Disclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and InnovationDisclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and Innovation

Text: Delany Boutkan, Mayim Frieden, Anya Naumova and Setareh Noorani

Born out of a sense of institutional and societal urgency, Collecting Otherwise has developed into a long-term project that encourages collaboration with other archival and heritage initiatives. During four years of activism, research and exchange, much has been learned about rethinking the place of built heritage, the responsibilities of memory work in institutional settings and the actions necessary to enact redress within an archival community. Questions about the agency of such communities, the accessibility of archival material, and the place of living archives within museums and collections have been at the heart of our work.

Collecting Otherwise advances the intentions of Disclosing Architecture. While maintaining and increasing the accessibility of the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, both initiatives critically question the assumed neutrality of such a collection. They disentangle, collect and disclose marginalised perspectives. Collecting Otherwise raises deep and sometimes disruptive questions about the rationale of priority and capacity – arguing for slower, annotative and collaborative processes. There have thus been cyclical processes of opening up collections to engagement.

This has been challenging at times, as it involves changing an institutional culture to recognise and champion under-represented roles, practices and perspectives in archives. Many of these roles, practices, and perspectives overlap with institutionally minoritised positions, requiring a deliberately open-ended and co-creative process. Ultimately, Collecting Otherwise proved to be an inspiring model of networked and rhizomatic collaboration within an institutional setting, and a productive entity working to test and embed new tools for collective archival practice.

Collecting Otherwise is positioned in line with a series of research and programming endeavours – entitled Archive Explorations – from 2016 onwards. These address thematic, methodological and socio-cultural gaps in the collection. Notable examples include The Architecture of Appropriation (2017), The Decolonial Gaze (2018), and Queer Houses and Places (2019). Disclosing Architecture has been an additional influence, encouraging an institutional reappraisal of the National Collection in an accessible and collaborative way. Beginning as a primarily speculative and exploratory process, Collecting Otherwise took shape as the need for material and practical interventions within the collection became apparent, with potential interventions identified along the way.
Over the past decade, the gaps inherent in institutional collections and archives have become an urgent focus. This work has been driven by legitimate grievances and demands on institutions, followed by widely accepted and ongoing attempts to decolonise institutional practices. In public institutions worldwide, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests have catalysed a broader wave of critical engagement. For museums and archives in particular, this has meant a re-evaluation of the institution as a site of inclusion and equity. But, as Sara Ahmed writes in Complaint!, “When you pose a problem, you expose a problem.” Such complaints, in which marginalised communities are responsible for exposing the marginalisation of their voices, documents and histories, and for pushing for their inclusion at the centre, require a fundamental shift in habits within institutional processes and institutional memory. New practices of openness and conviviality, but also of rigour in thinking through ‘redress’, are crucial. This means collectively creating the space for the archival community “to collect for themselves”, exploring how processes and outputs should shift according to the needs of collaborators.

Incorporating the findings and methodologies of earlier, aligned activities with case studies from the archival collection, Collecting Otherwise has worked to shift the Nieuwe Instituut’s monographic collecting policy towards one that embeds collective practices. Specifically, Collecting Otherwise has introduced contemporary paradigms into the collection, such as feminist ethics of care, post-custodial thinking, herstory methodologies, embodied archiving, and the collective harvesting of labour. We have often drawn on the work of feminist and decolonial thinkers including Audre Lorde, Fred Moten, Sumaya Kassim and Édouard Glissant, and archival scholars and historians such as Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler, Marika Cifor and Michelle Caswell. In preserving these traces of work, we built on what would later become one of our core project principles: neighbourly borrowing. The borrowing of (collective) knowledge, tools, and methodologies, foregrounding a practice of openness and sustainability of labour.

Opposing and resisting the traditional characterisation of heritage as a neutral and objective inheritance, Collecting Otherwise explores how certain collecting decisions are and have been made, how collecting practices have evolved, and how the enduring consequences of these protocols can be ameliorated. Reflecting on all those who have been excluded and erased by the established collecting policies and practices, the tools of Collecting Otherwise have been assembled, disassembled, maintained, borrowed and discarded.

