The Archive is Alive

What does it mean for an archive to be alive? Not a repository of the past, sealed and static — but a system that breathes, transforms, and produces new knowledge through the people, communities, and technologies that engage with it?

This symposium takes that question as its starting point. Hosted at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, it brings together artists, researchers, and cultural organizations involved in two European initiatives: S+T+ARTS Afropean Intelligence and S+T+ARTS Buen TEK — projects that have, over the past 18 months, fostered collaboration between Africa, South America, and Europe.

Both projects are rooted in a conviction that innovation does not begin with technology alone. Afropean Intelligence asks what artificial intelligence looks like when developed from and for African communities. Buen TEK explores how artistic and technological practices in South America can engage with ecological knowledge, territorial practices, and indigenous worldviews. Together, they demonstrate that archives of local knowledge — when activated through art, technology, and collective practice — become tools for social justice, ecological resilience, and more inclusive forms of innovation.

The program brings these practices into dialogue through presentations by participating artists and researchers, followed by roundtable discussions with cultural actors from Africa and Europe, alongside policymakers, technologists, and scholars. These conversations will ask what can be learned from these collaborations, what challenges they have surfaced, and how they might point toward more sustainable and context-sensitive forms of knowledge-making.