CHSP Alumni Spotlight: Minal Wickrematunge
Sri Lanka, Reinwardt Academy, MA Applied Museum and Heritage Studies
Minal Wickrematunge is one of the Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme (CHSP) alumni, who completed her Master's in Applied Museum and Heritage Studies at Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam.
Her thesis, Residency Remains: Archiving Creative Journeys. Investigating Decoloniality via Contemporary Art Interventions in Museum and Heritage Sites, already hinted at the direction her work would take after graduating. She is currently applying for PhD programmes in artistic and decolonial research, with a focus on female labour and the embodied traces of colonialism. She is also the founder of Memory.Circles, a collective she established in late 2024 that explores counter-archival methods centred on everyday objects. Since its founding, the collective has held workshops in Colombo and Galle Fort in Sri Lanka, as well as in Lagos, Nigeria, facilitated in collaboration with fellow CHSP alumnus Jay Olaniyan.
The collective's growing cross-border archive of everyday objects can be found at @memory.circles on Instagram.
Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme
The Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme (CHSP) is a Nuffic initiative funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, designed to empower young professionals from Indonesia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and South Africa to pursue a specialised master's programme in cultural heritage management in the Netherlands. The programme aims to foster international collaboration and knowledge exchange, enabling alumni to bring new expertise and perspectives back to their home communities.