As the “the privileged site where evidence can be found”, as notably described by the Aggregate collective, the archive is a key site in the construction of historical narratives. The archive is not only a privileged site in terms of accessing evidence, but also in terms of collecting it; it is the privileged site into which certain types of knowledge converge. Not entirely, yet overwhelmingly, archives record the opinions and actions of people in power: those with the education, means, and motivation to amass and to keep, sometimes at great personal effort, evidence related to their activities – political, profession, intellectual or otherwise. Formed by impulses to collect and record, all bequests are driven by hidden agendas. Ideals, such as the common good and preservation of public knowledge, are often, implicitly, doubled up by more profane motivations: ambition, sense of self-worth, the vision of securing the preservation of one’s traces. In dealing with archival absence, we imagine an alternative, imaginary archive, where forgotten words and erased deeds are restored to knowledge; where unseen or concealed actions are exposed to the light of historical reckoning. Drawing upon concrete examples from the gta Archive, this paper discusses the accidents and strategies towards building up an archive of resilience: of people and sometimes of things recovered, deliberately or by coincidence, from historical erasure.
This paper begins by questioning what the term ‘restitution’ brings to our understanding and engagement with archives we engage with. Unlike its use in relation to the physical artefacts [which are now making their way back, being shared or loaned to African repositories], I argue archival restitution is a much more piecemeal and fluid process. The classical understanding of archive remains focused on the boxes of text and occasionally material artefacts stored in a room, climate controlled or otherwise. Archive restitution in a post-colonial [African] context is a much broader messier project. Comprising the collection of unarchived material; oral histories of unrecorded actors, acknowledgement of intangible heritage practices that also contribute to our encounter with the restored post-colonial archive, and re-categorised artefacts to name but a few. The challenge therefore of engaging with the archive is significant, this is not a relatively static process, involving hours of engagement with material in the traditional ‘archive’ supplemented with formal/informal interviewing with a few sources and a cursory visit to sites.
It is a much more ethnological feat, which often does not have a defined ending; there is an expectation that more information will be forthcoming and the archive needs to be ‘open’ enough to receive this. Like an architect’s own house design or fine wine, the archive is never finished and grows in maturity with time. This means that its use and interpretation is expected to constantly change and transform, in all forms; from text to orality, or indeed location-situation. This approach is both exciting and challenging but makes for a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation, as with a ‘free-form’ jazz piece there may be a theme but the piece is ever changing… Our ongoing encounter with the Alan Vaughan Richards Archive is the main case study that frames this piece.
, HIL E 71.1,
“What, Switzerland?!” Notes on hardships and shadows of Swiss architecture
Modern Switzerland was built, cleaned and maintained mostly by extremely poor migrants. Migrants, whose human right to live as couples, and together with their children, was denied during almost seven decades from 1934-2002. This injustice was rooted in a federal law, and the law in racist, eugenic thinking. Poor migrants were conceptualized by the law as a cheep human production resource. They were not ment to engange in intergenerational networks of tenderness, intimacy, care and legitimate family's stories in Switzerland. One of the families that survived this structural violence, is the family I was born. My grandfather and my father were migrant construction workers, my mother was a migrant cleaning woman. I was born in Zurich and separated from my parents by the foreigner's police at the age of three months. My story is not mine alone, it is mirrored in approximately half a million other violated families' stories. Whenever I speak about it abroad, the reaction is: "What, Switzerland?!" In Switzerland, the most common straight forward reaction is silence. This goes along with present political attacks on families without Swiss citizenship, especially if they are poor. Today, I research this factual continuity, this international surprise and national silence. How can we make sense of this extreme form of amnesia? How can we frame this ghostly matter? I try to answer these questions without being retraumatized be the sources I found in the archives. I contain my affects when I research and work on the relationship between structural violence and manifest architecture. But afer working I let go and dream, and these dreams are often harsh, they immediately make me want to act when I wake up. In my input at the symposium, I will present one or two examples of my actual research. I would also love to exchange my experiences on the challenging dynamics between scholarship and activism with the audience.
