2026-03-27 | Caterina Pecchioli: 2749 Social Cartography: The Photo Archive of Decolonial Ecology LAB
The Photo Archive as a Living Tool for Decolonial and Social Art Practices
A participatory workshop by Caterina Pecchioli, in collaboration with Alessandra Saviotti.
23 April 2026 | 13:30 - 16:30
Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Rotterdam
Spots are limited. RSVP to info@thami-mnyele.nl
The workshop forms part of an international art project by Italian visual artist Caterina Pecchioli, which investigates photography as a living, participatory archive. The project critically examines human and non-human relationships across different cultures, exploring the interdependence between environmental crisis and collective memory, highlighting the intersections between histories of colonialism and contemporary ecological challenges. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines photography, science, and ecology, it aims to foster a dialogue on environmental transformations, featuring decolonial visions and knowledge, and imagining alternative ecological perspectives.
Participants are invited to contribute photographs and personal narratives that articulate diverse ways of relating to the environment. These contributions will constitute the Photo Archive of Decolonial Ecology, a collaborative and evolving archive developed together with different communities, including Indigenous and diasporic artistic groups across Philadelphia and Rotterdam. The archive will serve as a collective resource informing future artistic outcomes, including an interactive cartographic platform and a textile-based speculative artwork imagining Earth in the year 2749.
The workshop proposes a collective space for co-creation of the archive, historical-critical inquiry, and imaginative speculation. The photo gathering, collective listening, and storytelling aim to open up a discussion and exchange on the interrelation between human histories and climate change.
Contributors are invited to engage in a collaborative process within an ongoing dialogue of collective inquiry. Participants are invited to bring one or more photos related to climate, ecology, and environmental care, focusing on personal, collective and contextual perspectives.
The exchange and discussion will also include a selection of works from the museum’s collections.
The focus of the lab will be the relationship between communities and water, environmental transformations, and resilience practices, also related to sea-level rise.
The photos (personal, from family archives, historical, or from the community) could focus on:
- Practices, Rituals, and Gestures: documenting good practices, everyday rituals, or symbolic gestures related to environmental care. These can be: family or community practices, spiritual and symbolic ties to nature, collective actions, invented or imagined rituals that respond to ecological concerns with a focus in water and land.
- Reference Figures: photographs of people who have influenced your thinking about climate, ecology, or environmental justice. These can be public figures, community members, family elders, activists, researchers, or peers.
- Environmental and Social Transformations due to colonialism and migration, acts and practices of resistance, sites of conflict, protection, and memory.
- Relationship Between Communities and Water: environmental transformations, natural events, occupations, and resilience practices related to sea-level rise.
- Determining Events: images representing natural or human-made events that you consider crucial in shaping your understanding of ecological change or climate crisis. Examples can be floods, droughts, fires, industrial sites, deforestation, pollution, protests, moments of environmental loss or transformation.
- Personal Ecologies: Photographs that express a personal relationship with nature, resources, or environmental responsibility. Images showing coexistence, fragility, interdependence, or repair.
“2749 Social Cartography: The Photo Archive of Decolonial Ecology” is a project by Caterina Pecchioli. The research project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2025, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Co-funded, through the Fourth Century Center Research and Design Fellowship.
Cultural Partners: Abington Friends School (AFS), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, IUAV University of Venice, Sale Docks, Thami Mnyele Foundation.
The workshop is organized in collaboration with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Thami Mnyele Foundation.
Caterina Pecchioli is a multimedia and multidisciplinary visual artist, researcher, artistic director, and community activist. Her work investigates the impact of power on mass behaviours and socio-political dynamics, with a focus on decolonial practices. Her photographs, films, drawings, videos and performances are focusing on identity and social issues investigated through the analysis of daily gestures, community dynamics and power
relations between individuals, communities and institutional power. Since 2015, her practice has embraced participatory approaches, leading her to found collectives that use art as a catalyst for social change through collaborative processes and action-research methodologies. She is co-founder of the art and curatorial collective Nation25, which addresses migratory, social, and environmental issues. She is also the initiator and co-founder of the art and fashion platform B&W – Black&White, The Migrant Trend APS, which studies and promotes migrant and intercultural fashion, as well as the collective The Glorious Mothers, focusing on the challenges of being artists and mothers in Italy today. Her projects have been presented at institutions such as Framer Framed (Amsterdam), CHEAP Festival (Bologna), Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella), Spazju Kreattiv (Valletta,
Malta), Fondazione Studio Marangoni (Florence), International Center of Photography (Palermo), Museum of Natural History (Florence), Manifesta 12 (Palermo), MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art (Rome), Villa Romana (Florence), 56th Venice Biennale – The Nationless Pavilion (Venice), 6th Cairo Video Festival (Cairo), Mulle International Arts Festival (Seoul), MAD – Murate Art District (Florence), NESXT (Turin), and OFF Biennale (Cairo). She is a 2025 Thami Mnyele Foundation Awardee and winner of the Strategia Fotografia (2025) and Italian Council XI (2022) by the Direzione Generale Creatività
Contemporanea of the Italian Ministry of Culture. www.caterinapecchioli.com – www.nation25.com - www.bwblackwhite.org Instagram: @catepecchioli
Alessandra Saviotti is a curator and educator who lives in Amsterdam. She wrote a PhD on how alternative education models framed as Arte Útil could be successfully implemented within the institution of education fostering sustainability, hacking the institution itself at the Liverpool John Moores University - School of Art and Design. She is an associate of Art Workers Italia. Her focus is on socially engaged art, collaborative practices and Arte Útil. Her work aims to realise projects where the public becomes a co-producer in the spirit of usership. Her reflection considers collaborative processes where cooperation is foundational in undermining the notion of competition. Since 2014 she has been collaborating with the Asociación de Arte Útil founded by Tania Bruguera, especially aiming to emancipate usership around the Arte Útil Archive. In 2013 she was part of the curatorial team of the
'Museum of Arte Útil' at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL); She is a regular speaker at international events, lecturer and workshop facilitator at many university and schools including Harvard University, Cambridge (2025), Southern Centre for Digital Transformation, Naples (2025), University of Arts, Belgrade (2024), UNIARTS Helsinki (2022), Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Den Haag (2022), Iceland University of the Arts (2021), Accademia di Brera, Milan (2020), She was the coordinator of the ‘Escuela de Arte Útil’ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (US). She was a guest teacher at ArtEZ - International Master Artist Educator and Master Kunst Educatie, Arnhem (NL), and BEAR (BA Fine Art).
Since 2007 has been working in collaboration with several institutions such as Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) at documenta 15 (CU/DE), The Whitworth, Manchester (UK), SFMOMA (US), MAXXI, Rome (IT), Delfina Foundation, London (UK), Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (UK), Visible Project (IT), Manifesta 7 and 12 (IT), Cork|Printmakers (IE), SALT Istanbul (TR), Estudio Tania Bruguera (USA) e Studio Francesca Grilli (BE).
She is a 2013-14 van Eyck Akademie fellow, a 2023 Zuid.Boijmans Van Beuningen visitor research fellow, and a 2015 Mondriaan Foundation grantee. She is a curatorial advisor for UNIDEE – Residency Programmes at Cittadellarte- Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto in Italy. www.alessandrasaviotti.com