Currently we are witnessing dynamic growth of digital archives, which has transformed access to historical sources and created unprecedented opportunities for engaging with cultural heritage. Artists of Polish off-theatre frequently incorporate digital reproductions of documents, photographs, and oral history recordings into their performances.

For Weronika Fibich, archival material is a key artistic medium. In her performance ‘Drawing from Memory’ (2010/2012), photographs found in a digital archive played a crucial role. In ‘Once Upon a Time in Glutendorf’ (Ewa Kaczmarek, Daniel Stachuła, 2025), the creative process was driven by the desire to stage and expand the community-based ‘Główna District Archive’. Jacek Owczarek and Kacper Klimczak, while working on ‘Brakarki’ (2024), discovered the social digital archive ‘Miastograf’. They not only used materials collected there, but also based the entire narrative of the performance on them.

All of these performances depict places and communities that no longer exist. Archival resources function both as artistic material and as stage representations of historical existence. Thus, representation becomes a key concept for both digital archives and theatre. Analog archival materials already represent history; in the case of digitized materials, we can speak of double representation. Traditional theatre represents the past through the illusionistic “playing of the past” (Lehmann’s principle of representation) while post-dramatic theatre reveals its identity (principle of presence).

In this presentation, I analyze selected practices of Polish off-theatre in relation to representation and the transformations brought about by the digitization of heritage. Drawing on qualitative research, I argue that digital archives, through their accessibility and structure, not only provide source material but also actively shape the aesthetics of contemporary off-theatre.