In the wake of the global student movement urging universities to decolonise, memory institutions (primarily, museums and archives) are also increasingly compelled to respond to the growing urgency of dismantling the colonial logic that informs their foundations and ongoing practices. Recently, there has been substantial scholarship that tackles the pressing questions on decolonising museums, especially those safeguarding colonial artefacts (Lee; van Bijnen et al.; Ariese), and archives (Mbembe; Ghaddar and Caswell; Azoulay; McCracken et al.). However, how this decolonial critique intervenes in the ontology of film museums, and how this critique informs new ways of thinking about the role of film museums as actors of social and environmental justice, remains underexplored. Therefore, initiating a debate from within the film archival field and with questions grounded in the everyday is urgently needed. This has the potential to open up a new field of inquiry, primarily informed by the film-specific histories of decolonial thought and praxis.

In order to explore this field of inquiry, we invite you to a series of lectures/workshops to take place from September to January at Eye Filmmuseum, thanks to the support of Decolonial Futures Seed Grant.

Across five sessions, we will collectively chart out five modes of decolonial intervention into film heritage discourse and practice; for example, refusal vs. participation; return and restitution; ‘re-membering’ scattered and displaced heritage; and reconfiguring archival record beyond the Anthropocene. The speakers include Jeftha Pattikawa on Moluccan audiovisual heritage project; Sidar Bayram on video activism and the role of records/recording in human rights frameworks; Mohanad Yaqubi on Palestinian film heritage; Nikolaus Perneczky on the questions of restitution, repatriation, and return; and Susan Schuppli on the more-than-human forms of archiving, recording, and witnessing.

Each session will pose significant material, political, practical, and epistemological questions for those engaged with archives in academic, political, aesthetic modes. The format of the sessions will ensure collective engagement with archival material and questions, for example, through specific preparation for each session to stimulate a focused deliberation on the decolonial intervention in question. The sessions are open to anyone interested in and/or working with/on archives, ranging from bachelor’s and master’s students to PhD candidates, academics, artists, and professionals.

Sessions are scheduled to take place on the second Monday of every month, from 14:00-17:00 at Eye Filmmuseum:

9 September – Jeftha Pattikawa
14 October – Sidar Bayram
11 November – Mohanad Yaqubi
9 December – Nikolaus Perneczky
13 January (Exact Date TBD) – Susan Schuppli

There will also be a parallel reading group taking place to prepare for, reflect on, and bridge the sessions. This reading group will meet on the first Friday of every month from 15:00-18:00 in BuzzHouse (OMHP), inside the Humanities Venture Lab.

6 September – Reading Group #1
11 October – Reading Group #2
8 November – Reading Group #3
6 December – Reading Group #4
10 January – Reading Group #5

Please contact Asli or Jamil via email for more information and to get access to the monthly readings.

The schedule:

Session 1 – “Refusing”: Community archiving for social and epistemic justice

Guest speaker: Jeftha Pattikawa and Verloren Banden project

9 September 2024 14:00-17:00 Eye Filmmuseum Room at the Top

This session will kick off the lecture series by centring the historically under-represented communities in the archives to address the key dilemma of striving for inclusion or refusing it. It will spotlight the role of audiovisual archives in upholding the ‘cultural archive’ (Wekker, Said), and discuss the community archives as independent, grassroots, activist heritage practice.

Discussion questions: Can the institutional archives be decolonised if it upholds the imagined community of the nation? How can non-institutional, community-led archives transform archival practices? What can institutional archives learn from them?

Reading group: 6 September 2024 at 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organizers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.

Session 2 – “Recording”: Accidental archivism, video work and forensics of anticolonial resistance

Guest Speaker: Dr. Sidar Bayram

14 October 2024 14:00-17:00 Eye Filmmuseum Waterfront

This session will expand on the discussion from the previous session by moving into another anticolonial context, this time addressing the role of activist audiovisual material in social justice, transitional and reconciliation context.

Discussion questions: How can grassroots media activism avant-la-lettre intervene in the narratives of colonial state? How to envision archival practices to preserve and present this material?  

Reading group: 11 October 2024 at 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organizers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.

Session 3 – “Re-membering the dismembered”: Memory activisms in the face of constant displacement, fragmentation, annihilation of archives and film heritage

Guest speaker: Mohanad Yaqubi

11 November 2024 14:00-17:00 Eye Filmmuseum Waterfront

This session will move the discussion to exiled, fragmented, and destroyed audiovisual archives. It will tackle different forms of memory work to counter the colonial erasure, such as transnational archival research, activist archivism, and creative artistic practices.

Discussion questions: In what ways can we find alternative archival practices that counter persistent colonial erasure? Can we imagine a decolonial, future-oriented, archival practice?

Reading group: 8 November 2024 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organizers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.

Session 4 – “Returning”: The question of return, restitution, and repatriation, or alternative models of custodianship and care in postcolonial contexts

Guest speaker: Dr. Nikolaus Perneczky

9 December 2024 14:00-17:00 Eye Filmmuseum Waterfront

Continuing the discussion from exiled audiovisual artefacts, this session elaborates the return of audiovisual material and maps the changing concepts of custodianship, ownership, and care when it comes to colonial audiovisual heritage.

Discussion questions: In what ways (state) archival institutions can centre their colonial collections without reproducing the colonial paradigms of surveillance, domination, extraction and how can we envision alternative practices of custodianship and care with communities? How to expand and reconsider the discussions on return, restitution, repatriation (or rematriation) concerning the specificity of audiovisual items and collections?
Reading group: 6 December 2024 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organizers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.

Session 5 – “Reconfiguring” the archival record: Material witness and ecocide

Guest speaker: Dr. Susan Schuppli

13 January 2025 Eye Filmmuseum Waterfront

In this final session, we will de-centre the anthropocentric archival practices and discuss the concept of material witness through Susan Schuppli’s work on forensic architecture. We will analyse the material witnesses of colonial violence and destruction – even at the absence of archives.

Discussion questions: What can archives learn from non-anthropocentric notions of archival record, specifically in contexts of colonial destruction? Trees, earth, ice, sea as archival material and counter-forensic evidence of colonial destruction. How do these archival materials perform/act in the struggle for environmental justice?

Reading group: 10 January 2025 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organizers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.