Architecture of AppropriationArchitecture of Appropriation

This conversation is part of the publication Architecture of Appropriation. On S__quatting as Spatial Practice.

René Boer: We are representing an institution that is collaborating with activist spaces that hold an ideology that is often anti-state. Het Nieuwe Instituut is, in fact, a state-run organization, the same state which criminalized squatting eight years ago. There is a tension between a state institution and activist practices that permeate the entire project of 'Architecture of Appropriation'. We'd like to reflect on these tensions together with you.

Amal Alhaag: There is indeed a conflict in the fact that these documents and practices are entering a state archive and, simultaneously, are produced outside that system, are deviant from how the state wants its citizens to perform citizenship, whether by building or by living.

R: Soon after the 'Architecture of Appropriation' exhibition opened at Het Nieuwe Instituut you also inaugurated the exhibition 'Whose Urban Appropriation Is It?' at TENTIn 2017 The Metro54 collective presented 'BLUEPRINT: Whose Urban Appropriation is This?', a multidisciplinary group exhibition and public program at TENT, a platform for contemporary art in Rotterdam, focusing on the relationship between street culture and architecture. Metro54 invited architects, designers, rappers, producers, and artists to show new and existing work that explores and articulates the complex relationship between architecture and street culture.. Both projects reflected on the notion of appropriation and explored the same tension, namely the collaboration between cultural institutions and collectives from very different backgrounds dealing with street culture.

A: I could not have done that project if I had not done certain projects previously, and engaged with the networks and people I collaborated with. TENT was a stage, but the project wasn't about the institution; we were interested in the site and location that they could offer us. It took us two years to build networks and relations in Rotterdam, to build the language that is local, embedded and co-owned by people who live there, before we even entered TENT. I think that Rotterdam was the right place to have conversations about questions of ownership, and the way appropriation was seeded also in popular culture. It had a lot to do with the city's urban planning, how people live there, and to whom the city center belongs. 10 years ago we could not have this conversation about street culture; street culture had a negative connotation. It is still criminalized, but at the same time it dominates popular culture and, simultaneously, is as much counter-culture as it is a form of refusal. Whether it's pop culture, mainstream, or not, it refuses what is the norm.

Marina Otero Verzier: A refusal of the norm. Could you elaborate on that?

A: You see it in the mentality of people. It is needed to create a setting from which to refuse the norm in which we find ourselves. I've been thinking for a very long time about this because people talk a lot about decolonial practices and projects, but it is actually not that easy to refuse that which is given to you. In the case of working with or within an institution, this is particularly relevant. It is about power relations. In the exhibition at TENT we were co-owners, and had our own resources, which allowed us to negotiate. That's a different type of departure point than when you are hosted, you are invited to work inside an institution and have to perform within a particular protocol you are given. I find that institutions often don't want to collaborate with you if you have an equal amount of resources and decision-making power, when you are in an equal power relationship.

R: Could or should an institution decorate itself with the culture that actually emerges on the street, and would the people participating benefit from presenting their own work in that context?

A: You could bring a different working methodology. The public program could help to create a space that can be activated. That is a combination, a formula that took me many years to fully develop. But as a formula, you can set that space up, and then people could choose whether to work with it or not. At the same time, a large part of the program could be a takeover, done by others. So people saw this methodology in TENT and thought, "If they can do it, then I can do it too," and approached the institution asking for space. Institutions should be a space for this to happen.

R: So you basically opened up the institution?

A: Yes, for me it's always an urgent aspect to really open up space; you allow different forms of being present, and accept that whoever wants to use the space can use it. And I think that is allowing people to appropriate, to change the language, but then someone else comes in and they reappropriate, then someone else comes in and they critique. What we didn't do was tell people what to do, we were not being paternalistic, in a sense, teaching people how to look, because in street culture the refusal means that you can't tell [anyone] anything.

Katía Truijen: Allowing for autonomy?

