Archive in Residence: Reading Vigil for Free Palestine

de Appel invites you to gather for the public presentation and sharing of the (unwilling) archive of Reading Vigil for Free Palestine (RVFP), presented within the Archive in Residence, de Appel’s programme dedicated to activating often overlooked archives through artistic and collective research practices.

From October 2025 to March 2026, RVFP participated in the Archive in Residence through an ongoing collaboration with the de Appel Archive, engaging with collective archiving as a living and political practice. This process has resulted in a publicly accessible audio archive of the daily Reading Vigil, available via readingvigil.net, alongside a special collection in the de Appel Library comprising all books read during the vigil to date, beginning on 6 November 2023, available for public lending. You can read the full announcement of the project here.

On Friday 13 March de Appel will host a public programme around the residency. The event marks a moment to share this archive and to open a collective conversation on activist archiving, memory, and the role of autonomous archives within ongoing political struggle. The programme of the event will include a presentation of the RVFP archive in its physical and digital forms, and will discuss questions like: How do we archive ongoing actions of solidarity? How to archive resistance? How to resist becoming an archive? Can an archive capture the ephemera around the happening – the learning, the rage, the confrontations, the moments of solidarity? Afterwards the conversation continues with Özge Çelikaslan on bak.ma, digital activist archives, collective archiving practices, and autonomous archival infrastructures.