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

Both architectural and archival practices create and reinforce cultural propositions: value paradigms, social norms and the narratives through which we codify our understanding of collective identity and social imagination. In the context of the Western tradition, both practices are typically concerned with permanence – seeking not only to preserve their protected contents or inhabitants for as long as possible, but also to protect their own infrastructure. The relationship between infrastructure and inhabitant becomes even more apparent when we consider the operations of inclusion and exclusion that underlie archives and architecture – the question of who and what is housed, and who and what isn’t.

An architectural plan – commonly known as a ‘blueprint’, referring to the technique once used to reproduce such drawings – can be understood as a score for entering and walking through an imagined place, a psycho-sociological terrain. Drawing on the fact that blueprints – ironically and lyrically – tend to fade and are therefore an impermanent medium, the installation Blueprints, constructing the membrane of a temporary dwelling proposes a reimagining of what constitutes an archival site. The result is an ad-hoc architecture in which storytelling is interwoven with hermeneutics, diasporic sensibilities, opacities and the desiccated remains of rituals.

Visual material from the archival collection of the Nieuwe Instituut, formerly the Netherlands Architecture Institute, is haptically collaged alongside and between images, words and drawn from the artist's own idiosyncratic archive. This subjective collection tells of ephemeral, collapsible enclosures and structures: one’s own 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, on the tensions between the effort to preserve and the inevitability of perishing (the loss of an image or imagination), and on the archival principles of housing bodies – be they bodies traversing archival spaces or, alternatively, represented bodies housed within an institutionalised collection.

In 2020, Henderson was invited to participate in Collecting Otherwise, a research project developed by the Nieuwe Institute as part of the Rethinking the Collection initiative. Henderson was introduced to three archives that invite critical reflection on the ethics of the materials they contain – and, more broadly, on the protocols and policies surrounding the preservation and public mediation of such artefacts. These archives, those of H.P. Berlage, A. Eibink and K. Limperg, contain items such as travel photographs, illustrations and glass slides that recall the individual’s leisure interests – artefacts that are not overtly related to the projects that characterised the architect’s professional practice.

In all three archives, Henderson observes an unsettling quality that underlines the framing of human subjects and provokes the question: what are the implications of retaining images in which 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 by the lens of the camera or the hand of the illustrator is further underlined by an awareness of both the historical-(geo)political context in which the images were produced and the contemporary circumstances of their preservation – namely, that the archive maintains these artefacts because of the heritage value attributed to the life’s work of the architect in question.

If the content of these archives is understood as a testimony to a violation inflicted on the subjects depicted, then the question of how to handle and mediate these documents with care goes beyond the material nature of the document itself. If this violation cannot be repaired, can it be acknowledged without necessarily repeating it? By manipulating and abstracting how the viewer’s gaze encounters these materials, often bringing the periphery and background to the centre of the visual field, Henderson visually interrogates these questions.