What does normative society deem worth remembering and what is left to slowly fade away? How does ideology permeate everyday practices and how do communities hold onto their sense of identity, memory and solidarity?
Red Threads: Following stories beyond the paper confronts the archive as a site of obfuscation and silence of marginal and oppressed subjectivities. The exhibition focuses on the possibility of rewriting archival inconsistencies and the imaginative reconstruction of narratives of the past. Red Threads is dedicated to the active reframing of the archive as collective, pluralist memory. The exhibition aims to trace the movements, struggle and perseverance of communal practices within and beyond the Archive. Red Threads is structured by the ways in which objects point towards communal practices, and how they move within the wider cultural horizon. We focus on revealing gaps in the archives by highlighting three overlooked groups: Surinam, Indonesian and queer communities.
Red Threads examines the Surinamese, Indonesian and queer communities across various media, including text and visual, but also food, textile, and oral history are taken into consideration. Structured in four parts, Red Threads moves from Surinamese culture and the importance of spoken tradition, to Indonesian culture and its emphasis on dance and textile as community practices, and queer movements’ traces in archival sources.The exhibition concludes on a more self-reflective element, acknowledging the personal archive as a reminder that each of us participates in shaping what will be remembered, overlooked or forgotten. Ultimately, the significance of the exhibition lies in its active reframing of the archive as collective memory.
By looking at fragments, silences, and overlooked cases, the exhibition goes beyond officially archived documents into the social, intimate, and communal worlds that are woven into an installation in which visitors physically follow red threads through the space. Rather than claiming to restore what was lost, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how we might remember responsibly and imagine alternative forms of archiving. The exhibition reflects on how acts of remembering connect but also entangle and obscure one another. Through this, visitors are invited to reflect on the ethics of historical recovery.