In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation from 2024, Caitlin Gowans takes us on a journey through a disappearing archive—one that is both physical and digital. From beneath her couch emerge dozens of posters from the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT), the annual graduate conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Once pinned to campus walls for a few fleeting days, these posters—alongside long-defunct Wordpress sites, vanished social media accounts, and broken hyperlinks—form a ghostly record of performance scholarship in motion.
Drawing on Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked, Gowans examines the ephemeral nature of the conference presentation and the quiet afterlives of academic gatherings. What happens to student conferences once the posters are discarded and the websites go offline? What remains of the performances of research that took place there?
By tracing the residues of these events—through images, metadata, and physical remnants—Gowans reflects on the tension between preservation and disappearance.
