30.06.2025, 10:00—12:00
‘Photography and Care as Acts of Resistance’ - Cristina Cusani & Dafne Salis
‘The talk explores the aesthetics of reparative practices in photography and artistic creation. It highlights the reparative value of curating archival collections, both within institutional settings and in artists’ works, with a focus on how such acts can challenge and subvert dominant narratives.The invited panelists are Jana Heackel, lecturer at the Kask & Conservatorium School of Arts Gent and associate senior researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography Art and Visual Culture, the moss curatorial collective, in the person of Lucie Menard, head of education programmes at Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains and Hermione Wiltshire artist and professor at the Royal College of Art. The artists Cristina Cusani and Dafne Salis will moderate the discussion and will present their work. In the afternoon, the Archival Sensation Cluster from the Kask & Conservatorium School of Arts Gent and the Care Research Group from the Royal College of Art, are invited to present their latest works and discuss together themes of repair and care. One of the group will focus on reparative and mending practices, enquiring how knowledge is handled; the other will engage with the potential of a critical, collective engagement with archives as “reparative practices” building on the idea of “critical fabulations”.
Read more about the speakers below.
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Jana Johanna Haeckel is an art historian, curator, and lecturer based in Brussels. Her written and curatorial work examines image and body politics in contemporary art, focusing on new ethics of photography in the age of the digital and art practices that subvert historical and colonial narratives through archival research. Jana holds a PhD in art history and works as independent curator. She currently lectures at the Photography and Curatorial Studies Department at KASK & Conservatorium where she also supervises the research cluster Archival Sensations.
Prior to this, she has served as director of Photoforum Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, and has worked as curator and project manager for the Goethe-Institut Brussels, as guest-curator for Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and as curator at Acud Gallery Berlin. She was a lecturer at University of Applied Science and Art Dortmund, UC Louvain and LUCA School of Arts Brussels and has guest lectured at various international universities and art schools, such as HFBK Hamburg, CEPV Switzerland, UDK Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. Her essays and reviews have been published in The British Journal of Photography, Trigger, EIKON, Monopol, Mousse Magazine and elsewhere. https://www.janahaeckel.com/ab…
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Hermione Wiltshire is an Artist and Senior Tutor in the Photography Programme at the Royal College Art, London. She has exhibited and lectured widely, and her work is held in many public and private collections including The Arts Council, The Walker Collection, IMMA, Weltkunst, MAG collection and the Birth Rites Collection. Her practice is an expanded photographic one that places sexuality and gender at the very centre of politics of representation. Feminist theory and the physical status of the photographic image are constant themes throughout her practice and research. Her current research fields include the maternal, childbirth, and the poetics of repair and care. She recently exhibited at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London in ‘Matrescence’ curated by Catherine McCormack and in ‘Birth’ at TJBoulting, also in London. Her work is included in Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood curated by Hettie Judah, a Haywood Touring exhibition currently installed at Dundee Contemporary Arts and Dreamtime Ireland at Visual Carlow, Republic of Ireland. She hosted and convened three international conferences at the RCA called Gender Generation:The Creative Process in Art & Design and Oxytocin in collaboration with Procreate at both the RCA and KCL and Sexuality and Power from Analogue to Digital with Dr Annouchka Bayley. Their co-written chapter, In/visible Technoscience: Feminist New Materialisms for (Post) Pandemic Digital Pedagogies appears in Diffracting New Materialisms: Emerging Methods in Artistic Research and Higher Education published by Palgravein2023. Sheisco-founderoftheHealthandCareResearchClusterintheSchool of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, created and delivers a unit called The Tender Gaze and leads the Material Looking MA Practice Group.https://hermionewiltshire.com
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moss curatorial collective (Lotte Egtberts, Elisa Maupas, Lucie Ménard and Anna Stoppa) is a transborder curatorial collective founded in 2020 by Lotte Egtberts, Elisa Maupas, Lucie Ménard and Anna Stoppa. Strengthened by the complementarity of their profiles (artist, scientist, mediator, and art historian) and their various professional experiences (galleries, institutions and artist-run spaces in France, Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands), they work organically prioritizing horizontal collaboration with artists, embracing vulnerability and co- dependence as assets in a competitive professional context. In 2022, the collective received a research grant from the Institute of
Photography in Lille for the project Deal with it — Aesthetics of repair. moss collective will be
represented by Lucie Ménard, Head of Educational and Cultural Programmes at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing (France) and independent curator. https://curatedbymoss.com
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Lucie Ménard is a 2019 alumna of the international post-graduate program Curatorial Studies at KASK School of Arts (Ghent). Since 2012, she has worked as the head of education programmes at Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing), a position she occupies in parallel to her practice as an independent curator. Exploring the relationships between mediation and curatorial practices, she’s particularly interested in finding ways to make the artist’s process visible. Her research is also inclined towards notions of temporalities and attention(s)/distraction.
