Komplot
Plotting the archive
01.10.2025—29.01.2026
Residency, Open call
Valentina Bianchi
Komplot is pleased to present Plotting the Archive, an archival research residency carried out by curator and researcher Valentina Bianchi, unfolding over three months (October, November and December 2025) and culminating in a public restitution on 29 January at 7 PM.
Valentina Bianchi is a curator and cultural worker based in Brussels. Her practice is rooted in grassroots methodologies, working with artists and communities to develop projects that question established hierarchies of knowledge and art-making. Valentina approaches feminism both as a method and a matter of inquiry, with a particular focus on ecofeminism and its intersections with ecology and sustainability.
She has curated and contributed to projects in institutions such as Extra City (Antwerp), Pilar (Brussels), iMAL (Brussels), and KASK (Ghent) and has worked as a curator at Jester (Genk). She also maintains a writing and low-tech publishing practice dedicated to ecofeminist topics, producing texts and editions that extend her research beyond exhibition spaces.
During her residency at Komplot, Valentina explored the archive, tracing common threads between activism, politics, and the art scene across twenty-five years of its history.
Conceived within Komplot’s archival residency programme, Plotting the Archive approaches the archive not as a static repository, but as a living and mutable territory, shaped by encounters, detours, and collective imagination.
Through a closed engagement with nearly twenty-five years of Komplot’s history, Valentina Bianchi’s research traces recurring threads between activism, politics, and the art scene, opening new pathways through the organisation’s documents, projects, publications, and ephemera.
The residency moves between moments of individual investigation and collective exploration. After an initial solo immersion in the archive and the multiple routes it suggests, interviews with people who have been part of Komplot’s history, the research expanded to include others through the workshop A heated room, coffee and chairs: a collective exploration of Komplot’s archive. Bringing together participants for a shared reading of archival materials, the workshop activated writing, drawing, and conversation as tools to reimagine Komplot’s history.
Working with materials drawn from artistic projects developed by and within Komplot, alongside postcards, artist’s books, and publications gathered over time, the group reorganised the archive into imagined “ecosystems,” alternately conceived as forests, cities, or swamps. These ecosystems generated alternative timelines and cartographies: mural-like palimpsests of stories, speculative narratives, and even an “email storm from the future,” portraying Komplot as a nomadic island, a place without fixed coordinates.
The outcomes of this collective process form the core of a forthcoming zine entitled Swamp, City, Forest – plotting the archive of Komplot, which does not function as a retrospective in the traditional sense, but as a collective map: a timeline that is also a territory, charting Komplot’s past while projecting possible futures. The zine was presented during a public restitution on 29 January, alongside a presentation of the residency’s research and methodologies. The event also featured a screening of Sad in Country (Part One) (2007), an experimental film by Catherine Vertige (Sonia Dermience) and Kosten Koper, which brings together interviews with Belgian artists involved in collective projects engaging with politics in diverse ways.
Situated within Komplot’s broader period of self-reflection, Plotting the Archive contributes to an ongoing re-examination of the organisation’s internal structures and history. The public restitution offers a moment to share this research with audiences, presenting the archive as both documentation and speculation.
Public programme
05.12.2025
11:00 - 15:00 Public workshop
Valentina Bianchi led A heated room, coffee and chairs: a collective exploration of Komplot’s archive, guiding us through Komplot’s archive, digging, selecting, writing, drawing, and reshaping timelines.
During the workshop, we delved into the archive and unearthed a series of precious relics. We then organised them in arbitrary and speculative ecosystems, placing them in swamps, cities, or forests. We then traced a palimpsest of stories in a shared mural, and ended with an email storm from the future.
29.01.2026
19:00 - 21:00 Public presentation