Opening Up Architectural and Building Archives
On 25 January, project member Setareh Noorani was invited to take part in a seminar series to co-explore collecting, curating and exhibition processes that extend what constitutes an architectural, building or city-based archive. The Opening Up Architectural and Building Archives project is particularly interested in how more ephemeral artefacts - often part of collections-in-progress that include users and community-based perspectives - can manage their inherent precarity and maintain equality as they move into institutional spaces.
21 February 2022
The session will be led by Barbican curator Jon Astbury with Matrix feminist architecture collective co-founder and Bartlett lecturer Jos Boys.
The planned outcome for the Opening Up Architectural and Building Archives project is an open-ended and open access web-based compilation of key terms and concerns, with entries written from many different perspectives and in a variety of voices. The participants will share the emerging online prototype with you nearer the event, as well as a MIRO board where participants can share their own projects, concepts, principles, tools and practices around engaging with architectural, building and city archives. They also hope to do some collaborative entry writing during the Zoom session to add to this prototype website, with all contributors of course credited.
This project is in line with our work on Collecting Otherwise, and particularly our focus on Digital Solidarity, which extends to thinking with and through the case studies concerning networking and care, to providing further context and other voices to archival descriptions, and employing open-source tools in the making of collective and public knowledge. While still in development and with a second part coming, you can read some connections between one of the Case Studies and our Methodogies-in-development concerning Digital Solidarity here.
From annotating to documenting, distributing publications or newsletters -- the written, and most importantly, collective word, builds up towards our own networked solidarity within and across the institution. Non-extractivist, open-source technologies can offer alternatives from big data, in a digital "card catalogue", but that ties in knots of references, notes, thoughts. Etherpad, as well as MIRO, is one of the ways we can write Otherwise: the network present is international and interdisciplinary, and the multivocality amplified by the fact that each user has a different colour, makes for a collective writing that does not erase voices but enhances particularities to strengthen collaborations.