.

Josephine Ellis 

Towards an Ethics of (Flux-)Dust

As a paradigmatic force of entropy, dust reveals—and persistently reminds us of—the ubiquity of decay. Far from inert, it actively deforms, accelerating physical, chemical, and biological processes of degradation. Unsurprisingly, within conservation, dust has long signified a failure of care, threatening ideals of stability and control that underpin the classical “conservation object.” This talk repositions dust as a liberatory force that challenges the anthropocentric and colonial frameworks of material preservation. Beginning with Robert Filliou’s Fluxdust (c. 1966) and Poussière de Poussière (1977), and placing them in dialogue with contemporary artists Jorge Otero-Pailos and Gala Porras-Kim, each of whom engages dust in distinct experimental approaches to care, I suggest that dust’s liberatory potential is double. On one level, dust exposes processes of material transformation that free materials from human-imposed constraints. On another, thinking of matter as freed in this way also liberates the concept of conservation itself, broadening what constitutes adequate care beyond the canon of Western authority toward more creative, dynamic, and pluriversal engagements with material culture.

Josephine Ellis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Studies in the Arts (SINTA) program of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Bern and the Bern Academy of the Arts. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of histories and philosophies of art, science, and conservation. She received her B.A in History from the University of Durham and her M.A in History of Art from University College London.   

Natasha Lushetich

Do you Flux?

Taking a DIY approach to fluxing as a practice of re-folding reality in 3, 4 and n+ dimensions and many intermedial combinations – this talk unfolds in three movements. Movement no. 1 compares the logic of fluxing to paraconsistent logic which allows for contradictions without a logical explosion or triviality where any and every statement becomes equally provable. Movement no. 2 takes an inter-scalar view of what are usually referred to as ‘historical’ Fluxus scores, informed by the quantum-physical, relational and intra-actional practice of collapsing orders of magnitude. Movement no. 3 takes a random selection of examples from the ‘here and now’ context of the talk to demonstrate that fluxing can function as an algorithm. As a Latinised version of Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi’s name, who, in 830 AD, authored The Book of Calculation by Completion and Balancing, the word ‘algorithm,’ like the book itself, refers to practices as different as codified rituals and geometric approximation techniques.

Natasha Lushetich is Professor of Art, Media & Theory at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on global art and the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge, critical media, complexity, structure and infrastructure. Her books include Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (Rodopi 2014); Interdisciplinary Performance (Palgrave 2016); The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (Rowman and Littlefield 2018); Beyond Mind (De Gruyter 2019); Big Data: A New Medium? (Routledge 2020); Distributed Perception: Resonances and Axiologies (Routledge 2021; co-edited with I. Campbell); and Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies (Rowman and Littlefield 2022; co-edited with I. Campbell and D. Smith).

Aga Wielocha

Learning from Activation: Other Forms of Institutional Stewardship and Their Potentialities

While neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 1970s sought to evade institutionalization, museums long resisted these radical forms that challenged their foundational principles. Yet the relationship proves more dialectical than oppositional. While musealization has inevitably transformed these practices (often domesticating their potential) these practices have simultaneously worked as transformative agents from within – a kind of productive contamination that disrupts and reconfigures the institutions that sought to contain them. Drawing on musealized Fluxus forms and the possibilities of their activation studied during my tenure with the Activating Fluxus team, this speculative presentation offers an overview of possibilities that emerge when we shift (or perhaps expand) our understanding of what it means to continue and sustain art. I examine what this evolved concept derived from preservation can offer institutions at a moment when responsible and sustainable operations are imperative, sketching a speculative vision for the museum of the future: an institution that responds to pressing societal concerns and adapts to contemporary crises. This is a museum that recognizes its collections not as static objects but as living processes requiring ongoing nourishment and care through active participation rather than passive consumption; a museum that activates rather than accumulates and facilitates rather than possess; a museum that instead of creating distance through othering use the potential of its collections to practice radical inclusion.

Aga Wielocha is a researcher, collection care professional, and conservator specializing in modern and contemporary art, having earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2021. Her doctoral research, conducted as part of the project New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA), explored the lives and futures of contemporary art within museum collections, particularly focusing on works that are variable and unfold over time.

Hanna B. Hölling

Flux, Fluxus, Fluxism: Conservation after Permanence

Conservation after permanence redefines care for artworks by displacing ideals of stability and endurance in favor of process, transformation, and radical change. It refuses the Western conservation paradigm anchored in permanence, stability, and continuity—tenets that have become increasingly untenable amid ecological precarity, political volatility, and shifting ontologies of cultural value. In response, conservation practice is beginning to align—slowly but decisively—with modes of holding lightly and letting go, recognizing flux, or fluxism, not as a threat to art’s survival but as the very condition of its vitality.
Fluxus offers a particularly fertile arena in which to probe this emergent mentality. In Fluxus fetishes, Fluxus foods, and other event-based, filmic, and electronic Fluxus forms, radical change—through decay, enactment, erosion, or refabrication—operates not as loss but as an epistemic and generative force. Here, change does not signal failure of care; it is care.
By embracing processes of de- and re-composition, conservation is repositioned as an active agent—one among many, including nonhuman actors—in the ongoingness of things. This post-preservation stance recognizes the artwork not as a bounded object but as a living, relational assemblage: an entanglement of species, materials, temporalities, and environments. Entering the role of an accompaniment in transformation, conservation reframes heritage as open, processual, and multispecies, challenging permanence as the ultimate measure of cultural value. In an era of post-preservation, a final question insists: can we survive our own undoing—and who, indeed, is the “we” that survives?

Hanna B. Hölling is a Research Professor and Principal Investigator at the Bern University of the Arts, where she leads research in her area of expertise. She is also a Senior Fellow at Collegium Helveticum affiliated with ETH Zürich and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of History of Art at University College London (UCL). 

Click here for a short biography of Natilee Harren and here for the moderators/associated members of the project.