Archiving a Legacy: The Work of Maria Blaisse Archiving a Legacy: The Work of Maria Blaisse

Whether in the hands of the maker or a relative, artists' legacies are often in the hands of individuals with neither the knowledge nor tools and time to preserve these legacies in the long run. Although they might look to museums, foundations or heritage institutions for support, the number of requests far exceeds the capacity of existing organisations to extend support. In the past years, Windhausen's field research has pointed to the need for more cooperation between these institutions as well as better provision of information, resources and guidance for those managing an artist's legacy.

In this context, many concerns are shared. What should be preserved? And where, how, and by and for whom? These are obvious questions, with much less clear-cut answers, faced by those assembling artists' legacies and archivists alike. Such methodological issues involved in selection and valuation processes are also an ongoing concern for NADD as the fields of design and digital culture lack collective approaches.

As a starting set of guidelines, Anja Tollenaar developed a framework for NADD last year, which is intended to guide the assessment of archives from these domains. This assessment framework proposes a thematic and material approach for the task of selection. It emphasises the importance of the broader networks that form the context of individual archives, as well as inclusion and diversity.

The project with Maria Blaisse presents the first opportunity to use Tollenaar's assessment framework in practice. Over the coming four months, Nils Pastoor will be working with it to assess and inventorise Blaisse's archive. Pastoor is in the final phase of the cultural heritage bachelor's programme at the Reinwardt Academy and this work will form part of his graduation project. As well as reorganising Blaisse's archive into a form that could be acquired by a suitable archival institution, this is a valuable opportunity to evaluate the assessment framework itself.

With a long career traversing the domains of art, design, fashion and performance, Blaisse's work exemplifies an interdisciplinary practice. Although arguably integral to today's broad fields of design and digital culture, interdisciplinarity is less commonplace when it comes to existing archives; whether due to a lack of in-house expertise or appropriate storage facilities, the storage and maintenance of archives that do not fall comfortably within existing sectoral divides poses an institutional-level challenge. In other words, it will become increasingly relevant to devise methods to preserve archives that don't quite fit the available categories.

On a related note, Windhausen has pointed out that estate forming is constitutive of canon forming. It is important then, that artists' legacies are not forgotten simply because their work is more complicated to manage and archive. Developing accessible tools and sharing cross-domain expertise can help both makers and archival institutions to incorporate future-proof steps into their own workflows.

This project aims to gain more insight into such issues through Maria Blaisse's archive. The video above (in Dutch) shares a brief glimpse of the archival material and some of Blaisse's own motivations and concerns.

Blaisse is funded by the Mondriaan Fund's Artist Basic programme for the realisation of this project.