International Symposium on Photography & Visual Culture
International Symposium on Photography & Visual Culture
THE INDIGENOUS GAZE
VISUAL METHODOLOGIES AND DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS
VISITING MENTORS
Astrid Korporaal · Bianca Salvo · Helen Starr · Nasheli Jiménez del Val · Samira Jamouchi · Spring Ulmer · Marianna Tsionki · Rashmi Wiswanathan · Sol Izquierdo de la Viña
THE ARCHIVE AS MODEL AND SOURCE
CREATIVE APPROPRIATIONS IN VISUAL ARTS
Archivo LAB25 reflected on the archive as both a model and a source of visual practice. On one hand, the archive serves as a structural model in artistic practice; on the other hand, artists' archives provide essential resources for historiographical studies on contemporary art, offering valuable information for art history.
This edition explored how visual archives are employed in constructing specific narratives, myths, and memories, and how artistic interventions contribute to reframing, resignifying, and reshaping one's understanding of the past and the building of new futures. It focused on artists' research-oriented archival practices, their archival appropriations, and the creation of their own historical or fictitious visual archives compiled throughout their practice.
MARTA BOGDANSKA
HE PUTS HIS HEAD IN THE HIPPO'S MOUTH AND KEEPS IT THE AWHILE
from VIVE LA RÉSISTANCE! (2025)
How can an archive talk about non-human animals' resistance and agency?
Vive la résistance! is a long-term, multimedia project exploring animal resistance and agency through archival research, photo-collage, video essays, sound, text, and objects. Building on Marta Bogdanska's earlier work SHIFTERS, it questions how history can be retold from an other-than-human perspective.
During the Archivo Lab25 programme, Bogdanska focused on organising thousands of collected materials into an archive that reimagines animals as active agents in historical narratives. Using appropriation, recontextualisation, and visual storytelling, she aimed to subvert hegemonic narratives and explore new modes of coexistence. She experimented with pairings, sequencing, and publication layouts, developing a dummy for a future photobook. Inspired by animal imagery aesthetics like 3D postcards, Bogdanska also created a new series, titled He puts his head in the hippo’s mouth and keeps it there awhile, employing lenticular printing to reflect on transformation and autonomy, while exploring ways to subvert the human gaze.
ELLEN NOLAN
NITA HARVEY ARCHIVE PROJECT (ongoing)
The Nita Harvey Archive draws directly from the heterogeneous archive of Ellen Nolan's British great-aunt, Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest, and signed to Paramount Studios in 1933, in a three-picture contract. Nolan inherited her archive in 2007, after it had been stored in her aunt’s garage since Harvey’s death in 1987.
Drawing directly from the archive, using feminist film and photography theory together with methodologies of archival studies, radical empathy, oral history, trauma and studies of early Hollywood cinema to underpin her approach, Nolan exposes Harvey’s hidden history and repurposing archival materials to facilitate new exchanges with the historical past. She enters Harvey’s archive through the prism of her story – “I didn’t make it in Hollywood; I refused to go on the casting couch,” – repeated in family conversations. This oral history will be embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Harvey’s voice within the body of her existing archive. This alternate history, at odds with 1930’s Hollywood mythology, will give voice to Harvey, and the many women marginalised by the ‘star system’.
In collaboration with atelier Theresa Parker, Nolan created reproductions of Harvey’s archival outfits. Wearing Harvey’s remade outfits, visiting the same sites that she stayed in 1933 as an aspiring actress, she establishes a dynamic between the embodied subject in the present, and the archival object.
MARIANNE BJØRNMYR
CUPALOY (2024-ongoing)
How does the photograph as an archival tool affect our definition of documented history?
Cupaloy is a long-term project exploring perception, trust, and the construction of historical narratives through photography and archival methodologies. Developed during Archivo LAB in 2025, it examines how images shape our understanding of history, particularly through chance, error, and speculative memory. The resulting photobook presents over 300 constructed photographs of events that nearly happened or could have altered world history due to accidents, mistakes, or human interference.
