In addition, it offers many advantages over a book by making it possible to approach the material in a way that reflects—in photographs and video—the physical architecture of the shows. More importantly, thanks to the cooperation of the participating artists, lecturers and organisers, we have been able to reproduce much of the audio-visual material included in the configurations too.

At the same time as presenting the four “configurations”—the four exhibitions and their accompanying events, lectures, seminars etc.—of the Hidden Histories – remapping Mozart project the DVD-ROM also provides access to the structure and working methods that underpin what the art project is about: research as an artistic strategy. This in turn rests on the complementary premise that in a wider, social sense art generates knowledge by becoming one text to be read in conjunction with many others – art as a dynamic, dual-carriageway process of translation which is never only about the visible “end” products. As the title implies, art and history have in common that they are sites where re-negotiation of personal and collective experience takes place, where history become plural, where so-called objectivity is re-contextualised and where shaping and controlling the historical past is a way of providing for the future.

Lisl Ponger & Tim Sharp

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