Gathering #4: Soft ClosingGathering #4: Soft Closing

In a reflection on the first year of Collecting Otherwise, the lens during this iteration -- Seen/Unseen: Intersectional Feminism and Gender Queer in the HNI Collection -- provided a path through which to formulate new visions of the standard archival and design practice, embodied in tools and insights that continue to feed back into the Case Studies. These are driven by the objectives: Selection & Value, Acquisition Methods, Visibility and Accessibility. Keeping these objectives as core goals for structural change allow for a larger strategy that instigates change, reflection and public engagement in thinking through and with the archive. While policy interventions -- by thinking through Contracts and Relationships -- work in the institutional and internal level, keeping Education and Digital Solidarity as parallel focus allows for work on the visibility of the archive, engaging with the local and international communities kin to the objects and thus speak with larger constituencies and continue to regenerate research.

As we will continue to adopt and adapt these tools to present newly acquired study cases, they will move in a constant process of permanent reflection: we do not intend to find dogmatic answers or to fill any void or gap. We intend to build bridges over these voids, to do research as collective and collaborative work, and in this institutional labour, ask ourselves what bodies do the work?

What mechanisms of collecting have been in place? How can we track the visibility of labour (intersectional, international, intergenerational) in the archived projects? How can we reflect on these activisms and connect the efforts to current struggles for freedom and recognition? How can we reflect on the male architect's gaze (racially) constructing the feminine, non-binary, Othered body?

Once everyone was kept up to date and celebratory recaps were made, we welcomed to the digital stage our first guest speaker, Federica Notari, a multimedia transdisciplinary researcher. As part of the team for a few months over this year, Federica was able to formulate an overarching and poignant understanding of the practice of care in the archive, in Collecting Otherwise, and in all the in-between spaces we embody and inhabit. With a practice that focuses on questioning how we navigate space, how it informs us, and how we belong to space, her contributions brought criticality, theory and new affective lenses through which to see and live the archive as present, constructed, ever-moving body. Recognising these features, we can begin to question: what didn't make it to the archive, what was not deemed worthy of collecting? What other matters survive through other types of remembrance, and what social tools are employed for collective memory?

With these prompts in mind, care can be a lens and practice that brings forward non-institutional ways of being, reparations and regenerations, and hope in forgetting.

As a respondent to this contribution, we invited Working Group member, artist, and builder Harriet Rose Morley to join Federica in thinking through some of her reflections. Harriet's practice in community-centred art, research and contributions to the Archival Care Rider have been key anchors in the project. Harriet and Federica discussed the layers of access and bodies that come to an institution when an archive enters it, and the possibilities of making them visible and present -- through rituals, gesture, consent and conversations. As labour of care, archival work is not, for Harriet, like the care labour at home, as institutions usually aren't. From practical bureaucratic matters to making public, to unsustainable labour to consent, the walls and space of the archive are not the same as watching back childhood videos at home. It's in this architecture of structures, in this geography of online matrixes, that different conversations need to happen to acknowledge -- perhaps not the institution as home -- but the archives as home in themselves, single objects as multiple stories, community carers and carriers. As we see remembering and archiving as collective (national) identity, Federica points to the hope in forgetting, disappearing. Perhaps then there is space to unitying the hierarchical narratives in place and construct others, other ways to belong. If the archive does not hold us, we can find other ways to be held. In this process, Harriet finishes the conversation with the need to rethink how we make archives public, particularly in how important it is to find different meanings through intra institutional networks. Making public comes with building narratives that are our responsibility to tell truthfully, inclusively, otherwise. These thoughts are unfolded in Federica's essay contribution, which you can read here.

After the past, comes the present and the future. For this, Collecting Otherwise took this gathering's opportunity to expand on next year's plans and intentions. Our interest in 2022 lies in the complication of 'here-there', the export and import of design and archival sentiments, within a globalised reality. This includes often overruled, exoticised, extracted, and Othered indigenous practice and labour. Collecting Otherwise considers also the current and future potentials of decolonial agency within the diasporic condition, narrating an empowered self from reclaiming (im)material heritage and design languages surrounding this heritage. As new study cases will be brought in, others from this past year continue to be relevant, in the ever present intersectional lens we look at the collection with. Untying more layers of meaning, access, and his/her/theystories that a single object or archive can tell. In the coming year, seen/unseen remains present as we research some of the same archives in their colonial ties.

