Archiving Machines
Alexa Szekeres + Remi Kuforiji
Free admission
Alexa Szekeres and Remi Kuforiji present the second iteration of their project Archiving Machines at INDEX 2024. This site-specific installation interrogates the photographic archive of the Diamang company, stored at the Nogueira da Silva Museum (Braga). Diamang was formed in 1917 by a coalition of European investors to mine diamonds in Angola. This archive exists as a physical embodiment of the colonial relationship of resource extraction between Portugal and Angola.
Built on algorithms of continuous sabotage, the installation embraces malfunctions, glitches and contradictions inherent to machines.
Over the course of the exhibition, which spans the museum’s Main Hall and the Sculpture Garden, guests are invited to sit with the machines in an act that feels simultaneously ceremonial and invasive. Alexa Szekeres and Remi Kuforiji’s archiving machines disrupt the archival process of bodies and landscapes, ultimately granting opacity to the memories of those stored within the Diamang archive.
Alexa Szekeres
Alexa Szekeres is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin (Germany) and Bucharest (Romania). Her practice questions geological and cultural processes of extraction and performative modes of knowledge preservation. Szekeres is developing an ongoing body of research entitled Ghosts in the Landscape, based on concepts of heritage and the memory of absent bodies, and the role of ruins and monuments in contemporary society.
Remi Kuforiji
Remi Kuforiji is an architect, artist and researcher based in London. His research explores the intersections between the politics of race, mapping, and performance. Kuforiji’s project Water No Get Enemy: Counter-Cartographies Of Diaspora positions Nigerian masquerade as an architectural tool of cartography to critique the neo-colonial extraction of the Niger Delta’s resources.