Symposium: Small Archives Thinking Collectively

Saturday 15 November 2025
12:30–6 pm

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Small archives do not have a specific size but are usually run by one or two people with archiving as one task among several and/or as a part-time position. Small archives vary in scope and quality and usually have very limited financial resources, especially when the art institute does not have a ‘formal’ collection. In this symposium we want to reflect on how we can share resources to enhance our archiving practices, from the point of view of small or medium non-collecting art spaces. It is a moment to gather resources from how we each operate, how we want to develop our archives and how we reach the public. Because, without people using these archives, all they are are storage spaces for boxes.

We will start this program with a keynote lecture to ground us in the theoretical, ethical and political issues related to small archives. Different initiatives, archivists and professionals will be in attendance and will then give insight into their practice. We will finish with a conversation between participants, to share our knowledge and experience so that we can collectively further the accessibility of our archives.

The aims of this symposium are to facilitate connections between archivists of small archives, to think about the politics of the archive, and to solidify ways in which we can help each other in the future.

Language of the event: English

Keynote speaker:

Clémentine Deliss (Curator at Large, KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels; Guest Professor, KANAL-Centre Pompidou at Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels; Global Humanities Professor in History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Clémentine Deliss works across contemporary art, curatorial practice, and publishing. She is Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels where she is preparing her exhibition “Département des Pièges” with collections from twelve museums in Brussels and prototype works by artists scheduled to open in November 2026. She is also KANAL-Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where she teaches the “Metabolic Museum”.

Presentations:

Mariana Lanari and Remco van Bladel (Archival Consciousness)

Archival Consciousness, a collaborative practice initiated by Mariana Lanari and Remco van Bladel, operates as a studio and a research framework for thinking critically about the Web and data literacy. They develop experimental infrastructures that interlink archives and reimagine alternative ways of reading and dissemination. Rooted in Lanari’s doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam, their projects, such as Biblio-graph and the NADD.network, work across institutions and temporalities to render visible the epistemic, technical, and aesthetic dimensions of digital heritage.

Nell Donkers (de Appel)

Since 2002 Nell Donkers has been the custodian of the Archive (library, archive and collection) of de Appel in Amsterdam. The archive represents the memory of de Appel and has become a vital place for meeting and sharing knowledge between researchers, artists and art lovers, wherein Donkers plays a connecting role. In different set-ups, Donkers initiates and organizes presentations and events with, within and about the rich history of de Appel. She digitally safeguarded the data of de Appel, and made it public by reorganizing the digital framework en futureproofing the database.

Evie Evans (Framer Framed)

Evie Evans is a writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She has an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Amsterdam and is currently the Archivist and Bookshop Co-ordinator at Framer Framed.

Isabelle Sully (A Tale of a Tub)

Isabelle Sully practices across art-making, curating, editing and writing. Working to context and with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as a main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span (experimental) writing, sculpture, performance, exhibition-making and publishing. Originally from Melbourne/Naarm, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-curator of Playbill, Amsterdam, and artistic director of A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam.