MARCELO BRODSKY — Guest Speaker REFRAMING THE ARCHIVE 2026 | 7th EDITION International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 23-25 SEPT 2026 | ONLINE — VISUAL THINKING AND THE FUTURES OF DEMOCRACY PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION MARCELO BRODSKY | Guest Speaker — "Memory Works" from Buena Memoria to Traces of Violence This visual presentation goes through some of my more relevant visual essays, that start with "Buena Memoria" (Good Memory, 1996), the Fire of Ideas (2014-2025), Stand for Democracy in Myanmar (2024), Africa fighting for freedom (2010-2024), and ends withTraces of Violence (2022). Each essay deals with a memory of historic, social or contemporary events and their consequences. My summary is short, because I can not summarize images, I will show as much as our time enables us to show, although my improvised text is always related to the process of creation and to the relationship between images and text. It is a research on Language. — Marcelo Brodsky is a visual artist whose work focuses on memory and human rights. In 1996–97, he presented Buena Memoria, a key body of work reflecting on the effects of state terrorism in Argentina. He is the founder and a Board member of Parque de la Memoria, a major memorial and exhibition space dedicated to commemorating the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship. His work is held in numerous collections, including Tate (London), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), Pinacoteca do Estado, and MASP (São Paulo), MAR Museum, Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro), the National Museum of Fine Arts and Museo de Arte Moderno (Buenos Aires), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), among others.

DR ÖZGE ÇELIKASLAN — Guest Speaker REFRAMING THE ARCHIVE 2026 | 7th EDITION International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 23-25 SEPT 2026 | ONLINE — VISUAL THINKING AND THE FUTURES OF DEMOCRACY PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION DR ÖZGE ÇELIKASLAN | Guest Speaker — Archiving from Below Care, Commoning, and Participation Contemporary archives are not simply repositories of historical traces, but dynamic and contested spaces where knowledge is produced, negotiated, and reimagined. Within activist and counter-archival practices, archiving can become a form of political intervention: preserving histories that have been marginalised or excluded, creating spaces for collective memory, and opening alternative ways of producing and circulating knowledge. Such practices also raise questions of care, responsibility, access, and the limits preservation. This lecture draws on more than a decade of experience with bak.ma digital media archive of social movements founded in 2014. Emerging from practices of collecting and circulating moving-image materials produced in contexts of political struggle and contested territories, bak.ma has developed as a living and evolving archival ecology. It brings together neglected archival materials, open-source technological infrastructures, and situated forms of labour that sustain them. I propose understanding bak.ma through the concept of the commons, not as a model of unrestricted openness, but as a practice of commoning grounded in care, responsibility, and relationality. This involves collectively negotiating what can circulate, what requires protection, and what may resist archival capture. It also includes the continual revisiting and reactivation of archival collections through artistic, curatorial, and research practices, allowing past materials to generate new political imaginaries. Through bak.ma, the lecture considers the archive as a fragile social infrastructure shaped by tensions between preservation and withdrawal, participation and protection, visibility and vulnerability. It asks how archival care can become a form of political practice, and how collective memory is produced through such situated practices that sustain, interrupt, and transform them. The lecture expands on the theorisation of archival commons developed in my book Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (dpr-barcelona, 2024). — Dr Özge Çelikaslan is a transdisciplinary scholar and practitioner. She is co-founder of bak.ma online archive of social movements (2014), and remains an active member. Her research and artistic practice engage with overlooked moving image materials, where questions of memory, contested territories, and archival ecologies intersect. She explores how archival gaps can become spaces of possibility, working across different media to activate silenced narratives and contested histories. She currently teaches film and media studies at universities and collaborates internationally on archival, artistic, and research-based initiatives. She is the author of Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (2024).