Together with the Working Group, new project cells will come into fruition. The next iteration will remain generative and always ongoing. We look forward to more community engagement, fleshed out projects and ongoing public research that will remain the driver of Collecting Otherwise in rethinking decoloniality -- the past, present and future dimensions of architecture and archives.

The second guest speaker of the evening welcomed in the Zoom call, all the way from Indonesia, is Robin Hartanto Honggare, researcher and PhD candidate at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. During these past months, Robin was also a visiting fellow at het Nieuwe Institute, which gave us the opportunity to connect and share research interests, learning from the enriching practice in uncovering stories from the Indonesian plantations during Dutch colonial rule and the ties with architecture and Het Nieuwe Insituut's collection. The first connection was unraveled through a visit to House Sonneveld -- inhabited by Van Nelle's manager, a major tobacco and coffee manufacturer, a key player in the colonial industrial complex. What stories are made visible and invisible when history protects the buildingsVan Nelle factory is now a UNESCO heritage site and House Sonneveld is a museum-house part of Het Nieuwe Instituut. so immensely tied with exploitation and violence? And how do we collect otherwise to decolonize the archives? Beyond gestures of returning, perhaps more is needed -- Decolonization needs more than metaphors, concrete acts of involvement, material contributions to the dispossessed. The role of the archive here lies in telling the marginalized stories previously unseen, in repairing damage, in opening access, questioning and living in the intersection of the collection and colonial practices.

In the Zoom screen we see archival material that shows photographs and plans of these plantations, particularly focused on more than 300 Sumatra plantations. What was once a rich, dense, and heterogeneous land is cut in violent lines, turning the landscape into capital machines: visible is both land and archives, in maps, plans and real life. Although these documents are often not in an architecture collection, Robin highlights the central role that the designs of the buildings take: they define the process of extractions, the spaces for workers, the communal and private areas. It becomes crucial to understand space in its impactful dimensions on people's lives. What were their memories? What would be an archive that speaks for these people? To act in this archive, to turn to the subject who is dispossessed, is something that requires acts of states, individuals, and institutions. Decolonization is not an individual research project, it doesn't happen inside an archive only. Decolonisaitoon takes collective, infrastructural action. In these lines, we are left with the call to involve more bodies and more action beyond intellectual inquiry, beyond research.

Back in the Zoom room, we open the floor to the audience: Setareh starts by highlighting one aspect that strikes us: The terror of the mundane, the violence enacted when colonial buildings are now made into housing in gentrified neighboorhouds. In this paradox, we ask how to enact the redress and how to decentralise? Although there are no quick solutions, the concept of the common, of making common within collection can offer some lenses: Digital solidarity, as a key tool in Collecting Otherwise, offers possibilities for how we can use collections from the institution as common objects that can be accessed from far away, a narrative reparation, access justice. We also question not just what is collected, but who is collecting. We see decolonial future collectors as an ongoing labour -- in diverse working groups, in bringing together different views on 'collection' and its materiality, in changing the locus of the collection and the tiers of its accessibility.

Back in the Zoom room, we open the floor to the audience: Setareh starts by highlighting one aspect that strikes us: The terror of the mundane, the violence enacted when colonial buildings are now made into housing in gentrified neighboorhouds. In this paradox, we ask how to enact the redress and how to decentralise? Although there are no quick solutions, the concept of the common, of making common within collection can offer some lenses: Digital solidarity, as a key tool in Collecting Otherwise, offers possibilities for how we can use collections from the institution as common objects that can be accessed from far away, a narrative reparation, access justice. We also question not just what is collected, but who is collecting. We see decolonial future collectors as an ongoing labour -- in diverse working groups, in bringing together different views on 'collection' and its materiality, in changing the locus of the collection and the tiers of its accessibility.

We close the evening with an online seance performance, by the dearest To be Determined-Trojan Horse Cell, a constellation of bodies and spirits that go across continents. The medium introduced the summoning proposal, we summoned the other spirits to speak through her and with the audience. In magical narratives, we were presented with other ways of archiving, of telling and of being present. A perfect end to this year, and a perfect beginning of what will still be revealed.

We don't just want to collect, as if it were an act of appropriation or extraction. We want to gather, cradling things that are precious and nourishing to us. We want to propose a gathering, physically with each other, a reunification of spirits that have been roaming apart.

Collecting Otherwise would like to thank all the Working Group members, participants, guests, audience and friends who shared this evening and this year with us. We look forward to further growing this community soon.