POST Nijmegen
ECHO
ECHO | Knowing in Solidarity: Education, Language Activism and Unlikely Archives
Wednesday April 15
19.30 - 21.45
POST – NIJMEGEN / De Plint – NIJMEGEN: Van Oldenbarneveltstraat 63-A
Language: English
Regular Fee: €5 –, includes one beverage
Students: €2,50, includes one beverage
Get your ticket here
What ideologies are hidden in between the lines of education systems? Who draws up these lines of (alphabetic) literacy? And what practices of (re)assembling, translating, transcribing, annotating, and supplementing can subvert these normative lines of inquiry?
The first ECHO of the year takes place in the context of the exhibition States of Violence, which documents and reflects upon the ways in which political, religious and cultural violence is mediated, researched, censored or communicated. During ECHO, we will turn to the field of literacy and engage with the ways in which the field is instrumentalized for practices of state formation and the production of universal knowledge. The three speakers - designer and artist Leroy Berger, educator and curator Clare Butcher, artist, typographer and researcher Tabea Nixdorff - will guide you along hidden curricula, indigenous languages and unlikely archival documents to share how they engage critically with practices of literacy and work actively against the violence of the marginalization of knowledges.
Leroy Berger will share with us his research on the violences embedded within Cyrillization - the conversion of a language outside of the Cyrillic alphabet into the Cyrillic alphabet - and linguistic activist responses to this act. This is formalized in his work and publication native tongues defiant. The work is intimately entangled with his Sakha indigeneity, reflecting his identity as a member of the Sakha people - native to Siberia and practicing deep connectivity to their ancestral lands, cultures and traditions. Tabea Nixdorff will bring part of her publication series Archival Textures and elaborate on critically tending to “the archive”. She does so in search of obscured knowledges of the past that can inform current strategies of solidarity and resistance. And Clare Butcher will expand on her engagement with archival and curricular frameworks through her constantly evolving practice of unlearning and aneducation, inspired by her early education in Zimbabwe, where she grew up.
After the individual contributions, they will engage in a collective conversation led by program co-curator and artist Asha Victoria, offering reflections and concrete tools that can help us engage critically engage with the way we come to know the world..
19.30 Exhibition visit
20.00 Walk collectively to De Plint
20.15 Start ECHO Program with introduction by program co-curator Asha Victoria
20.20 Contributions by Leroy Berger, Tabea Nixdorff and Clare Butcher
21.15 Panel Conversation
21.45 End of program
Leroy Berger (Sakha Republic)
Leroy Berger is a multidisciplinary designer and artist from Sakha Republic, based in Arnhem. His work explores how indigeneity - can exist outside of the local environment and community, what substitutes as home, and how indigenous culture and practices can be present in the time of globalization. Berger works with language, memory, archives, folklore and cultural traditions, trying to construct a space where political becomes personal, and document the ways oppression and discrimination affects day-to-day life, domestic environments, families and communities.
Clare Butcher (ZW)
Grown in Zimbabwe soil, Clare Butcher is from a long line of settlers, pedagogues, and gardeners. In her work (and life), she mostly collaborates around archival, cullinary and curricular frameworks. She is currently head of department at Image & Language, Rietveld Academy; and as a writer and editor Clare has worked on publications including The Rest is Up to Us, Burnaby Art Gallery (2026), edited by Curatorium Editorial Collective: Clare Butcher, Saada El-Akhrass, Myung-Sun Kim, Camille Turner; and We Contain Multitudes: Expanding Spaces and Forms of Mentorship within Art Education and Practices, ArtEZ Press (2023).
Tabea Nixdorff (DE)
Tabea Nixdorff is an artist, typographer and researcher currently based in Arnhem. 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. 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 co-organized community-building gatherings. In 2023, Tabea founded the publication series Archival Textures.