Archive ‘It’ ‘Madame’: Ria Pacquée on performance, exhibitions and archiving

From the late seventies onwards, Ria Pacquée (°1954, Merksem) started developing a multifaceted oeuvre focused mainly on performance and photography. Pacquée moves in public space by means of characters such as ‘It’ and ‘Madame’, creating situations that may feel simultaneously absurd, discomforting and everyday. Without academic artistic training, Pacquée built up her artistic practice autodidactically, through contacts in local and alternative art scenes. A professional artistic career was not her goal; Pacquée’s practice grew more organically out of a desire to do something, which emerged from her interests, observations and encounters. Figures such as Luc Steels, Marc Verreckt and Danny Devos introduced her to the world of happenings and performance. Simultaneously, places such as the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC), Ercola, Montevideo, Ruimte Z and Lokaal 01 provided important contexts for her early artistic path. From those beginnings, Pacquée gradually developed a practice that was not limited to Antwerp or Belgium, but expanded into wide-ranging artistic scenes in Belgium and abroad, including performances and exhibitions at Cirque Divers, Liège (1980), Space 626 and A’s, New York (1980), Gallery Diagonale, Paris (1980) and Kaaitheater, Brussels (1981). Pacquée also had close connections to Guillaume Bijl, with whom she ran Ruimte Z Aksent for a short time in 1982. In 1986, she and Bijl were also among the organisers of Initiatief d’Amis, an alternative exhibition in reaction to the limited selection of Belgian artists in Chambres d’Amis and Initiatief 86. From the nineties onward, Pacquée’s work steadily gained institutional visibility, including solo exhibitions at the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (1991), the Kunsthalle in Vienna (1992) and De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam (1993). In subsequent decades, further museum presentations and survey exhibitions followed, including Desert of Fragments in M HKA (2001), SLAM, RAMBLE, PERFORM at Cultuurhuis de Warande (2018) and They Are Looking at Us, We Are Looking at Them at the Middelheim Museum (2019). In parallel with her exhibitions, public space has remained a constant feature of Pacquée’s practice, not only as an alternative to institutions but rooted in an ongoing fascination with the street and everyday life.

Pacquée describes herself as someone who lives mainly in the moment. For a long time, she paid little attention to the past, career planning or her legacy. This attitude is reflected in her archive: installations have been destroyed, there is often limited documentation of performances, and material has regularly been thrown away to avoid ballast and to make space for new ideas and new work. Nevertheless, a subjective form of ordering, collecting and preserving has emerged within that apparently anti-archivistic stance. Over the years, she has built up an extensive archive of images, containing documentation of performances and exhibitions as well as photographs that Pacquée takes during walks and on her travels. The artist organises these photographic observations thematically in digital collections based on recurrent motifs. As such, they do not merely act as documentation, but also as a possible starting point for new performances and installations. Pacquée’s approach to the archive also gained an explicit shape in the work Archief van beperkt gedocumenteerde performances (1980-2015). This installation consists of Polaroids, printed photos, brochures and other documentation to do with performances. It is no coincidence that it was created during the Covid-19 crisis, arising from the need to make performances preserved only in fragments visible again.

Throughout her career, Pacquée has stayed faithful to the intuitive and independent stance from which her practice emerged. What grew out of spontaneous actions, observations and temporary situations has turned out to have a lasting significance today for the history of performance and visual art in Belgium. Precisely because Pacquée has never consciously approached her archive as a retrospective project, it still reflects the intuitive and uncompromising attitude that has characterised her practice from the outset.

Read the full interview here.