Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) are pleased to announce a partnership with Amsterdam-based collective Archival Consciousness through Biblio-Graph, a web application for digitising, publishing, archiving, and interacting with collections. The platform will support our organisations in expanding digital access to our collections and work across Africa and beyond.
Developed by Archival Consciousness, which was founded by artist Mariana Lanari and graphic designer Remco van Bladel in 2019, Biblio-Graph is an archiving system for cultural libraries and archives interested in easily accessible collections. It functions as an interaction layer consisting of a semantic layer and a graph database that sits on top of existing library systems. This allows visitors to work with, share, and reuse collection data as a network in a Timeline, Grid, or Graph view without altering the underlying databases, creating entirely new ways of engaging with archival materials.
Biblio-Graph also includes a built-in publication tool, Publish, developed in collaboration with Framer Framed. The tool brings publishing and long-term preservation together to create hybrid publications that can exist as web pages, PDFs for distribution, or high-resolution PDFs prepared for offset printing. Crucially, when a book is published through this system, it is automatically archived back onto Biblio-Graph as Linked data.
As part of this collaboration, G.A.S. and Y.S.F. host G.A.S. Publish using this tool to support the Foundation’s new publishing activities more broadly. Its first application is through Re:assemblages, where we are establishing a publishing strand to extend the research, conversations, and knowledge generated through the three-year programme into forms that can be shared, accessed, and preserved beyond it.
The strand begins with Archive Futures, launching in January 2027 with an essay series commissioning ten writers across two strands: Notes on Convenings, reflecting on the archives, ideas, and unresolved questions emerging from each gathering, and Artists as Libraries, which responds to the relative absence of public archives on contemporary African and Afro-diasporic artists. The site will also hold the Archive Futures Repository, which will serve as the official digital toolkit archiving the programme and the inaugural and subsequent years of the African Arts Libraries (AAL) Lab and Affiliates Network.
About Archival Consciousness
Archival Consciousness is a collaborative practice initiated by Mariana Lanari and Remco van Bladel, operating as a studio and a research framework for thinking critically about the Web, digital and data literacy. They develop experimental infrastructures that interlink archives and reimagine alternative ways of reading and dissemination. Their projects, such as Biblio-graph.org and NADD.network, work across institutions and temporalities to render visible the epistemic, technical, and aesthetic dimensions of digital heritage.
About Mariana Lanari
Mariana Lanari is an artist, researcher and data scientist with a background in political science, currently pursuing a PhD at the Amsterdam School of Heritage Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam. Her research combines computational ontology with performance art to propose new ways of reading, translation and mediation between physical and digital collections in cultural libraries and archives.
About Remco van Bladel
Remco van Bladel runs a multidisciplinary design studio in Amsterdam that specialises in book design, publishing platforms, curatorial projects, type design and interactive applications. He is co-founder of Onomatopee and a lecturer in typography at Graphic Design Arnhem (ArtEZ University of the Arts).