The evaluation of 18 Swiss and seven foreign collections on performance art, held outside museums and art galleries, enabled us to gain an overall impression of the level and nature of collecting activity, i.e. of the size and focus of collections as well as their structure and accessibility.[1] In addition, the survey provided us with detailed information on the media and qualitative condition of the artefacts as well as their storage and long-term archiving. After analysing the completed questionnaires, we selected five Swiss and three foreign archives / collections to serve as examples. We interviewed their representatives and made spot checks of their holdings on site. Our main criterion when making the selection was to secure a widely heterogeneous cross-section of collections in Switzerland to investigate and compare with foreign archives. The terms ‘performance archive’ and ‘collection of performance documents’ can to a large extent be used synonymously in Switzerland, especially in view of the fact that there is no archive explicitly for performance artefacts in the country. Although most Swiss collections display an archival and documentary interest, this usually arises directly from core tasks (such as organising performance events, exhibitions and festivals since c. 1970 to the present day). Their activity is, however, more informed by notions of collecting or even coincidentally accumulating than by archival concepts.
