Digital Care: Moniek Toebosch
A special event by LI-MA revisiting the oeuvre of the seminal artist
How do we care for artworks that resist fixed form? How can archives remain active, and what does it mean to present media art across changing technological contexts? These questions are central to Digital Care, an ongoing programme by LI-MA that brings together artists, archivists, and researchers to reflect on the preservation and presentation of digital and media art.
At the heart of this edition of Digital Care is the archive of Moniek Toebosch (1948–2012), an artist whose extraordinary multidisciplinary practice spanned performance, sound, text, and installation. Known for her participatory and often subversive approach, Toebosch played with the boundaries between art and everyday life, resisting singular forms of documentation or institutional framing.
For the past six months, LI-MA became home to the archive of Toebosch. The process of organising and preparing archival materials for future research, conservation projects and artistic reinterpretations, has revealed the remarkable breadth of Toebosch’s artistic practice. Poetic texts, graphic designs, organisational correspondence, music recordings, and documentation of performance work, among other things, coalesce into an archive that represents the multi-faceted nature of the artist’s oeuvre. In this interconnected web, no single subsection of the archive attains hierarchical status over another. Together they form equally important parts of understanding Toebosch’s artistic life.
Opening Up the Archive
This Digital Care event takes Moniek Toebosch’s archive not as a closed record, but as an opening to ‘the history of the future’. During this event we reflect on Toebosch and her oeuvre by investigating how we can engage with her work in a contemporary setting through reenactment, reframing and reconsideration, supported by novel, comprehensive archival research.
Archivists David Koniuszek and Caitlyn van der Kaap will introduce the archive and highlight key themes within Toebosch’s oeuvre they found reflected in the archive, such as her multidisciplinary approach to artistic media, a subversive attitude towards institutionalisation, and her commitment to merging art with life through participatory, public and collaborative artistic practices. Together, we will look at several audiovisual works from the archive that have been recently digitalised by LI-MA, offering a glimpse into a body of work that has long deserved wider attention.
Lecture-Performance by Alicia Framis
The evening will also feature a lecture-performance by artist Alicia Framis. Framis was a resident at the Rijksakademie between 1995 and 1996, during which she encountered Moniek Toebosch as a tutor. This would be the beginning of a long-lasting artistic connection.
Drawing on their shared history and taking up the archive as a living resource, Framis pays a personal tribute to Moniek Toebosch’s practice. Her own multidisciplinary practice, with its sustained engagement with social structures, and the choreography of public and private space, offers an artistic lens through which we can revisit Toebosch's spatial and participatory works.
Digital Care
More broadly, the Digital Care programme raises questions around how media artworks can be presented now and in the future. What role do documentation and archives play in this process? When should original hardware and software be maintained, and when might emulation offer a more sustainable approach? These questions are explored in close collaboration with cultural institutions connected to the works, each contributing perspectives that extend the archive into a wider network of care and interpretation.
