About Inward Outward

The international symposium Inward Outward investigates the status of moving image and sound archives as they intertwine with questions of coloniality, identity and race, and seeks to bring theory and practice into dialogue by drawing together people from different professional and creative backgrounds.

Archives, assumed to be containers of memory, are vested with a particular power to constitute and define who is and who is not included in history -that is his/her/their/our-stories. Inward Outward asks what approaches and interventions exist (or could be imagined) that question archival practices in an effort to “decolonize” the archive, and explores what “decolonizing” the archive—within and beyond the walls of established institutions—could offer for the production of new bodies of knowledge.

There is something specific to sound and moving images as they hold a particular type of textured representation that uniquely captures the visual and aural qualities of who or what is being recorded. Taking a critical archiving approach as its base, Inward Outward explores what is specific to moving image and sound materials, including both materials of the past and those created in the present, and the archival practices used to collect, preserve, and make them accessible.

Initiated between the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, with special support from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen’s Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC/NMvW), the first Inward Outward took place in January of 2020.

A great thank you goes to former members of the Inward Outward team: Esther Captain, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Juliette Huygen.