Funded by the Decolonial Futures Seed Grant and hosted at the Eye Filmmuseum, the project includes a series of five sessions, each engaging with a specific aspect of decolonial intervention in film heritage. Session topics include refusal vs. participation, restitution, memory activism, and non-human archiving. Featured speakers – such as Jeftha Pattikawa, Sidar Bayram, Mohanad Yaqubi, Nikolaus Perneczky, and Susan Schuppli – bring insights into community archiving, video activism, militant cinema, restitution practices, and ecocentric archiving. 

The project uses a combination of lectures, workshops, and a reading group to engage participants in critical discussions about the ethical and political aspects of archiving. Each session offers a collaborative space for critically analyzing and moving beyond colonial paradigms in film archives. pen to students, scholars, artists, curators, archivists, and other practitioners, the sessions explore decolonial strategies for recovering, restituting, and preserving audiovisual heritage. 

Jamil Fiorino-Habib (he/they) is a researcher and lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in the politics of aesthetics, temporality, and resistance. Jamil’s current research projects elaborate on their interests in political subjectivity, identity, and archival studies, with a specific focus on queer theory and critical theory, exploring how the medium-specific affordances of various media technologies and platforms affect our social relations, political subjectivities, and horizons of possibility. Jamil’s work explores the intersections of pop culture and sub-culture, the hegemonic and the subversive, and the impacts of Western cultural imperialism in a globalized media landscape. In tandem with their academic research, Jamil also works with a variety of grassroots collectives within the Netherlands, where they help mobilize and organize political work centered around radical system change. 

Giovanna Fossati is a Professor of Media Heritage, Technology, and Culture at Utrecht University. Before her appointment at Utrecht, she served as Chief Curator (from 2009) and Deputy Director of Collection & Knowledge Sharing (from 2023) at Eye Filmmuseum. Additionally, she was a Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam (from 2013), where she taught in the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image program since its inception in 2003. She remains affiliated with the UvA as a Guest Researcher. Her research focuses on film history, film restoration and digitization, and the history and theory of audiovisual archival practice, with a recent emphasis on developing a more global and sustainable approach to audiovisual heritage. 

Asli Özgen is Assistant Professor Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersections of film historiography, critical archival studies, and memory activism. Rooted in intersectional feminist and decolonial praxis, her current research focuses on the audiovisual memory of contested pasts, as well as archival and activist practices concerning diasporic film heritages. Within this frame, Asli is currently working on a book about the audiovisual heritage of migration from Turkey to the Netherlands, with a particular emphasis on the political uses of film in (international and transnational) solidarity networks, as well as the archival status of this material. In addition to her academic work, Asli is an internationally accredited film critic who regularly contributes to film festivals. She is also affiliated with a cultural NGO in Turkey that focuses on the politics of cinema and freedom of expression.