The present becomes us: Embodying the archive

The following text is a dialogue between Johanna Linsley and Emma Bennett on the possibility of translating a performance on which they collaborated into text. The performance, a lecture titled The Present Becomes Us, is based on a science fiction premise: what if the Future is a geographical location which derives its materiality by stealing potentiality from the Present? The premise was created by Johanna, but the lecture was performed by Emma, using the subjunctive mood, and opening with the lines ‘This is a performance lecture by Johanna Linsley, or it would be if she were here’. The text explores questions about temporality, geography and the places where histories are made, so that a complex and embodied notion of the archive subtly emerges. The voices of the two writers(/performers) are not strictly delineated, so that in this dialogue as in the performance, a porous and ambiguous understanding of presence and identity remains.