Preserving Practices: Taking Out the Trash

Artists, designers, and makers often struggle with processes of archiving their own work. This is especially true for individuals or collectives who work digitally or who have more intersectional and social practices. Archiving your own work can often feel like a lonely task, and one that gets left behind, forgotten, moved to the end of the to-do list. How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices is a four part workshop series on digital archiving that gives creators and makers the tools they need to archive their own practice.

In our first session, Taking Out the Trash, we want to explore whether it is necessary to keep everything in the process of archiving your work. With what seems like endless amounts of cloud storage, and smaller external hard drives with more and more space, it feels like endless storage is possible. But is it necessary to keep everything? How do you make the choices of what to keep and what to throw away?

The session will begin with a talk from Marie Verdeil, a French designer and artist based in Brussels. Marie will join us to talk about her own archive practices, getting out of Google’s environment, the Fediverse, Low-tech Magazine’s website, the environmental impact of digital tools and data centres, and how to make choices and compress content sustainably.

The talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop led by Elki Boerdam, a visual artist, researcher, writer, and photo-editor, and one of the initiators of Input Party, an image event where artists share their referential image archives. In this workshop, which will take the format of the Input Party, participants will be sharing images and references from their own archives. The images will become a physical tool for the process of sharing—opening up conversations about archiving images and work in general, digital images as material, and how they contribute to the construction of work. What should you keep from that abundance of images and references that you collect in the process of making work? How can that act as a way to encapsulate a work in the archive with context?

📅 Date: 13 November 2025
🕗 Time: 15.00 – 18.00 CET
📍 Location: The Hmm’s studio, NDSM-plein 125, 1033 WB, Amsterdam and online
🎟 Tickets: €5 per workshop & €15 for all 4 workshops (onsite or online)

As these workshops are more intimate sessions, there is a limited supply of tickets available. They are also available to follow simultaneously online. You can find information about physical accessibility at The Hmm’s studio here.

Note for passepartout ticketholders:

With a passepartout ticket, you can join all four sessions onsite or online. We ask that you email us at info@thehmm.nl in advance to let us know which workshops you would like to attend, and your mode of presence. Please scroll further for the specific location of the session(s) you would like to join onsite.

About How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices

How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices is a workshop series made in collaboration between The Hmm and Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD), a growing network of museums, creators, archives, designers, researchers and collectives who have combined forces to make design and digital culture archives visible, accessible and future-proof.

This four-part series encourages us to move from individual practices to collective archiving—practicing ways to support one another acts of archiving. With this in mind, the sessions will include knowledge sharing combined with a practical collective working session. Each workshop will begin with a talk from an artist, designer, or researcher, sharing their own archiving practice and experience as inspiration, followed by a more hands-on workshop where an invited guest (researcher, artist, archivist) teaches a specific set of skills or approach to archiving. Following the workshop, time will be dedicated to work on archiving your own practice as an extension of the tools or ideas shared in the session.

The sessions will be hybrid and participants can join onsite or online. The onsite sessions will take place either in Amsterdam at The Hmm’s studio in the NDSM Loods or Rotterdam at Nieuwe Instituut. Please check the session you would like to join for the specific onsite location.

You can join for all four sessions with a passepartout ticket, or choose one or two to take part in.

Upcoming workshops in the series:

🔷 11 December 2025: The Archive and the Audience
Onsite location: Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam

Many artists and makers, especially those working with digital technologies, have interactive aspects to their work where the audience also becomes an important and large part of the work itself. How do you archive the audience, when it’s an interactive project, or experiment with forms of collective archiving?

🔷 15 January 2026: The Materiality of Archiving
Onsite location: Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam

Digital archiving can often seem quite ephemeral, with things stored on servers, in the cloud. In this session we want to focus on the materiality of digital archiving, thinking about how to archive a website, online project, or browser-based work. 

🔷 12 February 2026: Automated Archiving
Onsite location: The Hmm’s studio, NDSM-plein 125, 1033 WB, Amsterdam

In this workshop we want to explore if, and how, we can use AI and other tools for automated, and even speculative, archiving. Can these tools make our archiving processes faster? And what is the new value of the archive in the face of these fast-paced developments in AI?