Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2020Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2020

Exactly a year ago, it all sounded so self-evident. A review of the past year, which appeared on the site of Het Nieuwe Instituut on 31 December 2019, discussed the opening of _I See That I See What You Don't See_. Having previously been seen as part of the Milan Triennale, this project now came home to Rotterdam. The triennial investigated the disruptive and sometimes disastrous influence of humans on the planet, partly as a result of our design activities. Perhaps, the organisers assumed, our design strength could also be used in the recovery. I See That I See What You Don't See focused on a world in which there no longer seems to be room for the night, with all the disastrous consequences that entails. The review states that Het Nieuwe Instituut welcomed more than 1,000 people at the opening. And then there was the symposium. It's described as though it were the most natural thing in the world: /"In a packed auditorium, the visitors listened to presentations with darkness as their main theme./" More than 1,000 visitors on a Saturday in September, with a packed auditorium on top. Now, 365 days on, amid the reality of the 1.5-metre society, it sounds like a surreal dream.

Along with the rest of society, including our fellow institutions in the cultural field, Het Nieuwe Instituut has had to reinvent itself over the past year. Sometimes, decisions had to be made that were downright painful for employees - for example, when the organisation of Het Nieuwe Café had to be dismantled. This illustrated, once again, the vulnerability of a structure that seems built on such solid foundations, under the label of /"cultural infrastructure./" Ultimately, it's all about people, and their sometimes fragile dreams and perspectives. With regard to the actual housing of the institute and its direct ecological environment of the Museum Park, the development of a sustainability vision is an important step in the right direction. To this end, the energy consumption and waste flows surrounding the institute's activities have been mapped together with the City of Rotterdam and Wageningen University.

The year had just started when the 2021-2024 Activity Plan was submitted within the framework of the Basic Culture Infrastructure (BIS) application. In this plan, the institute describes how inclusivity and multivocality are guiding principles for its programme, working method and the structure of its own organisation.The Activity Plan mainly focuses on the projects that the institute undertakes via the Agency for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture to support the professional field. These include successful components such as the International Visitors Programme and the Travelling Academy, and, for example, the Dutch contribution to the Biennale di Architettura in Venice.

However, the ink was barely dry when countless of these activities - which are often a continuation of proven practice - were returned to the drawing board. At the last minute, the biennale was cancelled, postponed for a year. And how about the visitors from abroad? How can you welcome curators, journalists and others wanting to familiarise themselves with the current state of architecture, design or digital culture in the Netherlands, when they cannot travel and are not allowed to meet the local design community? What do you show them when exhibitions, symposiums and events are cancelled across the country? How do you share knowledge with the rest of the world via the network of diplomatic posts if there is virtually no physical exchange?

These are some arbitrary examples of the issues that have distinguished 2020 from previous years on every level. Of course, a lot did go on. For example, Research launched a new Call for Fellows. This year entitled _Regeneration. New Institutional Practices_, it aimed in particular at participation by collectives. They were asked to submit proposals based on the previous themes, Burn-out and Planetary Exhaustion, as the starting points for collective forms of organisation and action. Out of 198 entries from all over the world, the jury chose two collectives to set to work in October 2020: O grupo inteiro from Brazil and the London-based Resolve Collective.

The absurd reality of 2020 quickly accelerated a number of transformations within the organisation aimed at setting up a digital home in line with new aspirations and priorities, in addition to the physical housing of the institute. One example is the development of the open source web environment Enter, which will eventually offer a user-friendly and human-based alternative to the heavily criticised software of certain American tech giants.

A crowd-puller like the Thursday Night Live! programme switched seamlessly to Het Nieuwe Instituut's online channel. Weekly digital newsletters and web magazines let the public share in the many activities which the institute continued to promote. The regular Sunday walks led by the /"detour guides/" - the so-called Sunday Strolls - were transformed into Sunday Scrolls, joint explorations of the digital world. A workshop by the artists Charlie Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp took the guise of a /"week-long course/" in which the international group of participants - quite appropriately - worked online on the design of spaces for inner reflection. And via the channels of e-flux Architecture, a series of reflections on monuments and commemoration processes started in the autumn, following the current discourse on controversial statues. Het Nieuwe Instituut also manifested itself in public space. For example, in Rotterdam metro stations where Shertise Solano and Marcel van den Berg showed their commissioned works sharing visions of Black Lives Matter with the travelling public.

Of course, there were exhibitions - even if sometimes they were allowed to receive only an extremely limited audience. As an embodiment of the /"healthy home/" from the heyday of the Nieuwe Bouwen movement, Sonneveld House hosted an audio tour specially created around the highly topical theme of hygiene. Based on its own research, Research developed the _Lithium_ exhibition, which, in the shape of a spa, explored both the benevolent and the harmful aspects of the never-ending human search for energy. And Lou Stoppard put together a much-discussed exhibition about the hooded top with _The Hoodie_. This piece of clothing has a seemingly endless range of associations, from stories about youth culture and social inequality to themes such as privacy and fear. With the on-site programme _The Hoodie Unravelled_, Rotterdam design collective Concrete Blossom addressed the many different themes in a series of (private) workshops, public lectures, mini-exhibitions and (online) films.

