“Reparative Encounters: Colonial Histories, Other-Archives, and Collaborative Artistic Research” – Daniela Agostinho (Aarhus University)

La Vaughn Belle, Between the Dusk and Dawn (how to navigate an unsettled empire), 2023.

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? How do we care for the presences and absences they conjure? And is it possible to create different registers with which to engage colonial histories beyond archival access? In this talk, I elaborate on these questions drawing on the ongoing work of the Reparative Encounters network for artistic research. Established in 2023, Reparative Encounters brings together artists and curators from the US Virgin Islands, Ghana and Kalaallit Nunaat, locations differently impacted by Danish colonialism. We came together as a group in the wake of the digitisation of the Danish colonial archives to explore the relations between disparate experiences and communities connected by Danish colonial history, experiences that have not been articulated, narrated or archived through historical records. By foregrounding artistic and curatorial approaches, the talk meditates on collaborative artistic research as an archiving method for repairing colonial legacies, retelling the past and offering new narratives for the future record.

Daniela Agostinho is Assistant Professor in Digital Communication and Culture at Aarhus University and currently a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. She works in the fields of visual and digital culture, artistic and curatorial research, with a focus on colonial archives and artistic responses to war and imperial histories. At Aarhus University, she is co-director of the research unit Postcolonial Entanglements and the Center for Critical Data Practices. She is co-editor of the books (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2020), Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021), The Uncertain Image (Routledge, 2019) and Panic and Mourning. The Cultural Work of Trauma (Walter De Gruyter, 2012). She currently co-directs the network Reparative Encounters: a transcontinental network for artistic research and reparative practices and she is working on a book titled Archival Encounters.

You can register for this seminar here. This session is part of the Transmission in Motion seminar (2024-2025): “Implicatedness” To stay updated with more seminar sessions, please subscribe to our newsletter.