A newly invented classification system arranges these events into non-linear narratives, disrupting traditional historiography. Influenced by Derrida’s Archive Fever and inspired by the 1938 Time Capsule of Cupaloy, the project resists linear storytelling and reframes photographs as speculative documents rather than facts. Each image is rephotographed from archival sources, echoing how AI generates images from existing data. Repeated cast objects in concrete and gypsum mirror photography's logic of reproduction. Cupaloy challenges the authority of the archive, proposing a dynamic, open-ended counter-history built on misclassifications and overlooked possibilities.
LAURA FIORIO
REINVENTARIO
What happens when memory is preserved not by institutions but by those who lived it?
Reinventario is a community-driven archival project developed with former workers of the Bormioli glass factory in Parma, once a major industrial centre, now mostly demolished. As redevelopment erased much of its heritage, a DIY archive emerged, sustained through care and storytelling. Between 2023 and 2025, Laura Fiorio collaborated with the group to digitise their collection, compared it with institutional records, and translated their imagined futures and inspirations into archival interventions. The project led to a photobook that merges inventory with reinvention. Inspired by the visual grammar of the archive, family photographs, technical drawings, and advertising imagery are recontextualised through collage and intervention. The book reflects on the socio-political value of factory life in 20th-century Italy and preserves this affective, collective memory beyond its local context.
THE ARCHIVE AS MODEL AND SOURCE
Aikaterini Gegisian
Photography has long been regarded as the archival form par excellence, entrusted with a mnemonic function and a central role in the organisation of knowledge. It is no surprise, then, that the archive has taken such a prominent place within expanded photographic practices, with artists using it both as method and as form—as Okwui Enwezor articulated nearly a decade ago in his seminal exhibition and text "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art". Artists often approach archives as sites where knowledge can be challenged, and where cultural, national, and gender identities can be questioned and reconstructed. Sometimes photographic archives are reimagined as active discursive systems; at other times, they are treated as a kind of archaeology, excavated and reframed. The artists in Archive Lab 2025 engaged with the archive as both source and form in a variety of ways. Some challenged existing archives but also experiment with alternative ways of creating them—expanding the concept to include community and family archives, while also developing new interpretative frameworks. For example, Ellen Nolan worked with a personal family history, while Laura Fioro re-imagined a community archive. Marta Bogdańska brought together a new archive by assembling disparate materials that explore animal resistance, and Marianne Bjørnmyr developed a speculative approach to archival practice that questions the documentation of history. In the mentoring sessions, we worked through a dialogic, collaborative process that opened the projects to multiple viewpoints and interpretations. What became increasingly clear was the central role of the photobook in these practices. It emerged as a crucial medium for weaving together archival visions and revisions into a coherent narrative form.
ARCHIVE & CONFLICT
POST-PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES IN A POST-DIGITAL WORLD
Archivo LAB 2024 "Archivo and Conflict" aimed to critically investigate the relationship between photography, the archive and conflict across different temporalities. Throughout the LAB programme, artists will delve into the materialities and immaterialities of archival production within the digital age in regard to contemporary critical appropriations concerned with different perspectives on conflict, as well as history’s repressed events and violations. It further intends to examine the techno-aesthetics of datafication, understanding artistic strategies as potential sites for resisting and counter-acting current extractivist processes, which tend to capture and transform everyday life into data.
AGNIESZKA RAYSS
POSTCARDS FROM THE WAR (2024)
"Postcards from The War" is an artistic and historical exploration beginning on February 24, 2024, marked by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The influx of images on social media during this period captured real war scenes just 200 km from the artist's hometown. These images, primarily taken by civilians, included dramatic scenes of destruction, military movements, and the human cost of war.
Despite the extensive documentation of the war, Agnieszka Rayss notes that many significant stories and moments are overlooked by mainstream media. Private photography during the war thus becomes crucial, serving as both a memory frame and evidence of the conflict. The screenshots, while visually compelling and reminiscent of war movie stills, are unsettling due to their real-life context. "Postcards from The War" is a poignant combination of these propaganda postcards with contemporary war photography. This juxtaposition highlights both the ideological source and the grim reality resulting from imperialistic pursuits. The project pays tribute to Martha Rosler's "Bringing the War Home" and is named "Postcards from The War," reflecting the Rayss' inspiration and the thematic fusion of past propaganda and present conflict.