, HIL E 71.1,
Beyond Digital Restitution: Unarchiving Lessons from Resituating Colonial Archives
In 2022 and 2023, Nieuwe Instituut, Gudskul, and Museum Arsitektur Indonesia organized a workshop and exhibition titled Simpang Susun Arsip Kolonial (Resituating Colonial Archives). Simpang Susun addressed, on the one hand, the geographical constraint separating Indonesian communities from archival documents related to the built environments of colonial Indonesia stored in Rotterdam as part of the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. On the other hand, the series of events also scrutinized the limits of digital restitution, underlining instead the importance of meaningful engagement between institutions and communities through resource sharing and archival activation. This presentation reflects on this cross-institutional collaboration and the works of researchers and collectives from different parts of Indonesia who participated in Simpang Susun. A striking observation from the workshop and exhibition is how digital access could not by itself restitute the systematic exclusion of the perspectives of colonized communities in colonial archives. The works in Simpang Susun thus proposed a set of situated practices that attended to architecture’s afterlives, thereby moving beyond what colonial archives could tell. A fictional tour with a Dutch architect to a cinema that he designed in Bukittinggi, a multisensory reconstruction of an exclusive gentlemen’s club in Jakarta, and a layering of archival material with drawings to foreground informal activities at a Dutch villa in Bandung were among the works that provided alternative ways of exploring how colonial buildings have been, and could be, appropriated, sensed, and narrated. This mode of unarchiving imbues the archival collection with new interpretations while testing the spatial and temporal boundaries of Dutch-Indonesian connected past.
, HIL E 71.1,
Stitching Against the Archive: Embroidery as Counter Cartography
Architectural and historical archives have often perpetuated incomplete narratives by omitting voices based by gender, sexuality, and race. In nineteenth-century India, colonial historiography and institutionalized archives reinforced this exclusion, sidelining vernacular storytelling traditions such as folksongs, literature, and embroidery. This talk proposes an alternative queer historiography that turns to regional embroidery in Gujarat—particularly Kathiawari and Kutchi practices—as a counter-archive through which marginalized histories of sexuality can be both traced and reimagined. This talk situates embroidery within broader debates on representation, materiality, and historical loss. It aims to highlight how embroidered textiles—through their tactile, sensory, and spatial qualities—open up other ways of witnessing and remembering queer lives.
Methodologically, this work advances embroidery as architectural historiography. Through the creation of a hand-embroidered tablecloth that records everyday queer spatial experiences from my childhood, I weave personal narrative into a longer lineage of communal memory embedded in domestic textile practices. This act of making demonstrates how embroidery exceeds decorative function: it operates as an embodied and critical practice, carrying counter-hegemonic knowledge and resisting the silences of the colonial archive. By juxtaposing archival manipulation with the creative agency of regional artisans and my own practice, I wish to explore embroidery’s generative role as a counter-archive. For architectural history, this offers a new framework for engaging with marginalized sexualities and genders as deeply inscribed in material, spatial, and sensory practices.
How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? This talk tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.
Through a curated cockroach at MoMA—and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach—this talk reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman.
The Palestinian condition is one of exile and erasure, this applies as much to the Palestinian as it does to their knowledge. Maktabat Sabil began as a crowdsourced library that sought to overcome this condition; to create a (virtual) space for the collective aggregation of knowledge, documents, and resources. This talk presents Sabil as an attempt to build an institution from the ground up, away from metrics contemporary academia and against its capitalist logic, and in the face of colonial erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians. The talk reflects on the epistemological, pedagogical, and practical dimensions of such an endeavor.
February 20 – Symposium
, HIL E 71.1,
Digitisation between Preservation and Decolonisation: Excavating the Injustice of Digital Archives
Digitisation has emerged as an effective response to the absence of materiality associated with cultural heritage conservation/preservation, especially during wars. My contribution examines funding, institutional infrastructure, and the discourses around digital tools and equipment used in heritage preservation efforts in the context of war. It shifts the narrative to the medium itself rather than the end product of digitisation. Focusing on the infrastructure used to conduct archiving, rather than the documentation itself, I question its neutrality and address the delicate relationship between preserving cultural heritage as a “western” notion around historical fabric and/or museum objects and the urgent need for decolonisation within the hosting institutions of digital archives.
