Curating Other-Archives: colonial archives, artistic research and restitutive practices
December 12-13: Lecture and Workshop with Daniela Agostinho (Aarhus)
Lecture and Workshop will be held in English. The lecture will take place in hybrid form in room Uni 105, EG 014 and via Zoom. Please register for the workshop: das-dokumentarische@rub.de
Lecture | Tuesday, December 12 | UNI 105 | Room EG 014 | 6 p.m – 8 p.m.
As museums, archives and other cultural institutions make their colonial collections available online—giving contested materials a digital afterlife—unresolved histories and new ethical matters are bound to emerge. What can be traced, remembered and imagined through archives rife with omission and harm? And how do we care for the presences and absences they conjure? In this lecture, I will share reflections on the exhibition For Alberta and Victor: a collection of conjurings and opacities, by visual artist La Vaughn Belle, that I curated in Copenhagen in 2021. Grappling with unresolved legacies of Danish colonialism in the Caribbean, the exhibition posed a series of questions that will be unfolded in the lecture: how to reimagine not only the content of colonial collections, but also shift the conditions in which we encounter them? How to engage such archives as departure points for articulating and redressing the ongoing effects of colonial histories? Moving between curatorial process and thinking alongside Belle’s artistic practice, I suggest that current discussions on contested heritage beg us to reconsider relations between archives, performance, monumentality and embodied practices, and that the exhibition offered a vocabulary and sensorium with which to expand the scope of restitutive practices.
The lecture will also be broadcasted on Zoom. The link will be published before the lecture.
Workshop | Wednesday, December 13 | UNI 105 | Room EG 014 | 10 a.m – 1 p.m.
10 a.m. – 11 a.m.: Introduction/Discussion of Lecture
11 a.m. – 12 p.m.: Discussion of material (Katharina Menschick)
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.: Discussion of material (Ying Sze Pek)
1 p.m.: Lunch
This Text will be discussed during the workshop.
Short vita
Daniela Agostinho is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. She works in the fields of visual and digital culture, artistic and curatorial research with a focus on archives, care, and display of contested histories. At Aarhus University, she co-directs the research group “Postcolonial Entanglements” and the Center for Critical Data Practices. She is co-editor of various books, including Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021) and (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2020). She currently co-directs the network “Reparative Encounters: a transnational network for artistic research and reparative practices” with colleagues from Denmark, the US Virgin Islands, Ghana and Kalaallit Nunaat.
Image by La Vaughn Belle