Gathering #2: [De-]Constructing Care in the Archive Gathering #2: [De-]Constructing Care in the Archive

Departing from Archival Interaction's focus on the locus of heritage construction (where, with whom, under the aegis of whom?), we explored 'entering', 'caring for', 'being with', and 'making kin with' the archive. The public gathering also set out to look critically at the instrumentalisation of (architectural) archives and their attribution of holding 'truth' in constructing (collective) identity and history - as this has been used to marginalise, sanitise and oppress Other ways of remembering.

By thinking through moments of 'arriving' at the archive and how the archive enters institutions and institutional memory, we traced - through a selection of our case studies (Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen, Berlage, Nationale Tentoonstelling Vrouwenarbeid 1898, and Keurige Leugens van het Officieel Fatsoen) - the balances of care enacted between the object, archive, archive's origins, the archived practice or subject, the archive's custodian/curator, archivists, 'secretaries' and visitors.

Working group members, who are part of Disclosing Architecture, researchers Renan Laru-an and Yasmin Tri Aryani, curator Staci Bu Shea and artist Hannah Dawn Henderson joined the discussions on the case studies presented during the event.

The second public gathering of Collecting Otherwise greeted the audience and participants with Hannah Dawn Henderson's reading of her ongoing work, translated into words and footnotes, in the chapter entitled /"The archive as a site of ongoing renewal/". The space for our conversation is made by listening to Hannah's voice, establishing a common care and attention to what will be discussed:

/"The deceased's memory is the document, but what substantiates the archive itself? What is the structure that houses these documents? Seemingly, it is the one who recalls and who carries within themselves the memory of the departed; the living being is, at once, equally custodian and archive./"

Afterwards, brief introductions to the participants were made, and we began by recalling what Collecting Otherwise has been thinking of and working on - and asking where we go from here.

Setareh Noorani introduced the case studies and how they inhabit the Instituut's collection, describing how, in the opportunity we took to intersect ourselves with these case studies as a working group and within this institution, we took the matter of inter-personal and inter-material care seriously. This care departed from the under-narrated or even newly acquired case studies in the Het Nieuwe Instituut collection. In this project, what would be the agency of the archive, the archive's constitutor, the rights holder, the people pictured, the landscapes traversed? Following the archive as both a place and /"a metaphor for the production, maintenance and surveillance of collective memory/".

Our methodology is a practice of queering the archive, questioning how and with whom we do heritage. We don't go /"straight/" into the archive, but pause and engage - we choose to make kin, to be-with the archive. We feel out proximities, thresholds between working group members, institutional actors, archival agents, and under-narrated objects. In this we encountered many named and unnamed structures of care: care riders, contracts, check-in emails, gossips, whispers, amplifying, nods, entering, unfolding, unboxing, annotation efforts, listening exercises, and nurturing in unison.

These acts of care are crucial to our efforts - as we are not only working through and with the archival material in the collection, but embed our research in our tools, in how we talk, how we gather. How we care influences how we collect, how we remember.

After a more careful introduction to two of the three invited guest speakers of the evening - Yasmin Tri Aryani and Staci Bu Shea - the Trojan Horse Cell (our group within the group, composed of Clara Balaguer, Isola Tong, Alfred Marasigan and Czar Kristoff) introduced the third guest, Renan Laru-an, through the queer, pop culture approach of asking him _Vogue'_s 73 questions. This approach comes in the context of mingling, highlighting the informality needed for intimacy and care: /"How can we recover the energy we used to smuggle in hallways, sidewalks, cafeterias, by the coffee machine? Before we enter we must first approach, circling safely to signal we are coming closer. We want to make a critical case for the importance of friendly introductions and for the allowance of smaller talk./"

Renan is a researcher based in Sultan Kudarat, in the south of the Philippines. He creates exhibitionary, public, and research programmes that study 'insufficient' and 'subtracted' images or subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects. Current ongoing projects include But Ears Have No Lids (2021) and_ Promising Arrivals, Violent Departures_ (2018).

The questions were quickfire, as fun to watch as seemed it was to answer them. We got to know Renan, personally and professionally. We met him through knowing his backyard (filled with wilderness and brown and green colours), his favourite curatorial moment, his favourite western art terms (anything ending in -ity), his archival pet peeve - seriousness, and his current fascination with flowers, petals, and imperfect descriptions. Unfortunately, Renan ran out of his 30 seconds to answer the last question, first put to Gloria Diaz, the first Phillipino Miss Universe, in 1969: /"In the next day or so, a man will land on the moon. If a man from the moon landed in your hometown, what would you do to entertain him?/".

Following the energetic mingling, we turned to the next presentation, by Yasmin Tri Aryani, filled with international, intergenerational and urgent points of meeting and kin. Yasmin Tri Aryani is a researcher, graphic recorder and part of the 2019 M+/Design Trust research fellowship, who observes the problematic nature of architectural works that showcase the elements of traditional architecture of dominant ethnicities in government-funded buildings in Indonesia, a strategy that might lead to the marginalisation of minorities. Through her research, Yasmin also explores the way traditional architecture has been used to represent national identity since the colonial government period.

The audience was introduced to the construction of national identity through architecture, appropriating dominant ethnicities as representative of the whole country, particularly from a point of view of /"displaying to the outside world./"

This can be seen in examples such as Berlage's documentation and drawing of his Indonesia trip and the Paris World Expo. Taking us into contemporary examples, Yasmin showed how now some inclusive strategies are questioning this status quo, building new ways of appreciation towards a diverse architecture and heritage. Instead of a new architecture that reproduces foreign styles or Westernises the urban landscape, these approaches rebuild on tradition in all its diversity.