A: Yes in that sense, I think it's urgent. Because it's one of the pillars of counter-culture and street culture, that everything can be dismantled potentially, but at the same time it is about how we can use the space and transform it, to make use of where it is located, socially, that it is a place where people can say, "I already walked on that street, I grew up on that street." There is a particular relationship between people on that street, and for a long time it hasn't been their street anymore, or that's at least what people told me in the case of this exhibition. What does it mean when you are spatially alienated; when don't feel that some places are for you? The whole neighborhood near TENT, in the center of Rotterdam, is coded like that, but then it is of course to exclude the people we are trying to invite. Sometimes you don't need a 'door bitch', the way the cafés are decorated is a code, where a Dutch-Turkish person would say, "Ah - this isn't a place for me." There are informal tools and ways that design can communicate that people are not invited. What does it mean when you enter these spaces?

M: You are arguing that we can appropriate existing institutions and bring different discourses into them. In that sense, the main idea of the 'Architecture of Appropriation' project is to acknowledge that there is an archive of Dutch architecture and that it's mainly white men in there. So if we want to acknowledge unrepresented voices, and also think about what it is that we want to pass to future generations, we have to discuss who and what should be included at this point.

Yet, you could also claim that these institutions are, perhaps, obsolete. They are rooted in principles that are not based on diversity, they are not open to certain types of practices. That's why we are always wondering - should we appropriate these institutions and try to change them, or should we just let them collapse, and instead try to create new ones?

A: What does it actually mean to build institutions for yourself? Is it not arrogant to think that you don't fall into the same immediate traps? There's the thing about authorship - how do you break the rules of institutions when they have existed for thousands of years? We have to go around the world and look for different formulas, and remix them, and create a mixture of them. And then another option is to side-step all of that, and disregard the rules and the history and what the institution actually is. Almost repackaging it, temporarily. That doesn't mean that there's no space for critique or re-thinking, but to see it as a potential moment in time where you use it in the way you think is necessary, and then you disregard it. Like a temporary package, or home. What if institutions are a site that can be used for staging?

I think about the Tropenmuseum, where I work, because of the heaviness of the history of the building, the violence attached to the building and the collection, which is largely stolen. Originally you were never allowed to say that but now it is mentioned in some of the texts, especially in the Indonesian section. I think it's really okay if people remain angry and upset at the institution, and at the same time there is still potentially a space that can be used as a site of gathering, as a staging for whatever political goals. That's how the museum was a really good exercise for me. How can the museum be a stage where I can connect with people who have historical relationships with this place, which they haven't activated yet?

Some people tell me they are still angry, "I hate this place, the violence; there can't be any good about this building." I think it's a waste of time to be obsessed by the fact that the history of the place can be transformed, it cannot be transformed! How do we live with the heaviness of that history, or the violence of that history? And at the same time, what do people need, what do people desire, what discussions can happen? How do we talk about the violence that is attached? Whether it's the violence of keeping women out of the archive, or queer people out of the archive? I always wonder that we know it's white men, but there are so many other ways of being, where are all the people who are hidden in this archive?

M: We are now working in initiatives such as 'Queering the Archive' and 'Feminisms in the Archive'. The squatting project was, in fact, an attempt to create a new acquisition policy that would include collective, and often criminalized, practices inside the archive and recognize their legacy in the construction of the city. We had everything against us to make it happen, but repeating this possibility over and over again creates a public discussion to begin with. Sometimes people ask, "How come you are using public funding to do a project with squatters?" but others think its a very relevant endeavor. Even if surrounded by disagreement, the project allows us to imagine a different archive, and plant a seed of change inside the institutions and its different constituents.

R: I think this complicated position is very interesting. On the one hand there is the violence from the state, attacking these appropriated and squatted spaces, but at the same time an institution of the state is being used as a Trojan horse to open up to these practices. To occupy space within these state institutions. It's not a clear-cut thing.

M: In the project of Amal, she was saying something more, if I understood correctly. That the type of space and language she aims to facilitate inside the institution operates as a street, at street level. In our case, even though we are not only acknowledging gaps (both thematic and methodological) in the official historiography - such as feminism in architecture, queer perspectives, and collective and radically improvisational spatial practices - and working to reframe acquisition policies and include new documents, subjects, and media, our archive is nevertheless on top of pillars. It's not even connected to the street. In order to get into the archive you have to ask for permission. There are many layers in which this information is not accessible.

