Speaker Series: Decolonial Archive Lab

The students of the Decolonial Archive Lab invite the school community to engage with international creators of archival and collective practice initiatives. Open to all.

Akumassa and collective Practices

Thursday, 1.6.23, 5 pm, hybrid 
Otty Widasari from AkuMassa project in conversation with Raras Umaratih.
Conceptualized, organized and facilitated by Raras Umaratih.
In English.

Akumassa (a combo of two words: “aku” and “massa” [‘I’ and ‘public’]) was launched by Forum Lenteng in 2008 as a community-based media that emphasizes citizens’ perspectives in order to respond to social phenomena. Their formats span from photography, to video, writing, and organizing folk festivals, used as tools for uncovering social and cultural struggles from the perspective of the local people. Akumassa uses the framework of media literacy, and citizen journalism approaches, and has worked together with over 12 grassroots communities/collectives throughout the region known today as Indonesia. 

Otty Widasari (1973, Balikpapan) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker, and one of the founders of Forum Lenteng, a Jakarta-based non-profit that structures itself as an alternative platform for community-based social and cultural studies. Before studying at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts (2011–2013), journalism was her formal background, and one can see elements of journalism in her artistic practice, which includes video, painting, teaching, and performance art.

Are you listening?

Monday, 26.6.23, 4 pm, Aula
Sujatro Ghosh on radical thinking, memory and collective practices.
Conceptualized, organized and facilitated by Raras Umaratih.
In English.

“In this workshop we invite you to bring and share your desires to the space. What do you desire from an institution, from an art school, from a community? How do desires help us imagine alternative futures, what do they tell us about our present conditions?
Within smaller groups of 2–3 people, we would like to revisit our desires, finding out what that means and how they are shaped through neocolonial and neoliberal structures. We will try to interpret these impulses and articulate them into material, building a collective archive that may be published as part of Decolonial Archive Lab’s first edition in July. Recording devices, headphones, paper and pens will be provided.” Umaratih/Ghosh

Sujatro Ghosh is a multidisciplinary artist-activist and a curator from Kolkata, currently based in Berlin. His practice initiates conversations about social action and political protest, which produces the conditions for othered voices to be heard. His works weave across conceptual and material adventures produced by radical thought primarily around queer rights, diasporic tensions, women rights, climate change, gastropolitics and transnational migration. He works across film, performance, poetry, fabric works and photography. He is currently working on the relationships among food, memory, violence and justice.

On Archiving our/Stories

Montag, 3.7.23, 17 pm, Aula
María Belen on the construction of the Trans Memory Archive (Archivo Memoria Trans).
Conceptualized, organized and facilitated by Mano Leyrado.
In English and Spanish.

The Trans Memory Archive (AMT as in its Spanish acronym) is a collaborative and independent project managed transgender persons from Argentina, which gathers images and stories about the recent history of the trans community in the country. It is materialized through a digital platform, a photobook and exhibitions. The archive currently comprises a collection of more than 15.000 pieces, including digitized analog photographs, digital photographs, videos, newspaper clippings, correspondence, personal diaries, documents -national identity documents, passports, police files-, clothing, objects and testimonies of trans people dating from the early twentieth century to the late 1990s. The oldest archival piece dates back to 1936.