BIANCA SALVO
WHEN STATUES FALL (2024)
"When Statues Fall," initiated in late 2022, is an ongoing exploration into Western heroic narratives, scrutinizing their evolution across historical and contemporary contexts, both physically and digitally. Between January and May 2024, during the Archivo LAB program, the project sought to challenge and reinterpret traditional notions of heroism.
This work delves into themes of permanence versus change, disruption versus creation, and the virtual versus the tangible, challenging the boundaries between fantasy and reality. By juxtaposing these concepts, it interrogates established models of collective memory centered on the civilizing hero. It further examines how digital archives and AI-generated images shape and suggest narratives, unveiling the complexities of Western-constructed heroic ideals. Practical explorations included staged photography, AI-generated images, archival footage, and sculpture, resulting in diverse and multifaceted outcomes.
Inspired by global acts of toppling public monuments in recent years, "When Statues Fall" reflects on monuments as ideological and physical markers of territory and space, extending these constructs into digital realms. Bianca Salvo was particularly struck by the symbolic and physical disintegration of these objects of power, a motif transcending historical periods and geographic boundaries. This inspired a visual parallel with the law of gravity, encapsulated in the statement, “What goes up, must go down.” This metaphor highlights the cosmic resonance in the rise and fall of heroic narratives, influenced by societal values, cultural dynamics, and historical events. "When Statues Fall" captures the essence of symbolic descent while commenting on deconstruction, transformation, and the complex relationship between power, memory, and cultural identity.
CHRIS LE MESSURIER
BEYOND THE SEA (2024)
"Beyond the Sea" explores the pervasive influence of Big Tech and platform capitalists, comparing their data-hungry systems to the seafaring empires of the past. The project examines the expansion of these entities as they monetize our data and control our attention, drawing parallels to historical colonization.
The inspiration for this work comes from the fragmented remnants of Leptis Magna, a Roman city in present-day Libya, which were plundered by the British and now lie scattered across various locations. This disjointedness and fragmentation prompted reflections on culturally significant objects stripped of meaning and stored in museum archives. Chris Le Messurier questions how archival resistance can adapt to the post-digital age and what opportunities exist in critically appropriating rapidly advancing tools.
"Beyond the Sea" explores AI's role in contemporary image-making, highlighting the issues of data plundering, rehashing unrelated data, and the user's complicity in refining machine outputs. Discovering numerous unphotographed objects in the British Museum's online catalogue, Le Messurier fed these entries into an image generator, creating a video loop with a synthetic voice narrating the original museum labels. This "flickering history" represents an unstable and questionable amalgam, challenging the meaning and representation of appropriated images. Reflecting on his role as a photographer and collector, the artist considers the relationship between photography, humanism, and colonialism. This relationship perpetuates the "othering" tendencies of museum collections. Le Messurier suggests that a philosophy moving away from anthropocentrism towards new potentials may hold answers, particularly in understanding the apparatus of control behind technologies like Midjourney, LAION-5B, and Adobe's proprietary systems. "Beyond the Sea" is an exploration of these new colonizing forms that operate under the radar. By peering deep into the interconnected network stretching across the oceans, the project aims to reveal the hidden forms and influences of these modern data-driven entities.
REBECCA SHAPASS
SUDDEN OCCLUSION (2024)
"sudden occlusion" is a 360° VR cinematic experience crafted from a dataset of images of Pittsburgh streets collected by the now-defunct autonomous driving company Argo AI. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, this project places the viewer within the neural network of an autonomous vehicle, offering a perspective on the car’s “mind” as it navigates a desolate cityscape devoid of its former inhabitants. Inspired by Pittsburgh’s transformation into a robotics hub and its historical role in autonomous systems development, the project reflects on the city’s industrial past in mining and steel-working. "sudden occlusion" draws parallels between data mining by autonomous vehicle companies and extractive capitalism, tackling contemporary issues like artificial intelligence, labor, and surveillance.
