This paper explores how embodied folklore and cultural memory continue to circulate in everyday life in Southeast Asia and how such memory can be revitalised through performance ethnography and art-based research. Challenging archive models centred on texts, institutional collections, and official historiography, the study argues that cultural memory is also transmitted through bodies, gestures, rituals, material practices, and relationships with place. These forms of transmission are conceptualised as “living archives”: dynamic and relational systems through which knowledge, memory, and cultural values are sustained across generations. Particular attention is given to the embodied knowledge of women, caregivers, and folk heroines, whose contributions are often marginalised within official historical narratives yet remain active through everyday practices of care, making, storytelling, and ritual. Drawing on performance ethnography, arts-based research, and practice-led inquiry, the project investigates how memory circulates between bodies, spaces, materials, and communities through site-responsive movement practices, collaborative laboratories, studio experimentation, and public performances. Situated across heritage sites, sacred landscapes, domestic spaces, and community environments, the research examines how artistic practice can function as both a method of inquiry and a mode of cultural transmission. By developing the concept of the Living Archive, the study contributes to performance studies, folklore studies, cultural memory research, and artistic research, demonstrating how embodied practice expands understandings of what constitutes cultural knowledge and how heritage can be activated within contemporary Southeast Asian contexts.

Authors:
Inessa Kalabekova, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Tetriana Ahmed Fauzi, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

About the Presenter(s)
Inessa Kalabekova is a PhD researcher at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Her research focuses on cultural memory, folklore, heritage, and embodied performance. Her current project explores how cultural memory is transmitted and revitalised through practic

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/inessa-kalabekova-ma-fine-art-csm-ual-497311147/

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