DR TOM ALLBESON — Keynote Speaker REFRAMING THE ARCHIVE 2026 | 7th EDITION International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 23-25 SEPT 2026 | ONLINE — VISUAL THINKING AND THE FUTURES OF DEMOCRACY PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION DR TOM ALLBESON | Keynote Speaker — Visual Politics at the End of Empire: Imperial Citizens in a British Archive of Postwar Photojournalism Before the advent of large television audiences in the UK, Picture Post (1938-1957) was a hugely successful general readership photo-magazine. The British equivalent of Life or Paris-Match, it covered international conflicts, domestic politics and transnational popular culture, and aimed to be at the centre of public debate. Picture Post published numerous postwar photo-essays exploring racism and prejudice in British cities. The editors also commissioned coverage (often from the same photojournalists) of wars across the British empire as from 1945 communities in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus and elsewhere fought against colonialism and occupation. An issue of the magazine might incongruously call out discrimination at home in one feature yet bang the drum for repression abroad across the following pages. Seemingly, staff worked to illuminate the experience of people of colour in Britain, while invisibilising oppression around the globe. This co-existence of progressive attitudes and colonial imaginaries entailed a perverse ‘not seeing in the midst of seeing’ – as Judith Butler (2009: 100) characterised the visual culture of the ‘War on Terror’. Moreover, there exists in the archives of the magazine a host of ‘hidden’ photographs – press prints and contact sheets comprising the many images from these commissions not selected for the pages of the magazine, as well as whole features that went unpublished (so-called ‘killed stories’). Historians like Erik Linstrum and institutions like the IWM are examining these so-called ‘forgotten wars’ today, bringing to light histories of incarceration, execution and persecution. This material illuminates wider issues about visual media and conceptions of twentieth-century democracy – issues concerning representation, participation and citizenship. What can we learn about media complicity and democratic deliberation in Britain’s ‘age of emergency’ by exploring the complex legacies of this visual archive? How might the surfacing of this imagery contribute to the project of addressing current blind-spots in British cultural memory of imperialism? This lecture draws on a decade of research and collaboration concerning the magazine, as well as vital conversations on the complex relationship between democracy and photography organised through the By/For Collective. From academic colleagues to museum professionals and community organisers, I am very grateful to all these contributors and collaborators. — Dr Tom Allbeson is Reader in Media & Photographic History (Cardiff University). His research concerns visual culture and contemporary history with specialisms in histories of photojournalism, and memory in post-conflict societies. He is co-editor of Picturing Peace: Photography, Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation (2025) and co-author of Conflicting Images: Histories of War Photography in the News (2024). He is co-convenor of the network, 'By/For: Photography & Democracy', as well as a co-editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. He has co-curated two exhibitions of historic photojournalism: ‘Picture Post: A Twentieth Century Icon’ (National Museum Cardiff, 2025) and ‘Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War & Peace’ (Photographers Gallery, 2024).

DR NONI STACEY — Keynote Speaker REFRAMING THE ARCHIVE International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 7th EDITION 23-25 SEPT 2026 | ONLINE VISUAL THINKING AND THE FUTURES OF DEMOCRACY PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION DR NONI STACEY | Keynote Speaker — Cold War Touring Exhibitions On the Road with MoMA's The Family of Man and Nato's Caravan of Peace Edward Steichen’s touring exhibition, The Family of Man, which opened in 1953 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Nato’s Caravan of Peace touring exhibitions of the 1950’s - 1970s, bring to the fore the relations between government and cultural organisations. This raises questions about the role of cultural diplomacy and propaganda and modes of public engagement with the multi-faceted touring exhibitions. This involves an examination of the role of the United States Information Agency and the approach to propaganda in exhibition making during the Cold War. My focus in this area is from a political and historical point of view, in the organisations and agencies involved - on how decisions were taken and what we might infer about this close cooperation between government, tradecraft - being the technology of the military and clandestine operations - and the realm of the exhibition in the cultural sphere. — Dr Noni Stacey is a writer and cultural historian. Previously, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at TU Dublin, and Writing Supervisor for the MA Photography & Society at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her book on the art of protest surrounding Brexit, Leave to Remain, A Snapshot of Brexit (2023), and Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s (2020), were published by Lund Humphries. She was awarded a PhD from University of the Arts, London, in 2017. Previously, she worked as a freelance picture editor and researcher, and as a journalist and TV news producer.

