CCA, Lagos Archives and IFRA-Nigeria invite applications from artists, curators, and researchers working across disciplines and media for a two-day workshop under the FEF Alternative Heritage Project.
Archives in Practice explores the archive not as a static repository, but as a site of inquiry and production. Archives generate new knowledge, new questions and new artistic production.
This workshop brings together eight Lagos-based participants for a focused engagement with the CCA, Lagos archive. Rather than offering a survey of the collection, it creates space for active, critical engagement.
Participants will be introduced to the CCA archive and its holdings, including exhibition files, correspondence, photographs, programme records, administrative documents and the accumulated traces of over two decades of curatorial life in Lagos. The aim is not completeness, but depth: to surface the archive’s textures, contradictions, and gaps, and to support participants in developing their own lines of inquiry.
The workshop will include structured critical thinking exercises drawn directly from the archive. These exercises are designed to slow participants down, to move them away from the impulse to illustrate or aestheticise, and toward something more searching: an encounter with how institutions construct their own narratives, what they choose to foreground and what they allow to recede.
Each participant will develop a response piece engaging the curatorial and archival process itself. This is not an open-ended brief, but an invitation to respond to something specific encountered during the workshop – a document, a decision, a gap, an absence or a pattern.
Responses may take any form appropriate to the participant’s practice. Where necessary, a written response is also welcome. What matters is a grounded, critical engagement with the archive and its implications for preservation, memory and institutional practice.
Practical Information
Date: 22 – 23 May 2026
Format: In-person, Lagos
Application Deadline: 11 May 2026
Apply: Submit your application here
