Performing the Archive

Elbe Trakal, a German artist and filmmaker, came to Getty after receiving the Library Research Grant, a grant that invites non-LA residents to engage with the library’s special collections.

Trakal’s original research proposal for the Getty Library Grant focused on German Democratic Republic (GDR) samizdat books, the underground printing and distribution of censored literature in East Germany in the ’80s and ’90s. After visiting the archives, his research also evolved into a new form: live-action roleplay in the Glendale Galleria mall.

“When I'm in the archive,” says Trakal, “I get the most joy by following my curiosity. I browse different objects that lead me to others that I may not have originally considered or known about. This needs to be very intuitive. It’s not structured. Sometimes I follow a name, sometimes an image, or even a connection between two people that I want to know more about.”

When it comes to engaging with an archive, every researcher has a slightly different approach. During his time as a Getty Library Research Grant recipient, Trakal engaged with the archive not only as an academic research space but also as a place that allowed him to make genuine connections with artists who came before him. He allowed chance encounters with materials to redirect his research and found the beginnings of creative projects that revealed themselves through his willingness to be led astray.

Trakal's method became a way of moving through the world in his time outside of the archive too. When he wasn’t at Getty, he spent his days in Los Angeles bookstores, exploring shelves of secondhand and rare books, reaching for whatever caught his attention: a unique cover, interesting title, or familiar author’s name.

In Other Books, an independent bookstore in Boyle Heights, Trakal came across a publication from Something Else Press. Founded by Dick Higgins in 1964, the publishing house became a platform for various Fluxus artists to make conceptually strong and interdisciplinary works in book form.

He returned to the GRI with a new fixation and immediately reserved all of the Dick Higgins materials he could, including his personal papers and his own books, which he had self-published with Something Else Press.

Performing the archive

One of Higgins’s books that Trakal checked out was Jefferson’s Birthday, published in 1964 as the inaugural publication of Something Else Press. The publication consists of two of Higgins’s texts: Jefferson's Birthday, a compilation of everything Higgins wrote in a one-year period between Thomas Jefferson’s birthday in 1962 and 1963, and Postface, an account of the Fluxus movement. It was in Jefferson’s Birthday that Trakal came across the score which would influence his own performance piece Fuck AMERIKA - for Dick Higgins (2025). Trakal said:

“Conceptually, the books were fascinating. You can open Jefferson’s Birthday from both sides and it’s a wild mix of music scores, performance scores, notes, and illustrations. I’m drawn to the idea of a book as a temporal container, a container as a kind of structural setting. A lot of these books take some type of structure and play with that in a conceptual way.”

Trakal was particularly interested in the use of roleplay in Jefferson’s Birthday. Trakal saw Higgins as a pioneer of live-action roleplay, an art form that Trakal has practiced over the last decade, since his text predated the emergence of the performance style in the 1980s and 1990s.

Live action roleplay in the Glendale Galleria mall

During this time in Los Angeles, Trakal gathered a group of participants at the Glendale Galleria Mall, with the aim of reenacting Amerikaka I, one of Higgins’s scores outlined in Jefferson’s Birthday. By performing Amerikaka I, Trakal was able to repurpose and recontextualize the archival material he found in the Special Collections, reanimating a work which was conceived in a different time by a different artist. If public space reflects the conditions of democracy, the downtown Glendale shopping mall stands as a symbol of a consumerist illusion that feels increasingly outdated and hollow, reflecting the state of democracy it tries to represent.

“The score is called Amerikaka. It functions like this: you have a list of characters, and they are all Americana clichés from that time; then there is a list of ‘speeches’ but they are usually just one-liners,” says Trakal, “Then you have a list of objects, a list of actions, and a list of cues. The piece is written to be a play on stage in the theater, employing lighting and environmental cues, but we performed it in the Glendale Mall.”

Ten players met at the mall food court, including Nina Sarnelle, Matthew Doyle, Matt Savitsky, Coleman Collins, Anya Ventura, Cary Cronenwett, Lorrie Waldie, Ashlyn Mcleod, Christian Anayas, and Elbe Trakal. Participants chose materials from index cards to improvise with Higgins’s “social types” and cliché conversations from the 1960s.

This type of archival play extends the lifespan of Higgins’s work and brings the archive to life. Trakal was not able to find any record about whether Amerikaka I was actually performed previously, so the 2025 iteration may have been the only time the score was brought to life, or at least the only time the performance was recorded.

Archives as living histories

This performance piece wasn’t the only way that Trakal used the archive.

Trakal was also interested in the way that archival research can deepen our understanding of an artist's life, beyond their work. While researching different books, he began to see artists arise as vivid characters in his mind, making unexpected connections between individuals who may never have met, but whose legacies are intertwined in the archive.

At the beginning of his research project, Trakal studied Guillermo Deisler, a Chilean artist who was living in exile in the GDR. After reading Jefferson’s Birthday, he became fascinated with similarities between Deisler and Higgins’s lives:

“They were born around the same time, they both died around the same time in their early fifties, they were both influential in artist book publishing, they both wrote extensive theoretical texts on visual poetry.”

Upon learning more about Higgins, Trakal discovered he had a mental breakdown. Trakal was able to trace how Higgins’s mental state impacted the way he ran his press and participated in publishing. Trakal learned more about Higgins’s life through archival information: journal entries and correspondences between Higgins and his ex-lover Alison Knowles, and other Fluxus members.

“Archives are often thought of as living histories,” says Trakal, “I think my fascination usually revolves around a person’s life, the kind of life choices they make and how they live.” In learning about other people’s lives through archival materials, it can make us rethink or connect with our own life experiences. “His breakdown had a lot to do with his breakup with Alison Knowles, and moving to Berlin, where he felt isolated. I’m also interested in how Germany did that to him,” says Trakal.

Interested in entering a research rabbit hole?

You never know where the materials in the Getty Library will take you.

If you’d like to go on your own research journey, the applications for 2026/27 are open until Oct 1, 2025. These are annual short-term grants offering support for researchers to use the Getty Library’s collections.

Learn more about the Library Research Grants and how to apply.