The archive, in its variables of collecting private or public documents, relating to a person, family, municipality or state, is configured as a circumscribed place, with limited access or reserved for specific users. Its historical connection – especially the archive as institution – with power and various forms of long-standing hegemony, while it has contributed to arousing its fascination and a certain aura of mystery in recent decades, has been paralleled with a profound questioning and recognition of its problematic “neutral technology” (Azoulay, 2019). To consider that a collection of written texts, visual works, volumes, and photographs, and moving images composes a corpus can lead us back to the etymology of the Latin term, which takes on this meaning much later. Before, it referred to a body, individual, person, or living being, as well as a corpse, inanimate body, matter, organism, and structure. If we then maintain the polysemy of the corpus to diversify the archives in which they live, we will suddenly find ourselves faced with a variety of typologies that expand the very notion of the archive, push it out of protective walls, dirty it, contaminate it and regenerate it, making it living matter and in constant metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020). We can read this corpus as an archive that selfgenerates, feeds itself, feeds back, tells itself, passes on, and lets itself be consulted. A system of knowledge that owns itself as an archive, which “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporally diverse and interconnected processes of documenting and consuming information” (Tortorici, 2018), available to be activated and put into relation in a constant becoming in transformation. What can this approach teach us about the wonder, the abject, the beauty, the waste in the planet when they become “haunted archives of livingness” (Subramaniam, 2024)? In this context, photography emerges as a central medium through which haunted archives are constituted, activated, and contested. Photographs not only preserve the visual remnants of ecological and political violence, but also act as spectral witnesses— carriers of both memory and omission. What role does the photograph play in embodying “livingness” or decay? How can photographic archives resist the logics of extractivism, classification? Confronted with climate change, overdevelopment, ecological devastation, environmental crises, energy dependence, poverty, reproductive injustice, unsustainable agriculture, and food insecurity, to name just a few, “seeking to understand the world as embrangled in its histories is the urgent project before us.” (Subramaniam, 2024) How can we look at the geological traces, at the rivers’ flow, at the accumulation of waste, at the dialects of folk proverbs and storytelling, at “invasive” plant species, at the physical space occupied to store our digital data and see them, observe them, sense them and create through them? Would we be able to look at them with the attention devoted to documents preserved and protected in archives without falling into the trap of “classification, tagging, and naming of different groups to form a human index” (Azoulay, 2019), or –by contrast– would we be able not to forget or ignore them but rather to embrace a project of care? Envisioning art—and cultural practices more broadly—as an empowering means at our hands to cultivate a utopia for a better liveable future, the 6th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive brings together scholars, researchers, visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to share their work and reflect on how contemporary artistic practices have been and are dealing with these haunted archives of livingness. — Program chair Dr. Vanessa Badagliacca —

The archive, in its variables of collecting private or public documents, relating to a person, family, municipality or state, is configured as a circumscribed place, with limited access or reserved for specific users. Its historical connection – especially the archive as institution – with power and various forms of long-standing hegemony, while it has contributed to arousing its fascination and a certain aura of mystery in recent decades, has been paralleled with a profound questioning and recognition of its problematic “neutral technology” (Azoulay, 2019). To consider that a collection of written texts, visual works, volumes, and photographs, and moving images composes a corpus can lead us back to the etymology of the Latin term, which takes on this meaning much later. Before, it referred to a body, individual, person, or living being, as well as a corpse, inanimate body, matter, organism, and structure. If we then maintain the polysemy of the corpus to diversify the archives in which they live, we will suddenly find ourselves faced with a variety of typologies that expand the very notion of the archive, push it out of protective walls, dirty it, contaminate it and regenerate it, making it living matter and in constant metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020). We can read this corpus as an archive that selfgenerates, feeds itself, feeds back, tells itself, passes on, and lets itself be consulted. A system of knowledge that owns itself as an archive, which “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporally diverse and interconnected processes of documenting and consuming information” (Tortorici, 2018), available to be activated and put into relation in a constant becoming in transformation. What can this approach teach us about the wonder, the abject, the beauty, the waste in the planet when they become “haunted archives of livingness” (Subramaniam, 2024)? In this