A shared gathering at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, brought together artists, researchers, and thinkers through an open call that received over 100 applications. When these applications were reviewed, eight artists were selected. They were selected with the purpose of building around one simple premise: spend time with the archive and see what it does to you.

These eight participants responded to an open call and stayed for days, working through CCA’s Digital collections without the pressure of a formal output or a fixed programme. The two-day workshop was facilitated by Amanda Madumere.

What they found inside the archive was not merely historical material but a living argument about what gets remembered and how.

The experience was as much about gaps as it was about content. The participants noticed what had been kept and, just as pointedly, what had not. And the role that archiving those documents would play in the future of contemporary art in Africa.

Conversations happened informally, in the stacks, between sessions, over shared tables. Nobody was presenting. Nobody was performing expertise. The two-day workshop created the conditions for a slower, more honest kind of thinking, the sort that tends to get crowded out when schedules are full and outcomes are expected.

What the workshop made clear, collectively, was that the archive is not a neutral container.

It is a constructed thing, shaped by choices, maintained by labour, and capable of shaping the people who move through it in return. These artists also found that contemporary artistic practice is more entangled with these histories than it typically admits.

The workshop ended without conclusions. That was never the point. What participants carried out with them was a sharper awareness of how memory works, not as something that simply exists, but as something that is built, curated, and, on the best days, honestly questioned.

Their interactions with CCA Lagos Digital Archive led to the Exhibition titled “Medium as Time”, which started showing on the 31st of May 2026