A: I've said before that archives are places where collections and objects go to die. There is a disconnected relationship to the objects, whether it's documents or something else. A lot of the things in public space, in the street, are not as valuable as the archive. The archive in that sense is an illusionary space of value creation, and the street is actually a simultaneously illusionary space, but for culture-making there is a friction in the street, the street cannot be controlled but, equally, the archive is uncontrollable.

There is a performance of containing the archive, and that I am very fascinated with - the desire to contain it, where there is all the time holes and silences and mess. If I think about some of the rooms in the museum where I work, there are whole collections of objects about Indonesia just gathering dust. But you can really smell the archive, it's not as if it's not living if it's not amongst you. But what I find very difficult sometimes is how do we undo the performance of keeping up the guard. It's like keeping up appearances. You know this inaccessibility, this performance of inaccessibility to recreate value over decades and centuries. At one point the objects become toxic, and you cannot touch them with your fingers.

R: I like this idea that things die within an archive, but they can also be reactivated, maybe in 150 years from now. When somebody looks into architecture in the Netherlands in 2018 they will see that somebody thought it was interesting to look at these kind of spatial practices. It dies, and it's inaccessible, but it's also part of the historic cycle.

M: I found the argument that Adeola Enigbokan defended in one of the workshops very interesting. She said maybe drawings like this should not be kept in the archive, maybe you have the archive for Architecture of Appropriation, or squatting in the Netherlands, but when you go to find the documents they are not there, you have to go to the places themselves. A networked, dispersed archive.

R: That's an interesting idea, but the archive at Het Nieuwe Instituut is an extremely well protected, fortified space.

A: It does look that way! But I wonder, do we not overestimate who wants to see this in 150 years; do we not overestimate the work we are doing now? Some things will be seen, but equally some things will be forgotten. But the percentage of what will be seen will be very small, and of course depends on the interest of people. These things are locked up in forts, but why are the forts not transparent? Why can I not see it from the outside and know it's the fort, and that the fort opens once a month? You know that there is something happening, of course it is for the future, but not for those that live in the present. It is contained forever, but the containment means that we, who are here now, cannot touch it or contaminate it.

This is a concern of mine - who is it we are saving it for? The national archives, and in particular the colonial archives, were as much about administration as anything else. Mostly to verify that no one was stealing from the empire or the system. It's so well documented, but I wonder sometimes to what extent it laid the model for how we archive today. It almost feels like archives were built not to preserve, but to preserve value.

R: There is a certain value system which has been put in place, full of biases and ideologies. But what we try to do is drag alternative values into this current value system.

A: To me, you are trying to experiment, to almost side step what the normative archive is. How one deals with it by already making these undesired connections. It can really be considered as a contamination of the archive! I think it's quite interesting that it's the unwanted, but it's equally important that it is a mapping of how people live together. What is erased or invisible. It is not only criminalized now but this act of living together in this way, against a normative nuclear family, is also considered criminal. There are so much politics and morals attached to squatting practices that are refused by those who want to keep up the appearances of the architecture archive.

M: We were willing and able to open up a more political discussion, by bringing this conversation to a national institute. What does it mean for cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam to dismantle these kind of spaces of communality and solidarity?

A: I think it is collectively accepted that it is improper citizenship to squat. It went so fast from a practice which was considered as a way to reclaim your city and tolerated, to being criminal. Even if houses and communities are legalized, or become more formal places for cohabitation, the role they play is still very undervalued. People don't remember how important it was for Amsterdam or Rotterdam. I am concerned because I don't think the topic fits in the algorithm of media sales in the Netherlands right now. It is trying to bring two worlds together, and use the value of the other to rethink how we value squatting practices. In that sense, I think an institution could be the right place for staging, but we also live in a moment when developers and city planners are really in a state of "We do not care because we know we can make money".