context, photography emerges as a central medium through which haunted archives are constituted, activated, and contested. Photographs not only preserve the visual remnants of ecological and political violence, but also act as spectral witnesses— carriers of both memory and omission. What role does the photograph play in embodying “livingness” or decay? How can photographic archives resist the logics of extractivism, classification? Confronted with climate change, overdevelopment, ecological devastation, environmental crises, energy dependence, poverty, reproductive injustice, unsustainable agriculture, and food insecurity, to name just a few, “seeking to understand the world as embrangled in its histories is the urgent project before us.” (Subramaniam, 2024) How can we look at the geological traces, at the rivers’ flow, at the accumulation of waste, at the dialects of folk proverbs and storytelling, at “invasive” plant species, at the physical space occupied to store our digital data and see them, observe them, sense them and create through them? Would we be able to look at them with the attention devoted to documents preserved and protected in archives without falling into the trap of “classification, tagging, and naming of different groups to form a human index” (Azoulay, 2019), or –by contrast– would we be able not to forget or ignore them but rather to embrace a project of care? Envisioning art—and cultural practices more broadly—as an empowering means at our hands to cultivate a utopia for a better liveable future, the 6th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive brings together scholars, researchers, visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to share their work and reflect on how contemporary artistic practices have been and are dealing with these haunted archives of livingness. — Program chair Dr. Vanessa Badagliacca —

The archive, in its variables of collecting private or public documents, relating to a person, family, municipality or state, is configured as a circumscribed place, with limited access or reserved for specific users. Its historical connection – especially the archive as institution – with power and various forms of long-standing hegemony, while it has contributed to arousing its fascination and a certain aura of mystery in recent decades, has been paralleled with a profound questioning and recognition of its problematic “neutral technology” (Azoulay, 2019). To consider that a collection of written texts, visual works, volumes, and photographs, and moving images composes a corpus can lead us back to the etymology of the Latin term, which takes on this meaning much later. Before, it referred to a body, individual, person, or living being, as well as a corpse, inanimate body, matter, organism, and structure. If we then maintain the polysemy of the corpus to diversify the archives in which they live, we will suddenly find ourselves faced with a variety of typologies that expand the very notion of the archive, push it out of protective walls, dirty it, contaminate it and regenerate it, making it living matter and in constant metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020). We can read this corpus as an archive that selfgenerates, feeds itself, feeds back, tells itself, passes on, and lets itself be consulted. A system of knowledge that owns itself as an archive, which “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporally diverse and interconnected processes of documenting and consuming information” (Tortorici, 2018), available to be activated and put into relation in a constant becoming in transformation. What can this approach teach us about the wonder, the abject, the beauty, the waste in the planet when they become “haunted archives of livingness” (Subramaniam, 2024)? In this context, photography emerges as a central medium through which haunted archives are constituted, activated, and contested. Photographs not only preserve the visual remnants of ecological and political violence, but also act as spectral witnesses— carriers of both memory and omission. What role does the photograph play in embodying “livingness” or decay? How can photographic archives resist the logics of extractivism, classification? Confronted with climate change, overdevelopment, ecological devastation, environmental crises, energy dependence, poverty, reproductive injustice, unsustainable agriculture, and food insecurity, to name just a few, “seeking to understand the world as embrangled in its histories is the urgent project before us.” (Subramaniam, 2024) How can we look at the geological traces, at the rivers’ flow, at the accumulation of waste, at the dialects of folk proverbs and storytelling, at “invasive” plant species, at the physical space occupied to store our digital data and see them, observe them, sense them and create through them? Would we be able to look at them with the attention devoted to documents preserved and protected in archives without falling into the trap of “classification, tagging, and naming of different groups to form a human index” (Azoulay, 2019), or –by contrast– would we be able not to forget or ignore them but rather to embrace a project of care? Envisioning art—and cultural practices more broadly—as an empowering means at our hands to cultivate a utopia for a better liveable future, the 6th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive brings together scholars, researchers, visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to share their work and reflect on how contemporary artistic practices have been and are dealing with these haunted archives of livingness. — Program chair Dr. Vanessa Badagliacca —

