Queering the Collections Inspirational MeetingQueering the Collections Inspirational Meeting

In its most recent public presentation, Collecting Otherwise engaged with the Queering the Collections network, in an inspirational meeting that revealed points of connection across institutions and archives.

In recent years, and through different initiatives, Het Nieuwe Instituut has been bringing overlooked actors, unacknowledged agents, and forgotten stories into the discussion by examining the role that archives play in the construction of the history of cities and their inhabitants, as well as to contest institutional memory and the dominant historiography.
An example of current efforts is this project, Collecting Otherwise, which looks through feminist, queer, and decolonial lenses to highlight the often minority perspectives that are generally obscured by the standard architecture and archival practice.

The project is devoted to achieving this goal through its horizontal working group, collaborations, commissions and public programmes, mediating multiple scales present in processes around institutional archives. Working with these initiatives and their archives as case studies, Collecting Otherwise hopes to shed light on the objects, systems and processes entangled with intersectional, international and intergenerational notions of feminist and queer spatial practice, and to re-inscribe them into the national collection and disciplinary history.

The ways we have engaged with the case studies are subject to continuous reshaping and unfolding of thought, as we continue to recognise particularities of the case study archives. Through explicitly making public of our research, which does not mean we strive for full exhibitionist disclosure, we imbue the archives with a networked, non-linear mentality. These archives require a certain methodological specificity, as they relate to particular contexts of friction. Taking note of these frictions and pressure points we critically harness discomfort. We refuse to fall into the tropes and categories the archive as such extends to us. We choose to make kin (following Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing), to listen to images: /"They are photographs that affect me and images in which I see a multitude of things./" (Tinna Campt), to unravel the ethics of custodial care (asking who cares), to question the liberal mode of making accessible and quantifiable, as the colonial archive is seen as /"a site of endless promise/" (Anjali Arondekar).

An example of contextual friction and kin can be found in the photo album of Wim den Boon, one of the explicit traces of queer life in the collection, and that was first encountered by us through snippets of scanned pages earlier shown by conserver Alfred Marks during institutional programmes. The typology of the album in essence evokes a hapticity, which Campt describes as /"not merely a question of physical touch. It is the link between touching and feeling, as well as the multiple mediations we construct to allow or prevent our access to those affective relations./"

This loss of context led to a perceivement of the images as almost too extraordinary. The sequence of scanned pages without the binder holding them together made the depicted desire to be free seem too unhinged from his _keurige _(/"proper/") self. We were only confronted with the interstitial space, the gap, in between the neatly positioned photographs. We found visiting the source material, physically engaging with this album in the context of the other (unscanned) photo albums donated by Wim's brother, nurturing our thoughts - seeing how the queer life seeped into other facets of his being, refusing the relegation to silence.

By visiting and engaging with the physical archive, through this tactility and direct engagement, connections, side notes, annotations and watermarks become tangible and start conversations. A kinship with and through the material allows us to look at the case studies with more complex, multilayered lenses than previously thought. A narrative is being told and made closer, where we can counter an abyssal thinking, one where /"the realm of /"this side of the line/" and the realm of /"the other side of the line/" does not exist and we think-with the archive. One could extend Haraway's concepts of kinship into thinking archival encounters as tentacular, as diving into the material also means to engage in side conversations, in asterisks and footnotes, conversations connecting multiple parts of the whole.

The digital gaze offers a different context in which the archive is presented to us: through hyperlinks, codes, tabs opened on the side, a two dimensional image. In the coming months, we will continue to reflect on the implications of accessibility and contextual encounters within the digital archive, particularly in its frictions of opacity and transparency, and the need to extend the tentacles of archival kin into the screens of participants and audience.

On another hand, through engaging with the process of acquiring an archive, from the case study Vrouwen Bowen en Wonen, we were met with the /"sanitisation/" that personal and living room archives go through in order to enter institutions. The documents that had previously hosted a myriad of multi-species, in human and more-than-human kinships, is meticulously arranged, cleaned, categorised according to institutional inventories, and made data. We are left with questions of how to preserve the living room, the personal annotations or the asterisks that archives go through during their time before becoming part of a formal institution.

To connect back to the refusal of archival tropes, we continuously ask how we can reappropriate and rethink the /"master's tools/" to dismantle and rebuild new houses, and how to materialise tools differently as part of the process of rethinking and doing otherwise.

Collecting Otherwise engages with an intersectional working group interrogating a monovocal archival gaze using a work in progress method. Collective knowledge is produced in and around the working meetings, where a multi-scalar approach to the material and the subsequent methodological and critical questions. In the praxis of writing otherwise, we engage in on-going secretarial and documentation work, through the Lysergic Secretary notion.It aims not only to extend research into all its pores and to become the project's archive, but to emphasise previously hidden roles and labour, such as the secretary. The Lysergic Secretary is a collective body, present in our Etherpad for keeping notes, writing ideas, and communicating.

This summary of what was shared during the meeting precedes the discussion taking place afterwards, in an open conversation with Eliza Steinbock and Olle Lundin. Some of the key points of our exchange include working in groups and within institutions, how to care for the process, its members and the archive, and the urgency in oral histories and dialogue in making heritage. You can read -- and comment -- on the notes taken during the event in our Etherpad.