Workshop: Archives and Erasure

What new practices of documentation and archiving emerge in conditions of extreme violence and heightened precarity? In what ways do these archival practices counter cultural erasure? What role can artistic research and practice play in reconstituting, repairing and reimagining damaged and destroyed heritage and histories?

This workshop takes as its point of departure the 2025 Kyiv Biennale exhibition, Everything for Everybody, currently on display at the Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture, Ukraine. The exhibition provided a space in which diverse artistic practices exploring archival materials, family histories, and documentary practice could intersect. Thinking across contexts and geographies dealing with loss, the remnants of colonial pasts, and violent legacies, it explored how archives form unique testimonies of places and communities that have vanished or been destroyed.

Participants will have the chance to engage closely with artistic works shown at the exhibition that critically engage the politics of the archive and the exclusionary practices at its core. Reading work that reflects on new approaches to archives and archiving in the Ukrainian, Palestinian, and Caribbean contexts, the workshop will also present some key concepts and methodological propositions (e.g. counter-archiving, reparative fabulation) that we will draw on to think about our own fragmented heritage and incomplete archival collections.

Please bring with you a gap, a dissonance, or a silence from a personal collection or an archive you work with which you may be struggling with and/or don’t know how to approach. We will tend to these gaps in a discussion towards the end of the seminar with the help of the methodological and theoretical notions introduced in the readings.

Contact: Irene Hütsi (irene.hutsi@artun.ee).

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