Heritage Futures: A Training Programme for Makers and Archivists
This track activates archiving as a tool to challenge univocality in Western institutional archives and as tool to centre voices that have long been excluded, empowering collective, decolonial, inclusive perspectives on archives to help enrich archival practices.
This Track asks how archives shaped by colonial systems can be made more democratic, accessed, questioned, and expanded—and how the histories of colonised communities can be engaged with beyond normative, institutional archival structures, that foreground ‘neutrality’ and canonisation of knowledge.
Focusing on contexts such as the ABCSSS islands and the Netherlands, it brings together different perspectives to examine how archives are described, who they serve, and whose voices remain absent. By confronting these gaps directly, this track works toward developing new, shared strategies that do not reproduce existing hierarchies, but instead open space for alternative narratives, forms of access, and community-led approaches to archival care. This track focuses on the following questions:
- Whose knowledge is still being excluded through institutional frameworks?
- What alternative forms of access can challenge or bypass these structures?
- How can communities reclaim agency over their own archival narratives?
- And what would it take to build archival systems that are no longer built to serve the colonial narrative?
This project was made possible thanks to:
RCE