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Cristina Cusani (Naples, 1984) is an Italian visual artist and photographer. She graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome with a degree in communication studies and she completed her studies in Fine Art Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. In 2012, she attended the Laboratorio Irregolare, a two-year masterclass with Antonio Biasiucci, an enriching experience that emphasized the importance of dialogue and helped her develop a dedicated working method.
Her research explores themes of identity, memory, family, and personal experience, aiming to reach a collective dimension. She works with residues, traces and memory, often incorporating words into her projects. In her recent works, she envisions photography as a tool that not only documents memory but also transforms it — reimagining archive photographs into images where fiction and reality intersect, meanings shift, and the past and present merge into one.
Her practice extends beyond traditional photography; she experiments with the medium in all its potential, including designing site-specific works and installations. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries, festivals, museums, and fairs both in Italy and internationally. She has been awarded for prestigious prizes such as Strategia Fotografia 2024 and some of her works are part of contemporary art collections. Since 2018, she has been engaged in multidisciplinary curatorial projects with Chiara Arturo, under the name Progetto Vicinanze, which is rooted in sharing as an artistic practice and explores the Mediterranean as a space of crossing. From 2022, she has been a member of the artistic collective The Glorious Mothers, which addresses, through activism and research, the protection of artist mothers within the art world. She lives and works in Naples, Italy. -
Dafne Salis is an Italian artist and photographer. After graduating in 2012 with a degree in photography from the London College of Communication, Salis has since worked in the field of visual arts, both as an artist and as a professional. She founded Skin & Blister Collective
in 2014 and was part of the duo Salis / Gut from 2013 to 2017. Salis obtained her Master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in 2018 and she is currently pursuing a PhD in the same institution. Her work has been exhibited both in Italy and abroad in places such as the MACRO or the Crypt of the Venerable English College in Rome, The Dream Factory gallery in Milan, Spilt Milk gallery, Edinburgh, Southwark park gallery, the Ugly Duck and Photofusion in London. Her research on art and care has been published by Trigger, Fotomuseum Antwerp, and by MA BiBLIOTEQUE. In 2020 she founded, with seven Italian artists, the artistic collective The Glorious Mothers, which questions the representation of motherhood. The group carries out political activism in support of reconciling motherhood and work in the art world. She currently lives and works in Rome. https://www.dafnesalis.com
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Archival Sensations is a research cluster that unites artists, designers, researchers and students who are involved in imaginative memory practices and forms of preservation as an artistic research method. The cluster deals with the mediation of memory — both personal and collective — to reflect on past, present and future notions of history and how these can be translated to different forms and usages. https://schoolofartsgent.be/en…
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The Care Research Group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) comprised staff and postgraduate researchers within the School of Arts and Humanities at the RCA. ‘The group regularly came together to reflect on: how to care for the human body in the technical-patriarchal societies; the politically-transformative potential of prioritising care (rooted in empathy, solidarity, kinship) over capitalist gain; the activation of creative research practices as means of caring/transforming;’ artistic practice in relation to mending and repairing. The Group was conceived in 2020 and initially led by professor Gemma Blackshaw, in the 2023/24 academic year professor Hermione Wiltshire took the lead. https://researchonline.rca.ac.…
The event is part of the projects Lost in Motherhood by Cristina Cusani and Techniques and Methodologies for Caring and Ethical Photography by Dafne Salis, both supported by
Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
EN
Cristina Cusani and Dafne Salis are two visual artists and photographers based in Italy.
Cristina’s interest span from intimate memories to domestic life, while Dafne’s research focuses on photography and power dynamics.
Together, they propose the workshop Stitching Memories where each participant is asked to bring a family photograph which recalls an event they would like to change. As an act of mending, attendants intervene on their photograph through embroidery by adding elements, concealing parts or changing the layout of what is portrayed, as to metaphorically repair their past. The intervention will aim at making visible the power’s structures operating in intimate and close realities, such as families. These donated photographs become a collective work of art.
NL
Cristina Cusani en Dafne Salis zijn twee visuele kunstenaars en fotografen gevestigd in Italië.
Cristina’s interesses variëren van intieme herinneringen tot het gezinsleven, terwijl Dafne’ onderzoek zich richt op fotografie en machtsdynamiek.
Samen stellen ze de workshop Stitching Memories voor, waarbij elke deelnemer wordt gevraagd een familiefoto mee te nemen die hen herinnert aan een gebeurtenis die ze zouden willen veranderen. Als een daad van herstel grijpen de deelnemers in op hun foto door middel van borduurwerk, waarbij ze elementen toevoegen, delen verbergen of de lay-out van wat wordt afgebeeld veranderen, om hun verleden metaforisch te herstellen. De interventie zal gericht zijn op het zichtbaar maken van de machtsstructuren die opereren in intieme en nauwe realiteiten, zoals gezinnen. Deze gedoneerde foto’s worden een collectief kunstwerk.