In this public gathering, Collecting Otherwise opens up its second iteration, Post/De/Colonial, setting the stage for dialogues and perspectives that centre decolonisation within (heritage) institutions and archives as movements of redress and restitution. During this gathering, we explicitly move on from the gesture of asking questions. What is the role of institutions today in rebuilding heritage? How do we think about — and most importantly, enact — redress?

Through selected case studies, the evening will focus on practices and labour from a colonial “abroad”. It will give voice to how communities collect and have collected for themselves. We reflect on the future potentials of decolonial agency within the diasporic condition, narrating self empowerment by reclaiming (im)material heritage and design languages surrounding this heritage.

Could redress mean recirculating knowledge back to communities, making space for other archive practices, and thinking about how they can cross over to institutional practices and archives? How do we continue decentred and communal learning that allows for new visions and reclamation?

To help think along these lines, this evening will feature contributions from two Working Group members. Writer and artist Hannah Dawn Henderson explores through a written piece, Uttering Visibility, the semantics, contextualisation, and the allowance for doubt, the specific language, meta-data and archival apparatus surrounding colonial subjects in the Eibink archive. She asks: How do we make visible and communicate doubt, conflicts of ethics, the absence of neutrality, question marks that only bear yet further question marks?

Researcher and illustrator Yasmin Tri Aryani maps out the practices of everyday life surrounding the colonial buildings in Bandung, Indonesia, more specifically the histories surrounding De Driekleur, designed by Albert Aalbers in 1938 and recently renovated by local Indonesian architects. Would it be possible to find bridging interventions between the “inaccessible” modern-colonial houses/villas/buildings and traditional/vernacular settlements?

Joining the discussion and as a respondant for the evening, we welcome writer Sumaya Kassim.

“Collecting Otherwise thus passes through habilitating (ex)colonial peripheries and bodies to people collecting for themselves, according to their own interests and needs. This needs to happen in a situated and re-situated way.” — TBD-THC Cell (To Be Determined-Trojan Horse Cell)