reVerb is a memory archive of performance pieces..
It begins with a simple question: what is left of a performance piece after it is over? What does a performance piece leave behind?
Performance art happens in presence: at a specific time and place, in front of an audience. What happens in the aftermath of a performance piece? Does it continue to exist in the memory of those who attended? Is it reactivated and updated each time it is remembered? Is that subjective memory a form of distributed documentation?
This is not about reconstructing the works themselves or rectifying memory. The interest lies in how those experiences persist, shift, and keep acting through time.
The archive is made up of testimonies sent by people who have witnessed performance actions anywhere and at any time. Each entry is divided into two parts: a reference frame —artist, work, place and approximate date— and the memory itself.
reVerb collects those persistences, which will find new forms of activation over time: readings, publications, actions and other artistic supports.
If you'd like to share the memory of a performance you have witnessed, it's very easy and you can do so here:
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Notas sueltas sobre performance
reVerb began to take shape in 2017 as a question about performance memory: what remains of an action once it is over, and how it continues to exist in those who witnessed it.
I made an attempt to develop the project and received some testimonies but could not sustain it. My work with the body was still in process and I did not know what to do with this future archive.
In my own work as a performance artist, I never prioritized documentation. The work existed in that specific moment, and never again. The piece like water from Heraclitus' river, and its immediate vanishing.
The vanishing of the action is not necessarily its end. Perhaps it is a displacement rather than a disappearance: the performance act leaves the timeframe of presence and enters other, less visible dimensions, where it continues to act.
My intuition is that performance art does not happen in its intrinsic present — that is only one of its timeframes — -other temporalities reconstitute the ephemeral work and reactivate its tissues and functions.
Memory held in the bodies present is one of the primal materials of performance art. It is one of its transformative elements. Like guests at a banquet who carry within their bodies what was consumed at the table — so too does performance have an intimate and almost secret survival. An act of art that dissolves into atoms and becomes a distant repository, a cave, a refuge.
We remember our lovers, childhood games, the smell of home. The color of the places we inhabited. The feel of certain clothes, of animals, of water, of many different waters.
I think that building reVerb is a way of holding and sharing a treasure. A fragmented memory, opaque, half-lidded. A survival of vestigial traces.
A way to become the keeper of an archive of phantasmagoria, guardian of waves that propagate, disappear and return.
Indira Montoya - March 2026