R: The work also has an impact on the conversations about heritage. At the moment there is a new focus on post-1975 heritage, while the first post-modernist buildings are being classified. We had interesting discussions about ADMADM was a large squatted terrain with an alternative micro-society in Amsterdam's western port area. It was squatted between 1987-1993 and 1997-2019., and all these self-built houses there, which could also be seen as heritage.The only documentation of these buildings is the work we have been doing.

A: I think the impact takes a long time sometimes. You know it disappears, the urgency is there, you know the impact might not be in the media, but it will be in the archive for people, for researchers. The actual documented correspondence work you have been doing will be present for people to actually work with. So far there hasn't been any material for people to work with to say, "This is what it is, this is how we can perhaps look at it", or be critical. It's like laying a blueprint.

R: The question of gatekeeping is also interesting, for example in the exhibition you have been making you are selecting who is going to be part of it. Same with us. We have made an arbitrary selection of places we found interesting for specific reasons. It's interesting, the role of the mediator between the activists or the street - we are mediating between the archive and the exhibition space. How do you see this role? How can it be democratized?

A: I often don't see it as a selection, but I see it as a way of being in relation with people. Because I don't work with people I collaborate with people through relations. But I try to erase myself from it, I try to minimally reproduce authorship. For example, for the project you didn't see my name. It's irrelevant, it's not about me. It is collaboratively run, we don't want to see our names. Undo the rules of authorship and play the mediator.

R: You are still making a selection of how the street is presented to the outside.

A: I invite people, I don't edit what people decide, I am really only extending the invitation. There was complete freedom, I really didn't interfere with such a major intervention. I didn't do the programming myself, and I didn't edit it. There is a layout to the invitation, what the parameters are of the invitation, and to a degree I am responsible for this but I can't take the credit fully because it is also based on other collective thinking. You are in conversation and on the shoulders of others in a way.

What I find complicated is the question "What is a democratic way of doing this?" Then there is the anarchistic ways of doing things, or democracy in the sense of having everyone vote. Then there is also the question of how to pay people properly. The financial model, how to move forward in an ethical way, so that people are not giving their time for free, and you are not benefitting from their knowledge. Everyone wants their name out there, and of course that's fine, it's about taking space and ownership. Thinking about what you are doing with power, allowing other people to take ownership.

R: We have created a blueprint which enables these spaces to enter the archive because it also needs to enter the archive in a specific way. But the gesture of entering the archive is already quite radical, so it needs to be structured to some extent. It's also a blueprint or a methodology that can be replicated for the future, and future practices. Allowing people in the future to also 'extend this invitation'.

A: The question is whether you are willing to step into the position of non-authorship. I think about this at the museum, how we work with new things entering the museum collection, because that's almost impossible. Recently I've been thinking how we can surpass the commissions. There is the center, there is the activation, the discourse, the dislike, the critique, and you attach it to the object. So in this case the objects become like flowers, they are no longer single entities which can be classified through a story of a missionary road in 1905.

It's something we are thinking about, but then you have to work with a collection, and sometimes it's difficult working with people. We are obsessed with the present and ephemeral things, sometimes things can be dismantled and taken away, but they are preservers. So you are not always on their side, you are a troublemaker in a way. How do you collaborate with people who don't necessarily see the benefit of rethinking objects?

It takes time - I mean three years ago I was talking about this idea of the flowers, but only now can I actually propose it, and test if it could potentially work, because yes, you can attach things to the object, but you can't attach other objects to the object. It can't be new work, as new work cannot enter. That's why your archive is in a step further, as there is space for new things to enter. Perhaps under certain conditions, but there is a blueprint for this, the blueprint could be very interesting for other museums who work around heritage to see what possibilities there are for rethinking about what goes in, and who the gatekeepers are for that.

R: The question is how we can open the doors?

A: If you want to change the basis of how the collection of an archive is seen, this could be a way, while potentially feeding it with new things. It doesn't even matter whether it will be used 150 years later, it already changes the structure that is built-in, and that's already an interesting proposition.