In this imagined future, the neural network of an autonomous vehicle persists on a server, navigating through its archived 3D images of Pittsburgh. The car's journey through the city reveals fragmented memories of its dataset, showcasing select portions of Pittsburgh's post-industrial landscape. The viewer, positioned within the car’s mind, experiences how the vehicle processes and interprets data to make sense of its surroundings. A dry, informational voiceover narrates the city’s geographic and historical context, linking the car’s role as an “explorer” and “collector” to a legacy of colonial and capitalistic violence. As the car recounts Pittsburgh’s industrial history, including its ties to coal mining, steel-making, and labor struggles, it raises questions about what is lost in the datafication of the city. The narrative culminates with the car’s most vivid memories on an experimental training track, highlighting the limitations and expansiveness of its digital recollection.
Currently in production, "sudden occlusion" is set to be completed by early 2025. This work not only reimagines the archival material but also critiques the broader implications of datafication, artificial intelligence, and the legacy of industrial capitalism.
ARCHIVE & CONFLICT: POST-PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES IN A POST-DIGITAL WORLD
Helen Starr
I am an Afro-Indigenous Trinidadian world-building curator known for working with futuristic AI tools such as VR, AR and Game Engines in order to develop a decolonial approach to contemporary art. I am based in London where I focus on integrating diverse voices, challenging dominant narratives, and exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and identity. I have a keen interest in the ethical implications of digital technologies and their impact on marginalised communities. Through my work, I try to create inclusive and engaging art experiences that foster critical reflection and promote cultural equity. My collaborations with artists often emphasise the importance of preserving cultural heritage and exploring alternative epistemologies. I would like to say that my time spent with these four artists—Rebecca Shapass, Chris Le Messurier, Bianca Salvo, and Agnieszka Rayss—has deepened my understanding and critique of Western technological determinism. Technological determinism posits that technology shapes society in a deterministic manner, often at the expense of human agency and complexity. Post-photographic practices, emerging from cybernetics developed as a tool for war, reflect how technologies incorporated into artworks are not autonomous forces but tools used by people with diverse motivations and contexts. As someone who relies on artists for my curatorial practice, it was a privilege to be part of these artists' developmental processes. Their works align with the need for ethical, inclusive, and human-centric approaches to technology, offering a visceral and raw form of communication that differs from the more logocentric methods such as text and debate. Visual art communicates through images, forms, colours, and compositions, engaging viewers on a sensory and emotional level. It can convey complex ideas, emotions, and narratives without relying on words, allowing for a more immediate and visceral experience. While text and debate depend on language and structured arguments, visual art can transcend linguistic barriers and offer multiple interpretations, making it a powerful medium for expressing nuanced and multifaceted concepts. This non-verbal form of communication often resonates deeply and intuitively with audiences. Engaging with Post-photographic practices in a post-digital world allows us to receive information in an embodied way, bypassing logical debates and touching on deeper human truths. The broken detritus of Ukraine in “Postcards from the War” by Agnieszka Rayss bypasses all logic, focusing on the human cost of conflict rather than dry border debates. Bianca Salvo's "When Statues Fall," including "Unsolved Problems of Gravity" and "On Heroes and Free Fall," challenges the narrative of dead heroes immortalised in stone, breaking down these myths. Sylvia Wynter reminds us that humans are not just biological beings but are also made of myths: "Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialised in deeds." This idea is reflected in Rebecca Shapass’s "Sudden Occlusion," which critiques data mining and surveillance, showcasing how these practices perpetuate colonial logics and reduce individuals to mere data points, stripping away personal agency. Chris’s "Beyond the Sea" responds to the expanding influence of Big Tech by paralleling data exploitation with historical imperialism. Using an image generator to question the meaning of appropriated images, his work critiques archival homogenization in the digital age and highlights how AI and data serve as new forms of colonisation. Raised in Australia with its colonial past, this work reflects on the role of a photographer and collector, delving into the opaque workings of AI systems that require deep scrutiny. When I integrate the indigenous AI protocols of my people into these critiques, the need for consent, respect for cultural heritage, and sustainable practices in technology development rises to the surface. And not just for indigenous people, but for all the peoples of the world who will struggle with the extractive nature of digital system design. This approach challenges the perpetuation of colonial logics by digital technologies and advocates for an ethical, inclusive technological landscape that values human agency and cultural diversity. By incorporating these protocols, we can create a technological landscape that serves the interests of all communities rather than perpetuating exploitation and inequality. Through the works of Rebecca, Chris, Bianca and Aga, we see the potential for technology to be reimagined in ways that honour and respect diverse cultural perspectives, fostering a more equitable future. —
ARCHIVO LAB is a mentored programme consisting of an experimental visual arts laboratory focused on practice-led research, at the intersection of photography and lens based media, articulating theory, criticism and creative practice. Within the programme, selected artists and practitioners are offered mentored sessions and engage in a series of webinars, reading groups, and other events. The purpose of the Archivo LAB is the experimentation, presentation, and mediation of technical images in contemporary art.
