Continuity Error: Mediatized Re-Enactment in the Work of Kerry Tribe

The Oxford Dictionary defines re-enactment as “the action or process of reproducing, recreating, or performing again.”¹ 1 - Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Re-enactment,” accessed March 28, 2013, www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/250343?redirectedFrom=re-enactment#eid. This definition establishes tension between, on the one hand, an original event, and on the other, a copy. But re-enactment as a contemporary art strategy cannot be said to serve only as a process of duplication. Re-enactment as an artistic endeavour does not simply replicate a past event: it re-actualizes it. By doing so, the re-enactment complicates the original event’s rapport with time and changes our perception of this event in the present. Reproduction is implicit; however, what the re-enactment induces is the production of an event not again, but anew. This process of replication is itself indicative of new meanings and relations because the re-enactment, as a projection of the past onto a point in the future, constitutes a displacement in time. The process of re-enacting initiates at once the de-construction of an event past and its re-construction at a later point in time. Making tangible the multi-linearity of time, the re-enactment transcends strict representation and thus becomes a framework for reconfiguration. Folding time on itself, the re-enactment becomes a productive framework through which we can experience multiple versions of the past. Playing with the fluidity of time, it is a strategy by which the very notion of accurate representation of the past can be questioned, and the fixity of events that have already occurred unhinged.