Body Archive I : Perhaps, I Can See the Past

In an age where digital technologies reshape how we access, preserve, and reimagine cultural memory, this collection examines the intersection between contemporary media and archival traces of embodied practices. “Perhaps, I Can See The Past” investigates how current technological tools function as time machines for recovering, reinterpreting, and revitalising ancient dance and ritual forms.

The selected works demonstrate diverse approaches to this technological archaeology of the body. Shon Kim’s Bookanima: Dance employs chronophotography to resurrect movement across cultural boundaries, while Daniel Belton’s PEPE (Moth Dances) merges traditional Māori taonga pūoro with digital art, creating pathways between ancestral memory and contemporary expression. Choy Kar Fai’s Unbearable Darkness pushes further into speculative territory, using gaming technology to explore the afterlives of Butoh through virtual embodiment.

These technological interventions actively reconstruct, reimagine, and sometimes fabricate new relationships with cultural practices that might otherwise remain inaccessible. From Onyeka Igwe’s contemporary dancers reimagining Nigerian protest rituals, to Caroline Garcia’s Imperial Reminiscence inserting herself into Hollywood dance sequences to expose hidden histories of cultural appropriation, to Markku Lehmuskallio’s documentation of Viennese-Karelian wedding dances, each work reveals how the machine’s gaze can both preserve and transform our understanding of embodied heritage.

Beyond concerns of historical  and technological accuracy, these works perhaps reveal how contemporary machines enable us to see—and move through—the past never fully visible before.