Underpinning and inspiring the work of Collecting Otherwise is the Collecting Otherwise Working Group, formed in 2021. Consisting of an international, multidisciplinary and endlessly curious group of thinkers from the fields of architecture, design, and heritage, our Working Group meets monthly online, both as a whole and in our sub-groups (cells) to catch up, exchange ideas and further.explore each project. It was a novel approach to propose, work in and maintain a long-term working group at the Nieuwe Instituut. By putting the ethics, commitments and convictions of Collecting Otherwise into practice, the Working Group has continuously demonstrated how collaboration within an institution can resist the urgent, temporal and logistical nature of institutional working practices. Our meetings revolve around the tools, projects, and ambitions of Collecting Otherwise, but welcome skill swaps, personal anecdotes and everything from Youtube clips to emoji-decorated words of encouragement in the chat room. As well as being one of the tools within the Tool Shed itself, the members of the Working Group brainstorm, materialise and contemplate the Collecting Otherwise tools together.

Collecting Otherwise has been guided by its annual iterations: Seen/Unseen (2021), Post/De/Colonial (2022), Tool Shed (2023), and Tool Shed: Borrowing, Maintaining, Shedding (2024). During each iteration, we began to collaboratively and intuitively assemble our tools and imagine our tool shed. This process involved meetings and brainstorming with the Collecting Otherwise Working Group, public gatherings exploring shared curiosities, exhibitions, and international collaborations and conversations. The Tool Shed represents and contains both the ideas behind Collecting Otherwise and the methodologies that we have developed together.

The Collecting Otherwise Tool Shed has multiple entry points and is defined by its open access, inviting acts of ‘neighbourly borrowing ‘to occur. Our Tool Shed aims to share and exchange resources between archival and heritage-related communities, activities and institutions that are also exploring, researching, and developing reparative archival practices. This Tool Shed foregrounds the process of redress, not only through the borrowing of workable tools, but also through the (re)distribution of skills, the collective attunement to particular cases or phenomena, and an overarching sensitivity to how we engage with the archival traces of heritage.

The Collecting Otherwise Tool Shed consists of the tools identified and developed to date: the Collecting Otherwise Working Group, the Archival Care Rider, Asterisk*, Oral Histories/Herstories, Mapping Collective Memories, the Trans-Institutional Supra Archive, and the Network Archive, as well as process-oriented learning from the spin-off projects Dutch-Indonesian Design Exchanges, Resituating Colonial Archives, and Sonneveld Paducah. The tools in our Tool Shed address different aspects of the dynamic between archival material and host institution, such as its acquisition or description. The Archival Care Rider, for example, offers an alternative approach to the acquisition of archival material, whereby the host institution asks about the logistical and technical needs of both the material and the donor, and can, in turn, care for them during and after the acquisition process. Asterisk* is a tool for describing archives; we use the Asterisk* as a footnote to archival materials, allowing for alternative titles and additional information and perspectives to be added. In turn, traditionally misrepresented or underexposed items in the collection can be better contextualised, while also reaching a wider audience as more information is added.

A set of five manuals for each of the Collecting Otherwise tools: Asterisk*, Archival Care Rider, Mapping Collective Histories/(de)tours, Working Groups, and Sonneveld Paducah, have been produced to mark the further shedding and seeding of Collecting Otherwise and its Tool Shed. Each manual outlines the development and implementation of its respective tool, with the intention of guiding other archival institutions or archival efforts through the process and thus inspiring similar interventions to emerge. Our manuals encourage neighbourly borrowing of our tools, so that our Tool Shed can continue to maintain, shed and travel beyond the institutional timeframe of Collecting Otherwise. We hope that the promising results of a shared, open tool shed will continue to unfold, and that processes of archival redress can remain ongoing – beyond Collecting Otherwise as a project, to Collecting Otherwise as a mentality and practice.

We would like to thank the following Working Group members, (former) colleagues and collaborators for their support: Alfred Marasigan, Angga Cipta, Annet Dekker, Anya Naumova, Carolina Valente Pinto, Clara Balaguer, Clara Haardt, Czar Kristoff, Eline Doeselaere, Ernst des Bouvrie, Federica Notari, Gesyada Siregar, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Harriet Rose Morley, Ina Hollmann, Isola Tong, Joe Steele, Lidewij Tummers, María Novas, Marina Otero Verzier, Martin van Wijk, Michael Karabinos, MG Pringgatono, Rifandi Nugruho, Robin Hartanto Honggare, Saidja Steenhuyzen, Tabea Nixdorff, Tijn van de Wijdeven, Yasmin Tri Aryani, Yessica Deira.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for their support and neighbourly borrowing: Museum Arsitektur Indonesia, Gudskul, gta Archives / ETH Zurich, Creative Industries Fund NL, lumbung.space, University of Amsterdam, Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD), FARO, nai010 Publishers, Museum Het Schip.