A global invitation to explore African and Afro-diasporic archives as living, contested, and future-shaping spaces
What does it mean to think with African and Afro-diasporic art archives as living, contested, and future-shaping spaces? This is the provocation at the heart of the Re:assemblages Symposium 2025, which has just launched its call for papers and proposals.
Conceived as part of the broader Re:assemblages 2025–26 programme, this international convening invites scholars, artists, archivists, curators, and cultural practitioners to explore the shifting ecologies of postcolonial archives, particularly those shaped by African and Afro-diasporic histories, practices, and futures.
Provocation: Between Fracture and Formation
The symposium positions the 20th century as a generative, unstable borderland—a formative ecotone where cultural networks fractured and reassembled. In these unsettled spaces, emergent African and diasporic archives began to take shape: experimental, insurgent, and still unfolding.
Within this context, the call for contributions encourages participants to approach archives not as static repositories but as living, porous, and interpretive sites—repositories of memory, resistance, and potential.
Themes and Formats
Proposals are invited across three core themes:
- Ecotones – As conceptual, historical, or spatial thresholds where ideas collide and recombine
- The Living Archive – Considering archives as spaces of ongoing negotiation and activation
- Annotations – Exploring practices of marking, re-framing, and interpreting the archive
The organisers encourage non-traditional formats alongside scholarly papers. These may include:
- Performances
- Readings
- Experimental presentations
- Workshops
- Screenings
- Dialogues or lecture-demonstrations
Contributions that challenge disciplinary boundaries or bring unexpected methodologies to archival engagement are especially welcome.
International Collaboration and Launch Events
The symposium is part of Re:assemblages 2025–26, a multi-year programme developed by the Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.). With a focus on experimentation, access, and archival activation, Re:assemblages brings together partners, practitioners, and collections from across the globe.
The programme launches with a public talk by artist Liz Johnson Artur on August 5, 2025, at Gallery TPW, presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada. Artur will guide audiences through her celebrated Black Balloon Archive, a photographic practice that has captured the lives of Black people worldwide over the past four decades. The event marks the first activation in the series Contemporary Art and Archive Practices (CAAP), a key strand of Re:assemblages.
Rooted in the Picton Archive
Re:assemblages builds upon the Picton Archive, housed at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos. This significant collection—assembled by Emeritus Professor John Picton and Sue Picton—includes rare and influential volumes spanning African and international art, anthropology, archaeology, and more.
The archive serves as a starting point for rethinking African modernisms, decolonial knowledge production, and transnational intellectual histories. It also raises urgent questions about archival care, access, and interpretation in the postcolonial present.
Submit Your Proposal
The organisers invite you to contribute to this vibrant, global conversation.
- Proposals should respond to one or more of the three core themes
- All formats—academic and artistic—are welcome
- Early-career practitioners and underrepresented voices are encouraged to apply
For submission guidelines and deadlines, visit the G.A.S. Foundation.