The forced rationing of the number of visits, in combination with the increasing use of online media, tempted the institute to reflect on the added value of a physical visit and the specific context that only an exhibition can offer. With Only for You, it makes this experience - during times when visitors are allowed - unique. Every day, a single visitor has the exhibition space to themselves for half an hour. In return, the institute asks this person to afterwards share their sensations of the exclusive experience.

How essential the exhibition as a spatial experience can be became perfectly visible in _Art on Display 1949-69_. This exhibition, realised in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, had its first edition in Portugal. The focus was on some of the most progressive post-war exhibition designs, created by architects Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini and Franca Helg, Lina Bo Bardi, Aldo van Eyck, and Alison and Peter Smithson. For the presentation in Rotterdam, the Belgian architect Jo Taillieu realised a new exhibition environment that gave _Art on Display 1949-69 _a place in Het Nieuwe Instituut's ongoing series of 1:1 reconstructions. From a temporary studio in the heart of the installation, the opening programme took the form of a series of live-streamed salons with contributions from, among others, museum directors Penelope Curtis (Gulbenkian) and Rein Wolfs (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), architect Lada Hrsak and critic Anna Tilroe.

For a year in which the phenomenon of the exhibition suddenly took on such a different meaning, an astonishing number of exhibitions were actually made. _Atelier Nelly and Theo van Doesburg_ put the spotlight on the extensive _Disclosing Architecture_ programme, which is undertaking the restoration and digitisation of architectural drawings and photos from the National Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning until 2025. By not - as usual - putting Theo centre stage, but rather by examining Nelly van Doesburg's crucial role in the creation, preservation and promotion of his work, the exhibition opened up new perspectives. Beyond the format of the classic archive exhibition, the curators and designers Koehorst in 't Veld were able to take the visitor on a journey of discovery that stretched far beyond the national collection. It also became clear how essential digitisation has become for the development of new narratives: they appeared to literally reveal themselves in the exhibition, between the various online archives and collections.

In collaboration with the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a programme was created around film and artist collectives that also offer an alternative to the dominant stories. This theme dovetailed seamlessly with _For the Record_, the ongoing research project on contemporary music videos as a public space for activism, commerce and emancipation. In addition to (online) conversations, performances and rituals, there were two central installations: _G/D Thyself: Spirit Strategy On Raising Free Black Children_ by the multidisciplinary artists' collective The Ummah Chroma (Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, Kamasi Washington, Mark Thomas and Bradford Young), and the installation _Set Stage Screen: Realities of Postproduction_. Through these, visitors came into contact with aspects of transcendence, spirituality and various forms of self-expression: themes that suddenly appeared to acquire a completely different meaning.

In addition to realising the exhibitions and surrounding activities, the organisation was able to programme several conferences and symposia, and various publications were released, including _Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture_ and the _More-than-Human_ reader. The aforementioned long-term programme Disclosing Architecture has continued to work on the restoration (unfortunately with a delay) and digitisation of design drawings from the national collection. In this, the three pillars are sustainability, usability and visibility, and these also form the foundation that is guiding government policy regarding heritage.

The year 2020 provided an opportunity to reflect on the current significance of heritage in the design disciplines. That process of consideration is vital for the selection process within Disclosing Architecture. It is physically impossible to restore and digitise all the drawings and photos in the national collection. Moreover, this thinking is also indispensable for Het Nieuwe Instituut as a whole. After all, from 2021, the institute will function as a heritage institution with a number of supporting tasks. This shifts the heritage task to the core of the organisation, as was laid down at the end of the year in the Heritage Activities Plan 2021-2024. In line with its assignment, Het Nieuwe Instituut wants to approach this domain in the same innovative way as it has done so far with exhibition models, research practices and themes, design assignments, education programmes and, for example, the formation of cross-disciplinary partnerships.

An important step in the further profiling of the heritage task has taken shape this year as the Network Archives Design and Digital Culture, which will be coordinated and provided with content-oriented input by Het Nieuwe Instituut. After years of apparent stagnation, and building on initial research from 2019, a few weeks ago an online launch allowed the creation of an archive facility for the design disciplines that have no place in the national collection. Up until now, the design and digital culture sectors have had to do without a coherent memory. The network of archive creators and managers will now build a bridge between the many sub-archives, sharing them with the world via a central digital access point. The focus is explicitly on the users. They will be actively involved in researching and enriching the collections - and so helping to question the prevailing canon in these design domains on the basis of multivocality.

In fact, this ambition applies to the entire programme that Het Nieuwe Instituut hopes to realise in 2021: generating involvement, activating it, jointly developing new visions and always involving new groups in that process. And hopefully we will meet again in a well-filled auditorium, or at the opening of a new exhibition.