Collecting Otherwise
Making Public in Etherpad
The Collecting Otherwise Etherpad can be viewed and used here. The sister project Feminist Design Strategies also has its own Etherpad, which can be accessed here.
In our Etherpad, we link stories from the collection that serve as starting points for reflection and research to theories about unweaving the national collection. The resulting multi-author text is both an official record and a living archive of the research undertaken. Through annotations, highlights, strikethroughs, comments and in-document discussions, the research undertaken by the Collecting Otherwise working group will take the form of an ongoing conversation.
As a public research tool, Etherpad not only serves as a communication aid, but also invites conversations and additions to the existing content, making it an ever-growing document that is always under construction.
The network of contributors to our Etherpad is international and interdisciplinary, and this multivocality is enhanced by the fact that each user has a different colour. This results in collective writing that does not erase voices, but enhances particularities in order to strengthen collaborations.
Feel free to add your thoughts or additional research, references and notes, keeping in mind the many voices of the past, present and future. Only with this multivocal and communal approach can we collect otherwise.
A summary of our first gathering using Etherpad
December 15, 2020
This first gathering introduced the members of the working group to each other and to Collecting Otherwise. Before the meeting, the members received a booklet with an overview of the case studies. The main objectives and study cases were presented. We want to approach the archive otherwise, with care and precision.
Collecting Otherwise is one of the pilot projects that have become a coherent part of the institution, defining present and future practices, guided by questions around notions of the copy, the value of the archive, the digitisation of content and networks of archives. By rethinking the collection, we are collecting otherwise.
In approaching the case studies, the tone was one of listening to images, connecting threads and reading through contexts. The archives can be divided into those that are in the process of being acquired; those that are newly discovered, with new conversations unfolding; and those of agents that are narrated as individual and not contextual. The members immediately make critical remarks about the archive and its contents. In response, member and curator Hetty Berens points out that Berlage’s archive is an interesting document to re-read from this perspective. We can ask what was the purpose of his time in the Dutch East Indies was, and how to look at the images in his archive – for now, the archive lacks ways to approach them, and such images remain only as bodies mediated by other gazes, exotisations. The group discussed the idea of decolonising museum objects.
The next step, advising on policy and acquisition, looked at the need to come up with new labels and different objects that make a collection meaningful, namely by creating our own timelines and oral histories.
Finally, working group member Harriet Rose Morley introduced the concept of an ‘archival care rider’, based on the ‘artist’s rider’, something she had been working with previously. The rider is a document for navigating precariousness, needs and desIres in relation to institutions, in which one can share anxieties, constraints and neurodiversity, and which works as a sort of contract to clarify any assumptions, doubts or gaslighting.
From the beginning, the open tone set made the members feel comfortable and at the same time excited.
Meeting 2: Translating archive material from Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen network publications
Moving from informal annotation to formal, presentation-ready out-takes is one of many ways in which this project seeks to reveal and discuss issues identified in the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.
Going from informal annotation to formal, presentation-ready out-takes is one of many ways this project will try to disclose and discuss issues identified in the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.