SEMINAR SERIES.
Between the personal and the collective:
archives, memory and remembrance in contemporary artistic practice.

This online seminar series brings together researchers and arts practitioners from different geographical contexts to reflect on archives and contemporary artistic practice. Focusing on the interactions and contradictions between personal and collective memory, the series aims to question ‘official’ histories and highlight alternative modes of representation.

Speakers in this seminar series engage with the archive as artistic material and source, but also as a knowledge structure, an institution, and a place for reflection. Sessions are organised thematically, and some of the guiding notions for discussion include self-determination, colonial erasure, gender-based identities, community-building, performativity and intergenerational memory.

Throughout these sessions, we will problematise how archives are constituted, accessed and explored, and how they are mobilised to create normative pasts. We will also consider the role that artistic and academic narratives can play in sparking collective action, and what are the impacts and potentialities of revisiting the past in contemporary artistic practice.

All sessions take place online between 4pm-6pm Lisbon time
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3636167198990?p=SM1oaF3ufEORtS9rPg
Meeting ID: 363 616 719 899 0
Passcode: BD9cc7NP

Friday 12 September 2025
Keynote: Conversation with artist Zineb Sedira
Also in person at NOVA FCSH (Room B211)
(With Amanda Tavares, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Friday 19 September 2025
Workshop: Is This an Archive? A Participatory Workshop on the Limits and Possibilities of the Archive
(Sarah Haylett, TATE and UCL; Theresa Kneppers, Borough Road Gallery, LSBU)

Friday 17 October 2025
Panel: Performance and collective power
- Concierto sobre cadáveres (2024): reactivating the poetic performance that denounces the Argentine military dictatorship (Maximiliano de la Puente, University of Buenos Aires)
- How do you archive a performance? (Angelika Waniek & Elena Strempek, performing artists from Leipzig)

Friday 14 November 2025
Panel: Women’s immaterial archives
- Re-materialising Absence: Creating an Archive of Omission for Dundee's Women Jute Workers (Fiona Roberts, Norwich University of the Arts)
- Gestural and Textile Archives: Artistic Practices to Embody What a Body Knows (Anna Andorrà-Gómez, University of Barcelona)

Friday 12 December 2025
Panel: Archival erasures and alternative modes of representation
- Decolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Artistic Practices: Archival Practices in the Works of Dalila Mahdjoub, Nidhal Chamekh, and Kader Attia (Salma Kossemtini, Curator and cultural producer)
- Fragments of the Self: The Archive as a Site of Presence and Erasure (Laura M.F. Bertens, Leiden University)

Friday 16 January 2026
Panel: Resistance, gender and self-determination
- The Archive of Fiore de Henriquez as a space of resistance to biopolitical roles (Emanuele Carlenzi, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)
- Archive as Activism: The Archive of Trans Memory (Clara Masnatta, Independent scholar and curator)