AFTER MEMORY reflects on how memory is affected by endless social media feeds, clouded storage spaces, automated data storage, and networked communication technologies. This bears both challenges and chances, as practices of remembering and forgetting are reconfigured and their competences are transferred from institutional actors to civic initiatives and individuals. In turn, the role of museums and archives is redefined, too, whose collections no longer preside over a sovereign narration of the past, but constitute shared repositories for the future.

AFTER MEMORY is a project by: Nathalia Lavigne, Lisa Deml, Víctor Fancelli Capdevila

By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.

Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.

Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.

With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas

Bilder

Still Unstable – 45 Years of V2_
For 45 years, V2_ has been a space where artists, researchers and technologists come together to question, explore and experiment with emerging technologies. To mark this anniversary, V2_ presents Still Unstable: a programme of exhibitions, talks, interviews and live performances exploring the hidden systems that shape technological innovation today.

Rather than looking back, Still Unstable looks ahead. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, algorithms and digital infrastructures, the programme asks what remains unseen: the labour, resources, ecologies and power structures behind contemporary technologies, and how artistic practice can make these visible.

Exhibition
24 September – 18 October 2026

The exhibition brings together works by Rosa Menkman, Aram Bartholl, Anna Ehrenstein, knowbotiq, Kaisa Molga, Morehshin Allahyari and more to be announced. Through installations, moving image and artistic research, the participating artists examine the infrastructures, relationships and systems that underpin today’s technological landscape.

Unstable Talks & Interviews
24–26 September 2026

Alongside the exhibition, Still Unstable presents three days of talks, artist talks and interviews reflecting on 45 years of media art and the challenges of contemporary technological culture.

Confirmed speakers are Andreas Broeckmann, Annet Dekker, Aram Bartholl, Anna Ehrenstein & Yara Makawei, and Marijn Bril. Interviews feature Joost Rekveld, Joana Chicau, Gökay Atabekand Rosa Menkman.

We are made of memory, but memory itself is a fiction 

The exhibition Self Storage investigates how individuals construct identity through personal and intimate recollections, as well as through the technical and social systems that shape their traces. Memory is not an objective recording: it is an assemblage, a selective construction built from both forgetting and persistence. A memory emerges within a space shaped by desire, loss, and reconstruction. Self Storage foregrounds this subjective and unstable dimension of remembering. Diaries, family archives, obsolete technologies, and bodily reminiscences become raw materials to examine the materiality of memory and its capacity for reinvention.

Hard drives, clouds, online profi les, and social networks are gradually replacing notebooks and photo albums. This massive externalization questions the boundary between private memory and public exposure, between lived traces and standardized data. Self Storage extends this inquiry into a contemporary era where identity is stored, outsourced, and endlessly duplicated. Through the works assembled, the exhibition off ers a poetic and critical drift between real and invented memory, intimate and externalized. It prompts us to consider: What do we need to retain? What do we choose to forget? And what becomes of the “self” when it is reduced to archives, content, and imprints?

curation : Nicolas de Chérisey & Philippine de Salaberry in collaboration with Ellia gallery

participating artists:
Joël Andrianomearisoa, Maxime Antony, Marcella Barceló, Aram Bartholl, Federica Belli, Matthias Bitzer, Borgial, Victor Boyer, Amélie Caussade, Salomé Chatriot, Coucou Bébé, Nick Coutsier, Fleur Cozic, Paul Créange, Corentin Darré, Oli Epp, Léonor Fini, Nan Goldin, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ryoji Ikeda, Victoire Inchauspé, Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Octave Lauret, Louis Lekien, Inès Longevial, Keegan Luttrell, Shiva Lynn Burgos, Matisse Mesnil, Sabine Mirlesse, Polina Osipova, Louise des Places, Joséphine de Rohan-Chabot, Philippine de Salaberry, Tehotu, Egon Thuile, Thu-Van Tran, Louis Verret, Francesco Vezzoli, Rose Vidal, Xolo Cuintle, Kai Yoda, Yugnat999.

Artists Darsha Hewitt and Aram Bartholl transform the MÄCK Second second-hand store into an experimental laboratory for media archaeology and collective making through a series of workshops.The project takes the objects themselves as its starting point: discarded televisions, stereo systems, computers, furniture, and everyday items that tell stories of their previous lives while also carrying the potential for new futures.

Found objects from the MÄCK Second inventory are examined, modified, and recombined. Together, the participants develop a large-scale installation that reconfigures the store’s interior and transforms its inventory into an immersive landscape of sound, images, stories, and technological relics, accessible to the public during opening hours.

Situated between recycling, artistic research, and a speculative future workshop, the project creates a temporary space that invites visitors to explore the hidden potential of old things and to rediscover second-hand culture as a resource for new forms of living, making, and imagining together.