The 5th edition of the Reframing the Archive conference seeks to explore the intersections of archival art and research within contemporary art, addressing both as integral and complementary facets of a broad and complex field of study. The conference will examine how archives serve as a structural model for artists working across diverse backgrounds and practices, while also being essential resources for historiographical studies of contemporary art, thanks to the wealth of information preserved within them. Key questions for discussion include: How can archival art be historicized or reinterpreted in today’s context? What tools and definitions (or counter- definitions) are useful in this endeavor? How are contemporary artists engaging with traditional archival paradigms, and what new possibilities are they inventing? Furthermore, how do archives “speak” about contemporary art, and what approaches can be used to interpret them as historical sources? The conference will also delve into how visual archives contribute to the construction of national narratives, their role in decolonization efforts, and emerging case studies in this area. Finally, it will examine how institutions dedicated to historical knowledge can be promoted and reimagined in the current cultural landscape. PROGRAM (Sept 27) 10:00 | Opening remarks Ana Catarina Pinho, Annalisa Laganà 10:10 | Guest Speaker: REIN JELLE TERPSTRA​ RFK Funeral Train - The People's View. The reversed perspective​ FILMSCREENING — Conversation moderated by Ana Catarina Pinho ​​ 11:30 | PANEL VII: HISTORIOGRAPHY Moderator: Annalisa Laganà (Università della Callabria) ​ "The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (1979-1999). The photographic collection as a platform for the creation and dissemination of architectural knowledge" Natália Correia Brandão, Technical University of Munich — "The Diary of Polish Art Life 1945-1989. The Case of the 20th and 21st Century Visual Art Documentation Department at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences" Karolina Labowicz-Dymanus, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences — "A toolkit for artists and illustrators. The photographic archive Matania in Naples" Gaia Salvatori, Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa ​ ​ 12:30 | PANEL VIII: ATLASES Moderator: Jennifer Good (University of the Arts London) ​ "Navigating Difference. Myth, Body, and Desire in Hudinilson Jr.'s Cadernos de referências Dis-Archive Practice" Simone Rossi, Università Iuav di Venezia / Universidade de São Paulo — "Transforming Historical Maps into Personal Narratives. "Dialectical contemporaneity’ at the University of Porto" Nelson David Correia Lopes, I2ADS / FBAUP Universidade do Porto — "From Atlas to Archive. William Eggleston’s Election Eve, 1976" Alexandra Ruth Nicolaides, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY ​ 13:30 | BREAK ​​ 14:30 | PARALLEL PANELS PANEL IX: INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES Moderator: Marta Labad (UTAD, Spain) ​ "Archiving the Disaster. Preservation, Separation and Encounter" Ioanna Sakellaraki, RMIT University — "In Search of Ghosts. Archival Instability and Plant Extinction" Liz Orton, LCC University of the Arts London​​ ​ PANEL X: MEMORY Moderator: Ana Catarina Pinho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa​) ​ "Mediating the Past, Making (in) the Present. Contemporary Artistic Practices from Turkey and the Construction of Memory Around 6-7 September 1955" Defne Oruç, London College of Contemporary Arts — "Wellow: Recounting ancestral memories of place through lens-based autobiographical practice" Sally Waterman, University for the Creative Arts, Epsom UK — "The artist’s archive as a collective task. Reconstructing memories of a lost Venezuela" Amalia Caputo Dodge, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ​​ ​ 15:30 | PARALLEL PANELS PANEL XI: MUSEUMS Moderator: Annalisa Laganà (Università della Callabria) ​ "On Establishing the Book Arts Archive of the Caversham Press and Centre for Artists and Writers" David Murray Paton, University of Johannesburg, South Africa — "Live archive to live art" Nina Rahe, University of São Paulo — "Listening colonial photographs. Adwa and my Sonic Journey in Decolonizing Museums" Livia Dubon Bohlig, Kingston University, London ​ PANEL XII: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES Moderator: Andrés Pachón (University of Coimbra) ​ "Curating the Internet. Photo-Archival Practices in the Work of Evan Roth" Yonit Aronowicz, Paris Cité University — "Rewilding the Digital Archive. An Artistic Exploration of the Bug as a Queer and Decolonial Agent" Martina Denegri, Univeristy of Groningen ​​​ ​​ 16:30 | PARALLEL PANELS PANEL XIII: PRACTICES Moderator: Evan Hume (Iowa State University) ​ "Artists' Multiples: Archives in Motion" Jim Drobnick, OCAD University, Toronto Jennifer Fisher, York University, Toronto — "The archive as artistic practice. Dayanita Singh’s constructed contact sheet photographic archives" Deborah Schultz, Regent's University London — "Museum, archive, phantoms" Agnieszka Rayss, Social Science and Psychology University, Warsaw ​ PANEL XIV: PROJECTS Moderator: Marta Labad (UTAD, Spain) ​​ "From fluid art to fluid archive. A dive into an online documentation project of ephemeral art and action since the 1960s" Annemarie Kok, University of Groningen — "Experiencing the University Archives through Curated Learning Teaching in the Visual Arts with the Help of Primary Sources" Lindsay Demchuk, University of Regina — "Challenges of Establishing and Preserving the Collection The Case of Vera Dajht-Kralj’s archive" Karla Lebhaft, University of Zagreb Ana Kršinic Lozica, University of Zagreb Ivana Završki, Independent Researcher ​​ 17:30 | CLOSING SESSION