Activating the Archive: A Practice of Love and Loss
Programme for artist-researchers of the Academy
Curated by Inge Henneman, Nico Dockx and the Archivolt research group
Tuesday 21 – Wednesday 22 October 2025, 10:00 – 17:00
This two-day continuous programme explores how artistic research and archival practices can respond to the urgencies of our time; personal, societal and planetary loss, displacement, and the search for belonging.
It is an invitation to join an open, performative process of inquiry with a dedicated group of people in an intimate and active setting. It is an experiment in collective research. We come together to test other ways of seeing, listening, and learning, and to question art’s potential for resilience and social change.
Rather than inviting experts to overthink their opinions, each participant brings their unique perspective and presence, shifting roles from makers to thinkers, from protagonists to audience and back again. We’ll start from what we share: our experience of the world as it is in this vulnerable moment of transition.
Each day is guided by a special guest who facilitates dialogue, translates and maps different embodied positions without losing sight of the interconnected whole, questions the blind spots of the conversation, and embraces not knowing and silence.
On Love and Loss, Displacement and Belonging
What if we approach the sense of loss that seems more acute in these times of living and dying in a damaged world, through the lens of artistic research and archival practices?
Love and Loss are deeply human experiences that are part of everyone’s life. Loss touches us during times of illness, separation, the end of life. On a larger scale, we seem to be confronted with the end of the world as we know it: the disappearance of cultural traditions, the loss of life and biodiversity at the edge of extinction, the loss of truth and justice and perhaps democracy itself.
What rituals can we create for grief and remembrance? How do the dead — people, cultural traditions, and ecosystems — activate the living? How can we get lost, navigate continuous change, resist and disobey failing politics, remember and begin again? Have we loved life enough? Can we relate to our environment without violent exploitation? How is an aesthetics of loss enacted in terms of materials and image-making in a studio practice? What does it mean to experience art as an expression of overarching love?
This gathering is a call to activate the archive - not as a static repository preserving the past, but as a living, relational and creative practice — a way to connect the past, present, and future. What happens when we activate archives as spaces of imagination, resistance, and radical transformation?
From a post-conflict and postcolonial global perspective, loss also speaks of displacement — the reality of leaving home, of migration, and the search for belonging. While social disruption and displacement often bring trauma, it can also open up new ways of being, of unfixing identity and territoriality. What does it mean to find a refuge, a place of your own, and can you take home along? Can this longing for connection become a force for change? And how can it help us reimagine our relationships with others — human and more-than-human — based on shared vulnerability, care, and interdependence? Displacement has a long-standing aesthetic tradition as well.
Throughout two days, participants will engage in conversations, workshops, screenings, and shared practices.
About the guests
Peter Aers is a philosopher and performance artist from Ghent. He studied philosophy in Ghent and Geneva and theatre in Brussels. His artistic practice lies at the border of performance, participation and reflection. Dialogue with people and communities is central to this. Peter Aers has worked with the homeless, the terminally ill, prisoners and school children, among others. He is an artistic thinker and former member of the collective Building Conversation
Winny Ang works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Antwerp. She also holds an MSc in Transcultural Psychiatry (Mc Gill University, Canada). Besides her clinical work with a (culturally) diverse clientele, Winny Ang also works at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Antwerp as a Communication Assistant and lecturer Arts & Society, diversity. She gives experiential trainings on diversity sensitive work in different settings (health care, cultural sector, education, ...).
(image: work by Karl Joonas Alamaa)
>> This programme is part of the research festival ARTICULATE 2025