Hannah Dawn Henderson at Rijksacademie Open StudiosHannah Dawn Henderson at Rijksacademie Open Studios

Both architectural and archival practices alike conceive and reinforce cultural propositions: value paradigms, societal norms, and the narratives by which we codify our understanding of collective identity and social imagination. In kind, in the context of Western tradition, both practices are typically occupied with durability -- aspiring to not only preserve their sheltered contents or inhabitants for as long as possible, but to also protect the fixity and longevity of their own infrastructure. The relation between infrastructure and inhabitant becomes all the more apparent when reflecting on the underlying operations of inclusion/exclusion exercised by archives and architectural visions -- the matter of who and what is hosted, and who and what isn't.

An architectural schematic -- commonly known as a 'blueprint', referring to the cyanotype technique that was formerly used to reproduce such drawings -- can be understood as a score for entering and walking through an imagined site, a psycho-sociological terrain. Drawing on the fact that blueprints are -- as much ironically as lyrically -- prone to fading and are therefore an impermanent medium, Blueprints, constructing the membrane of a temporary dwelling& proposes a reimagining of what constitutes an archival site -- materialising an ad-hoc architecture that sees story-telling interwoven with hermeneutics, diasporic sensibilities, opacities, and desiccated residuals of rituals.

Visual materials sourced from archival collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut, formerly the National Institute of Architecture, are haptically collaged alongside and amongst images, words and forms deriving from the Henderson's own idiosyncratic archive. This subjective collection recounts fleeting, collapsible enclosures and structures: one's anatomy, the memory of a family home damaged by a hurricane, and a ritually-constructed hut (a sukkah).

Through its narrative layering, the installation meditates on the thresholds of what can and cannot be documented, tensions between the effort to preserve and the inevitability of perishing (the loss of an image/imagination), and archival principles towards hosting bodies -- whether they be bodies traversing archival spaces or, alternatively, depicted bodies who have become housebound within an institutionalised collection.

In 2020, Henderson was invited to participate in Collecting Otherwise, a research project developed by Het Nieuwe Institute, part of the Rethinking the Collection initiative. Henderson became acquainted with three archival dossiers that prompt critical considerations regarding the ethics of the materials therein -- and, more broadly, the protocols and policies that surround the preservation and public mediation of such artefacts. These dossiers, belonging to HP. Berlage, A. Eibink and K. Limperg contain items such as travel photographs, illustrations, glass slides recollecting the individual's free-time interests -- artefacts that do not overtly relate to the projects that characterised the architect's professional practice.

In all three dossiers, Henderson observed an unsettling quality underlining the framing of human subjects, provoking the question: what are the implications of retaining images wherein the depicted subject may not have been able to exercise a sense of co-authorship over their depiction? That these subjects have been rendered as objects through the camera's lens or illustrator's hand is further enunciated by an awareness of both the historical-(geo)political context in which the images were produced and the contemporary circumstance of their preservation -- namely, the archive maintains these artefacts on account of the heritage value attributed to the lifework of the architect in question.

If the contents of these dossiers is understood as testifying to a violation inflicted upon the depicted subjects, then the question of how to handle and mediate these documents with care extends beyond the material nature of the document alone. If that violation cannot be rectified, can it be acknowledged without necessarily reiterating it? Through manipulating and abstracting how the viewer's gaze meets with these materials, often bringing the periphery and background to the centre of the visual field, Henderson visually interrogates these questions.

* artist statement text by Hannah Dawn Henderson