-
FORMAT AND DURATION
The Archivo LAB program runs from January to July, every year. The programme is held remotely through ZOOM video conference.
-
ELIGIBILITY
The Archivo LAB welcomes applications from visual artists, photographers, and practitioners in the field of visual arts to reflect on photography, film, and other lens-based media. Applicants should be older than 18 years old, and there's no restriction to nationality or geographical location. Applicants must be proficient in spoken and written English.
-
LAB MENTORSHIP & ACTIVITIES
Throughout the Archivo LAB programme, candidates will participate in several activities, including: research webinars, reading groups, and mentorship sessions to present and discuss their visual research progress. As part of the LAB outcomes, candidates are expected to engage in public events organised by the Archivo Platform, in a format to be determined by the artists and the LAB coordinators as appropriate. The final works will be eligible for the Archivo Acquisition Prize, a recognition of the conceptual and artistic accomplishment developed throughout the LAB. The awarded work will be included in the Archivo Art Collection.
-
SELECTION PROCESS
A selection committee will evaluate the applications based on their quality, originality, and connection to the theme of the Archivo LAB 2026. The committee will be composed of the director of Archivo Platform and two invited jurors.
For further information, please contact: info@archivoplatform.com
2026
PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVE
& ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINARIES
VISUAL PRACTICES
AND ECOLOGICAL THINKING
Archivo LAB'26 supports artists whose practices engage with the unseen, the spectral, and the interconnected in times of ecological crisis. With a particular focus on photographic archives—understood both as material traces and speculative tools—the LAB'26 invites proposals that explore how photography and its archival infrastructures can shape ecological imaginaries and activate new relations of care. Emerging from the thematic framework of Haunted Archives of Livingness, the program invites visual artists, photographers, and practitioners to approach the archive not only as a repository but as a porous, living system: a site that preserves, decays, regenerates, and resists. Projects may explore the role of photography in embodying memory and omission, presence and erasure, the human and the more-than-human, engaging with issues such as environmental devastation, extractivism, climate grief, and digital materiality.
Through the lens of the politics of care, participants are encouraged to trace invisible histories, overlooked relationships, and affective resonances that emerge within ecological entanglements. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: found imagery, vernacular collections, speculative fictions, data imaginaries, as well as embodied practices of looking and remembering. The LAB'26 fosters experimental, interdisciplinary, and non-extractive methodologies, encouraging practices rooted in situated knowledge and ecological sensitivity. Emphasis will be placed on collaborative engagements and on reimagining the role of visual culture in articulating new forms of environmental awareness and responsibility.
Programme Coordinator: Ana Catarina Pinho
LOUISE FEDOTOV-CLEMENTS
GUEST MENTOR
Louise has been the Director of Photoworks since 2023, where she leads the strategic vision and artistic direction of the organisation. Established in 1995, Photoworks is an international platform focussed on the development of photography through a programme of exhibitions, residencies, publications, engagement, the biennale Photoworks Festival, the Ampersand Photography Fellowship and the Jerwood Photography Awards.
She is the CoFounder/former Director FORMAT Festival. Previously she was Artistic Director QUAD, a centre for contemporary art and film; National Curator of Contemporary Art, Forestry England, and currently Jury Chair of Earth Photo with the Royal Geographical Society, Forestry England and Parker Harris.
As a creative director since 1998 Louise has curated commissions, mass participation, festivals, publications, film/photography programmes/exhibitions, juried and mentored worldwide.