In Wae Rebo, in East Nusa Tenggara, embodied and situated knowledges are key to rebuilding tradition and archiving. Architecture went to learn from the villagers, and not the other way around: living traditions and oral histories translated into the built environment, in a rekindling of non-institutional knowledge.

Making kin through the archive also means to tie and retie knots of togetherness otherwise. Coming back to the idea of care: we have been doing this through different scales of roles and hosting, we got to experience eating together as a practice of nurturing, vulnerability and kin making. Through bringing in our working group members' methods, we enrich our collective ones, building a library of tools. We want to continue fostering this approach and build an archival care condition, for negotiating labours and voices entering collections. Care is always central to our approach, in many constellations. On this note, we invited Staci Bu Shea to join in thinking and talking together. Staci Bu Shea is a writer and curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. This broadly focuses on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organising and institutional practice. Currently there is a special interest in archiving and commoning the /"clerical,/" end-of-life work, as well as arts accessibility from a disability justice perspective. We started by asking Staci how it situates its practice, in relation to both care work and archival work, and the meeting points between them.

The work at Casco started to move more towards a focus on the archive: this first contact was one of semi-organisation, one to understand where everything is, what is in the boxes, whose work is seen, in a tension between what's present and what's archived. Staci's personal gravitation with the archive comes perhaps from a control mechanism. We archive and thus we organise, we control, we store. Yet there is a longing for informality in the archive, imperceptible or interpretive, and in swimming around in a space or archival reorganisation, to look for sexy ways to engage with the archives.

Relationality is present in Stacis's practice, where archives and death-work entangle in their intergenerational nature, being with what is dead and dying.Staci's work in end-of-life planning offers different kinds of tools one can enact in self-empowerment. Death and dying work show the impossibility of death, a perpetuity. But how can we hospice the archives that need to die? What do we keep holding on to that can be allowed to lie, and what can still be revived?

And coming back to one of our core questions, how can archival material continue to make kin, even after being archived, even after its 'material' life? Staci relates back to the relational part of the archive and its modes of transmission: through the embodied knowledge, the stories we share, how we access and make accessible. It is urgent to rethink memory loss and to centre /"staying with the present/", and going beyond the /"necessary/" in caring for archival interactions.

Earlier in the afternoon, similar topics were approached in The Critical Visitor - one of the conclusions was the need to transform the archive into verb. We can feel the audience and speakers eager to jump in and ask questions, continue discussions and share thoughts. Renan raises his hand to elaborate on archival accessibility and use of metaphors. Privilege also lies in the neurotypical ways to make nouns into verbs, and the power in language transformation. Staci elaborates on the constant shifting realities and dialogues, and how the work is never complete. Perhaps there aren't any safe spaces, no full accessibility. We can try to make them safer, although the idea of complete access, or security, can be slippery.

Catherine, an audience member joining us from her home, generously noted the warmth and good energy in our Zoom gathering, and enquired on the role of institutions in relation to care - the content, the team, the guests can develop care gestures and conditions, but what about the structural level? How to have an institution that cares?

This is both a relevant question, and one that everyone wishes to respond to - especially since it is something the Working Group always has present in the meetings and thoughts shared. For Collecting Otherwise, the team aims to almost do an /"exorcism/" of all the knowledge, fostering internal care and connections with different members and layers of the institute. This means a lot of production, etherpad notes, Google documents and thinking of future policies that continue the work through the archive and beyond - making an archival care map, a series of collecting best practices that ask questions directly to the archive, its donors and others involved. What would the archive ask for?

Harriet Rose Morley picks this up, adding that thinking of new ways of acquiring archives open up trusts and a transfer of care, and public gatherings such are also open spaces for more contributions on how to continue this work.

But what about refusal, what about death? Czar Kristoff wonders about the death of the archive, or perhaps the death of the solitary ways of archiving, through collective knowledge building such as in the working group: since its beginning, we are also approaching the institution as archive. Coming back to Catherine's question, Czar notes that building care in working with institutions begins with an embryo, as a seed first - and the process we are sharing throughout this year is growing seeds. Staci picks this question up too, and notes how institutional work must begin first as a house in order to become a building. If we must dismantle the building, it also must become a house again - but does one let everyone enter their house? When to refuse, when to create opacities? Perhaps some knowledges should stay in the genealogy of certain communities, and not in the care of the institution.

Yasmin brings in notions of her own research to this question, wondering about traditions outside of the archive, and how this /"house/" is defined and built. As traditions evolve with culture, we must keep its relevances in check. For Staci, we must keep questioning whether preservation and care also means to obscure. When should the archive be laid to rest, and when should the institution give back the house to the communities?

As the chat continued to be alive with book recommendations and small notes, the evening had to be wrapped up - at least officially. We continued an informal discussion in our virtual bar, with our Zoom call taking on the energy of the drinks you share after the auditorium is closed. Setareh closed off with final goodbyes, leaving us with the thought that, in the institution, different cells in and out of the body can co-exist, in symbiosis.

We thank everyone who was present in all the different constellations, and are looking forward to the next gathering where we can share more updates and thoughts. Feel free to reach out to collectingotherwise@hetnieuweinstituut.nl and keep an eye on this web magazine.