AFTERIMAGE, A Gathering on Memory, Archives and the Reparative

AFTERIMAGE
A Gathering on Memory, Archives and the Reparative

afterimage | ˈaftərˌimij |
noun
an impression of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased.

AFTERIMAGE was a two-day public gathering on memory, archives, and gestures of repair, organized by Túlio Rosa and Paoletta Holst at WIELS in Brussels. It explored how we might look differently at what is visible in the archive: what forms of attention, sensitivity, and collective reading can open new perspectives?

Through work sessions, roundtable talks, and film screenings, artists, researchers, and audiences worked together around various archival practices. By situating these practices side by side, we hope to test how different approaches to memory and the archive can resonate with one another, and how gestures of repair might take shape through collective thinking and doing.

AFTERIMAGE was not a conclusion but a moment of gathering: a space to collectively reflect on what archives do—and what we can do with them.

With contributions by Angga Cipta, Emma Ydiers, Simon Asencio, Otty Widasari, Setareh Noorani, and film curations by Forum Lenteng and Sandra Benites.

DAY I — 19 DECEMBER 2025

13h30 WELCOME AT WIELS

14h – 15h30 WORK SESSION I: TRACING THE ARCHIVE
By Angga Cipta and Paoletta Holst
This work session focussed on archival tracing and copy techniques. In the past, architects have employed a range of techniques—such as tracing paper, blueprints, and photography—to replicate their designs for distribution and the sharing of their ideas. In this workshop, however, we will use the act of tracing and copying as a critique to move beyond mere replication and ask how such techniques played a role in shaping colonial domestic cultures and the facilitation and spread of colonial systems of extraction, hierarchy, and control within architecture and spatial practices. 

16h – 17h INTRODUCTION: AFTERIMAGE
By Paoletta Holst and Túlio Rosa

Tracing the questions and concerns that arose during the work sessions they had been organizing at WIELS, Paoletta and Túlio will introduce the gathering by reflecting on how their research trajectories intersect around archival engagement, composition, and reparative gestures. Revisiting the shared processes and conversations developed in these sessions, they will outline the path toward this public moment and open the ground for the discussions to come.

17h – 18h30 ROUNDTABLE TALK
With Otty Widasari, Setareh Noorani and Paoletta Holst and Túlio Rosa

Departing from the urgencies and challenges involved in collecting or activating archival materials in different parts of the world—such as Indonesia and the Netherlands—the conversation reflects on methodologies for collective interpretation and creation within both institutional and localized archival practices. Recognizing that discussions on archives and colonial histories are shaped by their specific contexts, and that motivations for engaging with the past stem from distinct present-day needs, it considers how shifting attention from institutional claims to more situated forms of memory can foster multiple perspectives and enable dialogue across these differing discussions.

18h30 BREAK AND MOVE TO GC TEN WEYNGAERT

19h WELCOME AT GC TEN WEYNGAERT
Gemeenschapscentrum Ten Weyngaert, Rue des Alliés 54, 1190 Forest

19h30 – 21h30 SCREENINGS AKUMASSA
Curation by Forum Lenteng

22h END

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DAY II — 20 DECEMBER 2025

13h30 WELCOME AT WIELS

14h – 15h30 WORK SESSION II: ENGAGING LESBIAN INFORMATION ACTISTS PASTS
By Emma Ydiers

This work session examines scattered archival traces of lesbian information activism in Belgium around 1985. Magazines produced or collected within these activist circles are taken out of institutional archives and re-encountered in a new time and space, where different interpretive codes apply. By repeatedly exploring these materials in relation to one another, participants experiment with ways of historicizing, connecting, and narrating lesbian pasts from the present. The work session continues a tradition in which reading, researching, writing, assembling, communicating, and archiving functioned as tactics for creating counterpublics. Materials include extracts from Artemys, Les Lesbianaires, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Vrouwenwoorden/De Paarse Paperpot/De Paperpot.

16h – 17h INTERVENTION/READING: WHAT IF?
By Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa

What if? emerges from an exchange between Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa around the script as a research device and a framework for collective authorship. Bringing together distinct yet resonant practices, they use scripting to mobilize complex materials, activate multiple voices, and reframe archival or historical questions. The presentation takes the form of a public scripted reading, offering the audience an entry into their ongoing dialogue and treating the script not as a finished work but as a provisional space for study, composition, and collective thinking.

17h – 18h30 ROUNDTABLE TALK
With Emma Ydiers, Simon Asencio and Túlio Rosa and Paoletta Holst

Reflecting on approaches to the archive that unfold through reading, staging, rewriting, and collective composition, the conversation considers how positionality and the role of the reader shape the ways we approach and reframe archival materials. Foregrounding the situated nature of inquiry, it examines how artistic practices engage archives through methods that embrace relationality and uncertainty, and how proximity, friction, and fabulation open possibilities for research, allowing us to consider how composition itself may begin to operate as a reparative gesture.

18h30 Break and move to GC Ten Weyngaert

19h Welcome @GC Ten Weyngaert
Gemeenschapscentrum Ten Weyngaert, Rue des Alliés 54, 1190 Forest

19h30 – 21h30 SCREENINGS
Curation by Sandra Benites

22h END

AFTERIMAGE:
19 and 20 December 2025

ORGANISED BY:
Paoletta Holst and Túlio Rosa

DOCUMENTATION:
Anna Lugmeier

WITH SUPPORT OF:
WIELS, That Might Be Right, Ghent University and FWO

LOCATIONS:
WIELS and GC Ten Weyngaert

THANKS TO:
Angga Cipta, Emma Ydiers, Simon Asencio, Otty Widasari, Setareh Noorani, Forum Lenteng, Sandra Benites, Maider Garayo Urabayen