Technologies of Fabulation

With Voluspa Jarpa, Fabiane Borges and Isaiah Lopaz

9 April 2026

Tickets

Storytelling has long served as a technology of cultural survival and continuity. In histories of colonialism and imperialism, the voices of the colonised have been silenced and their archives destroyed or tightly controlled. In response, those denied official record have sustained knowledge through oral tradition, myth and speculative narration, preserving what could not be officially documented.

Fabulation approaches gaps with imagination and responsibility. Drawing from fragments, lived experience and inherited knowledge, it assembles narratives that connect past, present and future without claiming wholeness or final authority. Such practices do not compete with the archive; they expand what an archive can be.

Artists and orators continue to use performance, myth and experimental narrative to confront absence and erasure. Ancestral storytelling affirms presence, transmits ethical frameworks and keeps collective worlds in motion. In this sense, fabulation operates as both historical practice and generative force, shaping ways of belonging while opening space for futures grounded in dignity and relation.

Fabiane Morais Borges, Voluspa Jarpa and Isaiah Lopaz each approach storytelling as a device for archiving, restoring and preserving collective knowledge and erased histories. Borges, a psychologist and researcher working between art, science and technology, develops collective and psychosocial methods that examine how subjectivity is shaped through shared imaginaries. Jarpa’s practice is grounded in long-term research into archives of political violence in Latin America, where she reworks declassified materials to reveal the structures and afterlives of historical trauma. Lopaz, a transdisciplinary artist working across collage, performance and text, draws on African, Creole and First Nations epistemologies to connect genealogy, personal myth and historical fragments. In this discussion, fabulation operates as a way of holding what cannot be fully documented while opening space for new configurations of memory and possibility.

TICKET FOR THIS PROGRAMME

What else is on Thursday?

Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Techno-Ancestrality at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and BAK Basecamp.

Thursday day pass 5-day festival pass

For more information on the festival tickets please see here

Image: Voluspa Jarpa

Voluspa Jarpa Fabiane Borges Isaiah Lopaz Nancy Jouwe

Voluspa Jarpa

― Artist

Since 1994, Voluspa Jarpa has maintained an extensive artistic practice, presenting solo and group exhibitions in Chile and internationally. Her work is grounded in long-term research into archives, memory, and the cultural and symbolic dimensions of social trauma, with a focus on the Cold War in Latin America and the artistic activation of U.S. declassified intelligence archives. More recently, she has examined Andean social uprisings (2018–2024) in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela, tracing state violence, environmental sacrifice zones, mining, urbanization, and the weakening of democratic systems—dynamics that remain entangled with colonial legacies. Notable exhibitions include the 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014), In Our Small Region Over Here at MALBA (2016), the 12th Shanghai Biennale (2018), and Altered Views, Chile Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2019). She received the first Julius Baer Prize (2020) and an Acquisition Prize at the 16th Cuenca Biennial (2023).

Fabiane Borges

― Speaker

Fabiane Morais Borges is a psychologist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a focus on the production of subjectivity. She holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology (PUC-SP) and a Post-PhD in Art, Science and Technology (NANO/UFRJ). She developed art-science research at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and is co-founder of Psique.Space, a platform dedicated to collective methodologies and psychosocial technologies for the future. She is also a researcher (and art director) of LACO – Oceanic Art Science Lab at the Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo (IOUSP), developed within the UNESCO Chair for Ocean Sustainability.

Isaiah Lopaz

― Artist

Isaiah Lopaz is a transdisciplinary artist whose work revolves around collage, photography, text, and performance. Born in occupied Tongvaland to a working class African American family, Lopaz is a descendent of Igbo / West African / Geechee / African American / First Nations peoples. His work frequently focuses on tracing where histories often framed as disparate and distinct, overlap and converge. The past, sacred stories and practices, genealogy, and personal mythologies are merged in Lopaz’ practice to underscore intersections of time and space. Artistic research that engages African, Creole, and First Nations epistemologies, cosmologies, and methodologies are essential to his work. In the spring of 2024, Lopaz founded Black Visual Grammar, a mobile archive which engages Black perspectives on an array of themes and subjects through collage workshops which coincide with public exhibitions.

Nancy Jouwe

Nancy Jouwe (Delft, 1967) is a cultural historian and works as a freelance researcher, public speaker, publicist and teacher. She teaches at Amsterdam University College and the Utrecht School of the Arts and conducts research for public history project Mapping Slavery. She (co-) published articles and books on postcolonial cultural and social movements and three guides on Dutch history of slavery. The publication Slavernij in oost en west (Spectrum 2020), of which she is co-editor, and A Gendered Empire. (Lost, 2020) of which she is editor, will be released in the fall.

Archive

Festival 2026