ARKonversations June 7th 2025 INHA PARIS

Archives are not only tools for preserving memory, but also spaces for critical reflection and artistic practices. This study day aims to explore the role of archives in cultural production, curatorial work, artistic research, and critical vision. Archival practices will be examined in a broad framework, with particular attention to their historical, political, and artistic value. The program features  a series of talks by art historians, curators, artists, and researchers who work with archives in various contexts. The goal is to create a dialogue between theoretical and practical approaches, highlighting the potential of archives as tools for knowledge production and political resistance, while offering new perspectives on the preservation and use of memory.

ARKonversations

June 7th, 2025
INHA – Salle Vasari
2 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris

Program drafted by Archivorum, Fondazione Ratti, and Galleria Continua

11:00–11:30 AM – Welcome and Everyone is Welcome

11:30 AM–12:15 PM – Marco Scotini

Disobedience Archive – Intersections Between Art, Memory, and Political Imagination.
Disobedience Archive is a multiphase, mobile, and evolving video archive that concentrates on the relationship between artistic practices and political action. Initiated in 2005 by Marco Scotini, a curator, art critic, and lecturer known for his work on political art and interdisciplinary practices, the project generates an atlas of contemporary resistance tactics, ranging from direct action to counter-information, from constituent practices to bio-resistance. The project, which transforms its display each time, also functions as a “user’s guide” to social disobedience and it turns the archive into a dynamic and generative device. It was presented at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, where it was paired with other projects, including Diaspora Activism and Gender Disobedience.

12:30–1:15 PM – Sislej Xhafa, Arnold Braho

The Right to Remain Unarchived – Community Archives and Engagement.
A conversation between Sislej Xhafa, an artist known for his conceptual works exploring migration, power, and identity, and Arnold Braho, an independent curator and writer, reflecting on how archives, like other cultural institutions, can function as living, evolving environments rooted in presence rather than permanence. Through ARKIV, a project recently started by Xhafa in a public school in Pejë, Kosovo, art becomes embedded in everyday life, reimagining cultural identities and relationships within communities. Braho’s curatorial practice emphasizes process, spatial use, audience co-presence, and the roles activated through exhibition practices, acknowledging the inherent non-neutrality of the curatorial gesture.

1:15–2:15 PM – Lunch Break

2:15–3:00 PM – Matylda Taszycka – AWARE, Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

Women Artists: From Building Archives to Making Them Public.
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions is a non-profit organization founded in 2014 to increase the visibility of women artists from the 17th century to the present day. It was born out of the urgent need to address their systemic absence from art history and to rewrite this history through archiving and sharing content online. The archives are not limited to written texts: they include multimedia formats such as filmed interviews, oral histories in the form of podcasts, and the activation of available resources through programs of talks, workshops, and performances, reflecting a commitment to embodied and diverse forms of knowledge. AWARE does not view the archive as a simple place of preservation, but as a dynamic practice that not only safeguards artistic legacies but also actively contributes to reshaping dominant narratives.

3:15–4:00 PM – Esther Ferrer, Maria Inés Rodríguez

Archival Methodology and Performative Practices.
María Inés Rodríguez, curator, director of the Nicole and Walter LeBlanc Foundation, and founder of Tropical Papers, engages in a  dialogue with the acclaimed artist Esther Ferrer. A pioneer of performance art and long-time member of the experimental group ZAJ, Ferrer is known for her radical, conceptual approach that foregrounds the body, time, and process. Together, they explore how artists’ legacies can be activated in the present, rethinking archives not as static repositories but as dynamic, creative platforms for intercultural dialogue and experimentation. Special attention will be given to the challenges of transmitting ephemeral practices and how care and reinvention can shape the future of archiving performative and time-based art.

4:00–4:15 PM – Coffee Break

4:15–5:00 PM – Dora García

Love with Obstacles, a Collective Reading.
Dora García, artist, teacher, and researcher based in Oslo, explores the relationship between viewer, artwork, and space through interactivity and performance. She represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Between 2018 and 2024, she developed the film project Amor Rojo, which focuses on Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai and the impact of her legacy on non-white, intersectional, trans feminisms. Dora García proposes a collective reading of selected letters and diary fragments in which women articulate political, personal, and feminist disappointments. The research originated from the study of Kollontai’s personal writings preserved in the RGASPI archive in Moscow.

5:15–6:00 PM – Enrico Camporesi

Scripta Manent.
Enrico Camporesi oversees the research and documentation activities of the film collection at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou. Starting from this collection, he develops, in an inductive fashion, projects which take as a starting point the experimental and artists’ films preserved at the museum. His talk focuses on the working method and the archival traces summoned in a vast inquiry on typography and the moving image— “written on the screen.”

6:15–7:15 PM – Nil Yalter, Anaïs Auger-Mathurin 

ARK Project and Screening of Nil Yalter’s Films Followed by a Q&A.
Since the 1970s, the artistic work of Nil Yalter — Golden Lion winner at the Venice Biennale in 2024 — has combined feminist and sociopolitical concerns, drawing on ethnographic methods. Archival material, photographs, documents, and interviews play a central role in her practice, serving as both source and subject. “My work is itself an archive,” she states. In works such as Exile is a Hard Job (1977/2015) and Topak Ev (1973), she uses archival methods to preserve marginalized voices and challenge dominant historical narratives. Among the three artists featured in the Archivorum Ark project, the discussion includes Anaïs Auger-Mathurin, art historian and curator, who works closely with the artist to explore, organize, and interpret her personal archives. A selection of Yalter’s video works will be screened, followed by a Q&A session.

7:15–7:30 PM – Closing