AFTERIMAGE - On Memory, Archives, & the Reparative (EN)
AFTERIMAGE - A Gathering on Memory, Archives, and the Reparative
AFTERIMAGE is a two-day public event that approaches memory, archives, and restoration practices from new perspectives, organised by Paoletta Holst and Túlio Rosa.
In work sessions, roundtable discussions, and film screenings, artists and researchers open up their processes and invite to join in the conversation. Together, we explore how shared interpretation can reveal new layers in the archive. How different ways of remembering and archiving can reinforce each other. And how moments of restoration can arise when we come together to reflect and act. An invitation to not only preserve the archive, but also to bring it back to life.
You can register for one or both work sessions via email. Read the full programme below.
DAY I — 19 December 2025
13:30 Welcome
14:00-15:30 Work session I: Tracing the Archive (in auditorium)
Work session around archival tracing and copy techniques with Angga Cipta and Paoletta Holst
In the past, architects have employed a range of techniques—such as tracing paper, blueprints, and photography—to replicate their designs for distribution and the sharing of their ideas. In this workshop, however, we will use the act of tracing and copying as a critique to move beyond mere replication and ask how such techniques played a role in shaping colonial domestic cultures and the facilitation and spread of colonial systems of extraction, hierarchy, and control within architecture and spatial practices.
Limited places available. Please register for Work Session I via email.
16:00-17:00 Introduction: AFTERIMAGE (Auditorium)
With Paoletta Holst and Túlio Rosa
Tracing the questions and concerns that arose during the work sessions they had been organizing at WIELS, Paoletta and Túlio will introduce the gathering by reflecting on how their research trajectories intersect around archival engagement, composition, and reparative gestures. Revisiting the shared processes and conversations developed in these sessions, they will outline the path toward this public moment and open the ground for the discussions to come.
17:00-18:30 Roundtable talk (Auditorium)
Panel: Otty Widasari, Setareh Noorani and Paoletta Holst. Moderation: Túlio Rosa
Departing from the urgencies and challenges involved in collecting or activating archival materials in different parts of the world—such as Indonesia and the Netherlands—the conversation reflects on methodologies for collective interpretation and creation within both institutional and localized archival practices. Recognizing that discussions on archives and colonial histories are shaped by their specific contexts, and that motivations for engaging with the past stem from distinct present-day needs, it considers how shifting attention from institutional claims to more situated forms of memory can foster multiple perspectives and enable dialogue across these differing discussions.
18:30 Break and move to GC Ten Weyngaert
19:00 Welcome @GC Ten Weyngaert
Gemeenschapscentrum Ten Weyngaert, Rue des Alliés 54, 1190 Forest
19:30 - 21:30 Screenings
Curation: Forum Lenteng
22:00 End
DAY II — 20 December 2025
13:30 Welcome
14:00-15:30 Work session II: Engaging Lesbian Information Activist Pasts (Auditorium)
With: Emma Ydiers
This work session examines scattered archival traces of lesbian information activism in Belgium around 1985. Magazines produced or collected within these activist circles are taken out of institutional archives, are brought back into dialogue with each other, and are engaged within a new time and space, where different interpretive codes apply. By repeatedly exploring these materials in relation to one another and the self, participants experiment with ways of historicizing, connecting, and narrating lesbian pasts from the present. The work session continues a tradition in which reading, researching, writing, assembling, communicating, and archiving functioned as tactics for creating counterpublics. Materials extracts from Artemys, Les Lesbianaires, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Vrouwenwoorden/De Paarse Paperpot/De Paperpot.
Limited places available. Register for Work session II via email.
16:00 - 17:00 Intervention/Reading: What if? (Auditorium) With: Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa
What if? emerges from an exchange between Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa around the script as a research device and a framework for collective authorship. Bringing together distinct yet resonant practices, they use scripting to mobilize complex materials, activate multiple voices, and reframe archival or historical questions. The presentation takes the form of a public scripted reading, offering the audience an entry into their ongoing dialogue and treating the script not as a finished work but as a provisional space for study, composition, and collective thinking.
17:00-18:30 Roundtable talk (Auditorium)
Panel: Emma Ydiers, Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa. Moderation: Paoletta Holst.
Reflecting on approaches to the archive that unfold through reading, staging, rewriting, and collective composition, the conversation considers how positionality and the role of the reader shape the ways we approach and reframe archival materials. Foregrounding the situated nature of inquiry, it examines how artistic practices engage archives through methods that embrace relationality and uncertainty, and how proximity, friction, and fabulation open possibilities for research, allowing us to consider how composition itself may begin to operate as a reparative gesture.
18:30 Break and move to GC Ten Weyngaert
19:00 Welcome @GC Ten Weyngaert
Gemeenschapscentrum Ten Weyngaert, Rue des Alliés 54, 1190 Forest
19:30-21:30 Screenings
Curation: Sandra Benites
22:00 End