How do family photographs carry the weight of colonial history and how can they help us reimagine it? This hybrid symposium brings together researchers, artists, and storytellers to explore colonial visual legacies, this time within the context of family. Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication invites you to visit “Visual Legacies – Family and Photographic Archives” on Wednesday 27 May, 15:00–17:00, at Erasmus Education Lab or join online.
- Date
- Wednesday 27 May 2026, 15:00 - 17:00
- Type
- Symposium
- Spoken Language
- English
- Space
- Education Lab
- Building
- Polak Building
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
- Location
And online
Building on earlier sessions of Visual Legacies that centre colonial photographic archives and their contemporary afterlives, this event examines the family as a site through which colonial visual legacies can be revisited and reworked. Focussing on scholarly research and artistic practices, we explore how family narratives, personal archives, and intimate details are mobilised to engage with broader postcolonial and diasporic histories. We ask how researchers and artists engage with their familial photographic archives, and how these private images are transformed when they become part of institutional or scholarly frameworks. What are the ethical, affective, and political questions that may arise? How do practices of writing, collecting, archiving, or exhibiting reframe intimacy, care, ownership and responsibility? By foregrounding visual practices that intersect private and public memories, the event explores how working with and through one’s family attends to inheritance, loss, and nostalgia, as well as creates space for re-imagining the hegemonic patterns of colonial photography.
The symposium will feature an introduction by Charlotte Bruns, followed by talks by Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues (Leiden University) who will introduce the archival project, "Keeping/Discarding", which uses digital storytelling and visualisation to rethink some of the premises of archives. Two speakers from this project will reflect on their interventions in relation to the theme of ‘Visual Legacies – Family and photographic archives’. Jonathan Tjien Fooh (VU Amsterdam) and Sandra Khor Manickam (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University) will consider their use of photography in reshaping family histories and the questions such interventions raise. Lastly, the symposium will welcome Tenee Attoh, photographer and founder of Mixedracefaces to present a selection of photographs and stories from the visual storytelling platform and cultural organization focusing on themes such as identity, belonging, and labels. After the presentations, we invite the audience to participate in the Q&A and podium discussion, led by Lise Zurné.
Programme
- Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues: Keeping/Discarding Exhibition in the Making: Stories, Records, and the Unarchivable
- Jonathan Tjien Fooh: Simbah-Simbah, Ngendi? Retracing Family Histories in the Aftermath of Colonial Violence
- Sandra Khor Manickam: Missing and reimagining history through photographs
- Tenee Attoh: Becoming Visible. @mixedracefaces and History in the Making
- Podium Discussion with Q&A
Short biographies
Tenee Attoh is a Ghanaian-Dutch photographer, visual storyteller, and founder of @mixedracefaces, based in the Netherlands. She holds a BA (Hons) in Film & Video from the University of the Arts London (formally London College of Printing), specialising in film direction and documentary. Drawing on a life across Ghana, the Netherlands, and the UK, Tenee uses photography and film to explore identity and lived experience — most notably through her documentary Caste in Half and short film Never Out of Africa. She collaborates with organisations and academics worldwide to support mixed-race communities, creating spaces where people of mixed heritage can feel seen, affirmed, and proud of who they are.
Jonathan Tjien Fooh is a Surinamese scholar and poet based in the Netherlands. His work explores coloniality and anti-colonial movements across the Caribbean and Indonesian Archipelago, combining ethnography, critical archival studies, decolonial, and arts-based methods. As part of Re/Presenting Europe, he researches embodied healing practices linked to coloniality and Javanese Indentured Labour and teaches at the Athena Institute (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues is a university lecturer at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society researching identity negotiations in arts and cultural practices in the globalized Portuguese-speaking world.
Sandra Khor Manickam is a Malaysian scholar of colonial Southeast Asia, the history of race, medicine and photography. She is a university lecturer in the history department at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is currently also part of the ERC project, “COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia” at the Institute of History, Leiden University.
Lise Zurné is a visual anthropologist working at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in Rotterdam. Her work intersects between memory and heritage, gender, ethnography, violence, and embodiment, focussing mostly on Europe and Indonesia.
Charlotte Bruns is a visual sociologist working as postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Media and Communication Department at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She works on visual communication and technologies, e.g. the history of communicating science with a focus on photographic practices.
