Friday 18 October, from 16:00 | Free entrance

We’re delighted to invite you to the first public talk of Lara Dautun’s residency at Page Not Found. Lara invited Tabea Nixdorff and Setareh Noorani to discuss their recent publication, Amplifying, within the series Archival Textures.

The book Amplifying, co-edited by Tabea and Setareh, brings together written manifestations that trace the beginnings of Black feminism in the Netherlands. Amplifying means giving credit to, mentioning, over and over, and supporting the circulation of sources and authors that are formative for our thinking and practices. It also means putting in the “extra effort” to seek out voices that are not immediately within reach as their recognition has been compromised by structural forces of oppression. In the early 1980s, the political term “black” (“zwart” in Dutch) was introduced in the Netherlands to build alliances between women from different diasporic communities, who were faced with racism in their everyday lives.

The publication series Archival Textures was founded in 2023 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, by Tabea Nixdorff, and was funded by a year long grant by Stimuleringsfonds. Together with a network of researchers, artists, designers, translators, poets, archivists and activists (most of whom have hyphenated roles and practices)—building on new and ongoing collaborations—the first season of books has been created and is being published this summer, 2024. In that sense, Archival Textures operates as an artist-initiated project, an intergenerational network, and a publisher.

✻ Lara Dautun, a recent graphic design graduate from KABK, thrives on bricolage, blending texts, images, code, and ideas. She loves collaborating to explore how alternative design, publishing, and archiving practices can drive emancipatory change. Her recent work focuses on feminist and lesbian publishing, and she champions subjectivity, open-source tools, and intersectional feminism.

✻ Tabea Nixdorff is an artist, typographer and researcher. Her artistic practice involves (self)publishing, writing, sound and language based performances, collaborative learning and social gatherings. Often working with/in archives, or libraries, Tabea’s works delve into micro-histories while touching upon broader themes such as omissions and distortions in historical narratives, embodied knowledges, queer belonging and a feminist poetics of error.

Tabea studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US; and Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem, the Netherlands. In 2019, her essay Fehler lesen. Korrektur als Textproduktion [“Reading Errata. Correction as Textual Production”] was published by Spector Books Leipzig. Her artist’s books are held in several public collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US; the Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, US; the Newberry Library, Chicago, US; and at the Weserburg Centre for Artists’ Publications, Bremen, Germany. Tabea has done performative readings, often collaboratively, in various places, such as the GfzK – Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, diffrakt – centre for theoretical periphery, Berlin, and Perdu, Amsterdam. From 2021 to 2023, her installation Feminist Design Strategies was on view at the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, for which she conducted extensive research in queer and feminist Dutch archives and organized community-building gatherings. In 2023, Tabea founded the publication series Archival Textures.

✻ Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut, and an independent artist.

Setareh Noorani’s current (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, NL) focuses on the paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non-institutional and collective representations in contemporary architecture, its heritage and future scenarios. She leads the projects Collecting Otherwise and Modernisms Along the Indian Ocean, co-initiated the Open Call Hidden Histories (with Creative Industries Fund NL), co-curated the exhibition Designing the Netherlands (2023), co-led the project and exhibited space Feminist Design Strategies (2021 – 2023), and has been part of Appropriation as Collective Resistance. Noorani co-edited the book ‘Women in Architecture’ (nai010, 2023), and has been published in Footprint Journal, and Radical Housing Journal, amongst others. Setareh Noorani received the Museum Talent Prize 2021, awarded by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Science and the Mondriaan Fund. Currently, she is involved in the selection committee of the yearly Nieuwe Instituut Call for Fellows, with 2023’s co-curated theme titled Tool Shed. Recently, Noorani was part of the curatorial team of the London Design Biënnale 2023, and involved in the selection committee of the 2022 Tilting Axis Fellowship. Noorani holds a master’s degree (MSc) in Architecture (TU Delft, cum laude).

In her artistic pursuits, Noorani researches processes of public resistance and (collective) navigations of diasporic trauma. This is expressed in the disruption and dislocation of archives, and the uncovering of counter-archives, through spatial research and (self-)publishing, for example in her residencies at Voorheen De Gemeente (2022 – ), Biënnale Gelderland (2022), DSGN-IN at The Black Archives (2021-2022), SHELTER IN PLACE/SHELTER IN SOLIDARITY (2021) at Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn (together with graphic designer Matt Plezier, as SMET, supported by the Creative Industries Fund Netherlands).

Lara’s residency is made possible thanks to the Makersregeling by the Gemeente Den Haag.

Image: Cover of Amplifying, published by Archival Textures

SPREADING THE WORD — with Lara Dautun and Rietlanden Women’s Office

Saturday 19 October, from 16:00 | Free entrance

We’re excited to invite you to a public talk as part of Lara Dautun’s residency project, “The Feminist Amateur Library”. The session blends reading, discussion, and collective knowledge, creating room for re-imagining and negotiating dynamic herstories.

Come be part of the conversation!

Lara Dautun, a recent graphic design graduate from KABK, thrives on bricolage, blending texts, images, code, and ideas. She loves collaborating to explore how alternative design, publishing, and archiving practices can drive emancipatory change. Her recent work focuses on feminist and lesbian publishing, and she champions subjectivity, open-source tools, and intersectional feminism.

Graphic designers Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde, known as Rietlanden Women’s Office, investigate collaborative graphic design. Their printed publication series MsHeresies focuses on research into collaborative graphic design practices, circling around the ornament not just as a decorative element, but as a manifestation of specific social relations.

Lara’s residency is made possible thanks to the Makersregeling by the Gemeente Den Haag.

Image: impression of The Feminist Amateur Library workshop at Page Not Found by Lara Dautun © Steven Maybury

Thursday 24 October 2024, from 18:00 | Free entrance

We are happy to invite you to the launch of “Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None”, an exploration into the fascinating world of the mandragora plant.

The mandragora plant is one of the best-recorded gynaecological herbal substances. It is also the only plant in the European context historically depicted as a half-human-half-plant-creature. The mandragora was, is and continues to be haunted by stories. Could its many stories hold a key for luring our minds off paths that have been sufficiently trodden down? What if the mandragora holds the potential for new orders and world-making; for a cosmopoeisis of mandragoras?

“Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None” explores the medicinal and magical mandragora plant, and the many stories that grew around it across history. Artist Leonie Brandner’s writing moves from the beginning of recorded storytelling to ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, tracing the lines the mandragora has left behind in medicinal books, folklore and eventually the impact the plant had in the hunt on so-called witches in the Middle Ages. Gently weaving her perception and encounters with the plant through her rigorous historical research, Leonie Brandner creates a kaleidoscopical image of human-plant-imaginations across time.

“Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None” (2024) is published by Onomatopee.

Image: pages of “Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None” courtesy of Leonie Brandner and Onomatopee