Project title
Archival Encounters: Colonial Archives, Curation and Restitutive Practices
Research question
How do artistic practices engage with colonial archives and narratives to repair colonial legacies?
Project description
As people around the world reexamine colonial and imperial histories, the debate over returning artifacts and documents taken during colonial times has become more important. Also looking at archives taken by European colonizers, needs more attention. This project focuses on the Danish colonial archives from the former Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) to explore how these archives can help us understand the past and create new stories for the future.
Combining visual culture, archival studies, artistic research, and curatorial work, Daniela Agostinho looks at how art can help “repair” the damage of colonialism. Working with artists La Vaughn Belle, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Dorothy Amenuke, and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, her book project shows how art can provide new ways to view history and develop new forms of archives that enrich our understanding of the past and help us reimagine it.
Selected publications
Daniela Agostinho (2024), “Curating Other-Archives: Witnessing, Care and Image Afterlives”, Rachel Somers Miles, Alana Osbourne, Elena Tzialli and Ester Captain, (Eds.). Inward Outward. Witnessing/Care & The Archive, Sound and Vision Institute, Hilversum, the Netherlands.
Daniela Agostinho (2019), “Archival Encounters: Rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives”, Archival Science 19. 141–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09312-0
Daniela Agostinho, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Karen Louisa Grova Søilen (2019), “Archives that Matter. Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories”, Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab Og Kulturformidling, 8(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.7146/ntik.v7i2.118472