But are not all facts dreams as soon as we put them behind us?

—Emily Dickinson

The purpose of restaging or reconstituting art and exhibition archives is not to calcify history but to document its fluidity. That is how the past endures—being liquid time.

   Restaging*

         Reenactment

      Reperformance

            Restitution

   Loss

              Appropriation

Theft

                 Replica

             Forgery

This issue of INDEX JOURNAL unites historians, artists, and curators studying the methods and concepts of restaging* history. Restaging is an open-ended concept related to loss, recovery, reenactment, reperformance, restitution, and appropriation. This latter term is genuinely out of fashion in contemporary art discourse. Related concepts such as the replica, theft, and forgery are even less ubiquitous in art history today. Rather than centre any of these ideas, this issue assumes that the confusion between them and their complex interrelations is advantageous in opening up how we conceive of the practice of historiography as scholarly, literary, and creative acts. Together, they denaturalise history as a smooth continuum of time and instead see it as malleable, open to interpretation and disintegration. Rather than assuming that concepts such as restaging, reenactment, reperformance, appropriation, and so forth are solid and distinct in any meaningful way, this issue enables them to blend and blur.

Their abstraction gives way to the meta-concept propelling this issue: liquid time. The objective of this concept is to reject the calcification and containment of memory, history, and voice. Liquid time is invested in history’s fluidity and permeability, giving way to all kinds of temporal movements, drizzles and drifts.

The contributors to this issue characterise Liquid Time as a tangible and fleshy connection with the past, as evident in Juan José Santos’s essay on haptic curating and Camila Galaz’s text on performance, kinship and cross-cultural translation, both written vis-à-vis post-dictatorship Chile (1990­–). Liquid Time can also be tracked through the inhuman forms of Papermoon’s puppets and their narratives of human rights violations from Suharto’s regime (1968-1990) in Kate O’Connor’s essay. Or through Seng Yu Jin and Anita Orzes’s experimental curatorial historiography to spatialise exhibition histories from Malaysia (Too Much Reality, 1974) and Havana (the Havana Biennial, 1984-1989), respectively. Shivanjani Lai’s essay foregrounds the poetics of water and stones to chart the border-crossing force of colonisation, empire and critical memory work across Fiji, India, and Australia in a post-slavery, post-Girmit context. Conversely, Darren Jorgenson understands Liquid Time as a form of collective, intergenerational memory networked and derived from archives and oral histories to validate the importance of the 1994 First Nations exhibition Bush Women. Lastly, Anna Parlane’s formal analysis of Michael Stevenson’s work The Fountain of Prosperity (Answers to Some Questions About Bananas) (2006) conceptualises Liquid Time by studying the materiality, texture, and detail of practice-led research, showing how contemporary artists recreate historical objects to amplify the “promiscuity” of the past. Ultimately, all of the writing in this issue seeks a multidirectional and porous relationship with the practice of history, creating a vocabulary for how to think and enact liquid historiography: last time, that time, same time,
from the time,
over time,
again,
time to be picked up.

—Verónica Tello, Sydney, Gadigal Nura, August, 2024