This article examines a performance event, "Life is Perfect," by Paul+a (Paul Jeff and Sarah Dowling), which took place on 2 October 2004 over a period of 24 hours at The Peterstone Court Hotel in mid-Wales. The site of this work was then revisited by TRAWS (The Inter-University research group for Performance in Wales) as part of an exploration of performance sites across Wales. These findings were themselves then represented at the Centre for Performance Research's conference "Towards Tomorrow?" as both a record of research conducted and as an exploration of the potential of collaborative engagement with site-specific work and its documentation as event within the context of academic research. The article traces the performance across three sites: hotel, hotel revisited, conference, and questions the knowledge developed at each site, how it challenges the original work, betrays, misrepresents, obscures and ultimately entirely restages it, according to very different criteria than may have originally been intended. Using Maurice Blanchot's fiction "The instant of my death" and Jacques Derrida's essay "Demeure" (both conceptual influences on "Life is Perfect") the paper turns towards a consideration of the "death" of performance events and the nature of "survival" that place offers in opposition to the archive. Finally, it considers the potential new epistemologies that emerge from research exercises focused on the recovery of a relation to knowledge that is not based on evidence, testimony and truth, but rather admits that loss, forgetfulness and uncertainty are integral to any "return" to the site of performance. (Contains 5 figures and 3 notes.)