Moving Labels - Shifting Narratives. Photo by Barbara Neves Alves 8 Nov –
22 Nov 2025
Workshop: Moving Labels — Shifting Narratives
In the context of the exhibition Shapeshifters: On Wounds, Wonders and Transformation, Framer Framed hosts the collaborative workshop series Moving Labels – Shifting Narratives by Barbara Neves Alves with Clare Butcher and Pedro Manuel. On 8, 15 and 22 November participants read museum labels as layered narratives, collectively reworking them through different mediums.
Museum labels often appear as neutral conveyors of knowledge: small panels that name, describe and explain. But they are also narrative devices: they frame what is seen and felt, they define who speaks and naturalise relations of distance and authority. Moving Labels – Shifting Narratives explores what happens when these textual devices are displaced or removed from their vitrines, re-read and collectively rewritten. When a label is moved outside the museum, detached from the object it once described, it exposes the stories and silences that have shaped it. It becomes a porous surface where other voices and memories can enter, where fiction and fact intertwine and where history can be reimagined through collective authorship.
Developed by Barbara Neves Alves, with contributions by Clare Butcher and Pedro Manuel, this process unfolds across three parts. Participants are invited to read museum labels as layered narratives; collectively rework them through speculative writing, collage, and annotation; and finally, translate them into gesture, sound, and movement. Each session builds a space of editorial reciprocity, and evolving encounters between bodies, words, and memory.
When these reworked labels later move through the city, from Framer Framed to the Wereldmuseum, they no longer describe objects, but carry relations: between those taking part in the sessions and a certain part of history, between the group itself, worked between and along each other, while also tracing a temporary line of correspondence between Framer Framed and the Wereldmuseum, and between what is shown and what is withheld. Their displacement opens a threshold where memory circulates differently – spoken, held or read aloud – and where the authority of the label gives way to more tentative gestures of relation, of remembering with and through others.
There’s a moment of sharing and reflecting on the sessions during the finissage of Shapeshifters on 11 January 2026.
This workshop series is free but places are limited, please register here. With this register, we ask that participants be committed to attend every session.
Session 1 – Unfolding Labels
8 November 2025, 11:00 – 15:00
Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam
Collecting, reading and unsettling museum labels at the Wereldmuseum. What stories are told and what remains unsaid? Reading the museum label as a layered narrative, tracing its voices, silences, and points of view.
Session 2 – Relational Re-telling
15 November 2025, 11:00 – 15:00
Framer Framed
Removing labels from the exhibit (metaphorically and materially) and using them as starting points for speculative storytelling and collective rewriting. Writing with and alongside others, reconfiguring the label through collective and reciprocal and relational forms of narration.
Session 3 – Moving with Labels
22 November 2025, 11:00 – 15:00
Framer Framed
Performing and voicing the rewritten labels, exploring their embodied, sonic, and spatial translations. Carrying the reworked labels through gesture and voice, attending to how stories move, resonate, and return.
Language: A mix of English / Dutch / Portuguese / Spanish is welcome.
These sessions are in English. Admission is free.
Do you also think art should be free and accessible? Please consider supporting us with a donation when registering or by becoming a Framer Framed Friend!
This event may be photographed and filmed. Kindly let us know in advance if you prefer not to have your picture taken. For seated programmes, places are always made available for wheelchair users. Please speak to the host before the programme begins.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
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Global Art History / The living archive / Colonial history / Museology / New Museology / Workshop /
Exhibitions
Exhibition: Shapeshifters
A group exhibition examining how colonialism has shaped museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge
Network
Pedro Manuel
Theatre maker, educator
Clare Butcher
Curator, Writer