Based on an analysis of archival practices and long-term ethnographic research, as I have been working in diverse cultural institutions in Germany, focusing on preserving heritage through digitization, I ask: How can we imagine a decolonized digital archive for heritage, whose materiality was extracted in and from the Global South, yet its archival entries are hosted in the Global North?
Although discourses around digitisation celebrate equality of access and promote their medium (e.g., the frontend of websites and participatory tools) as democratic, the latter not only serves as a means to preserve power relations but is also contaminated with military violence. Addressing the inequalities inherent in the relationship between the Global North and Global South necessitates a nuanced understanding of the colonial histories that inform the dynamics between these contexts, when studying heritage preservation efforts through digitisation. Such an examination not only critiques the notion of neutrality associated with these processes but also highlights the ethical and political dimensions of digitization and gives a space for standing against its injustices.
, HIL E 71.1,
On How to Collect Otherwise: Tools for Reading Architectural Archives Against the Grain.
Nieuwe Instituut manages and activates the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, on-site, online, and through exhibitions and public programmes. Viewing the collection as both a record of the past and a catalyst for future inquiry, the institute explores how archival materials can address today’s spatial and societal challenges. Architectural archives offer key insights into the relationships between society, historiography, and the built environment. They hold traces of debates on societal representation, gender equality, urban innovation, and international exchanges of planning and design knowledge. As witnesses to our collective past, these archives also hold the potential to become vital (re)sources for shaping the future. Yet, accessing them raises pressing questions about ethics, representation, care, and critique.
These almost 700 archives have been acquired over a period of over 100 years, in various phases. Different collecting mentalities connect to different affective, political, and intellectual registers, which ultimately seep into the materials collected and the way these histories are disclosed. Accumulation and selection happens with preconceived notions of priority. Whose legacies are kept, and what does that say about personal and institutional preference.
In recent years, Collecting Otherwise has been reimagining how we might approach architecture, heritage, and archiving in ways that reflect a constantly changing society. The initiative asks what design ideas we choose to represent, and how we might enrich the diversity, and futures of the built environment in the Netherlands through counter-archival strategies. They connect grassroots initiatives with institutional frameworks and open up long-term perspectives on what it could mean to collect otherwise. Through tools like the Archival Care Rider and archival annotation tool Asterisk*, developed together with donors, archival communities, and archivists, the team explored what it means to care for architectural heritage differently and to read archives against and along the grain.
, HIL E 71.1,
Beyond Data Extractivism? Navigating Virtual Collections
Virtual collections are much more than just digital representations of physical collections. While the large-scale digitization of archival images and musealized artifacts was initially intended to make cultural heritage more accessible to the public and researchers, the mass aggregation of collection data is now providing new operational and generative functions that are changing how museums, archives and other memory institutions understand themselves. The interfaces of virtual museum collections transform large ensembles of images, artworks and artifacts from different periods and places into seemingly weightless clouds of data that can be rearranged into navigable landscapes of statistical similarities and converted into a resource of extractable visual patterns for generating seemingly new content. Focusing on the notion of ‘navigation’, the talk aims to explore explores how the decontextualizing and extractivist colonial logic of the European museum continues in this operationalization of virtual image archives, and asks for possible alternatives forms and formats for accessing virtual collections beyond data extractivism.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London was praised in the nineteenth century as the “botanical metropolis of the world.” Since then historians have theorized it as a “center of calculation,” the hub of a global “network” that dictated the logic of how plants, seeds, and expertise moved between botanic gardens within the British empire and beyond. This paper looks at the Kew herbarium, which was first formalized in the middle of the nineteenth century to collect botanical data in a methodical manner and which grew exponentially during the period of high imperialism, in an attempt to understand the kind of work that Kew’s networks might have done. What changed with the institution of the herbarium? How did the accumulation of botanical data impact extractive practices on the ground? And how might Kew help explain the British empire’s peculiar topologies?
, HIL E 71.1,
Inherited Testimonies: Re-Tracing the Nama and Ovaherero Genocide
Traces of the German colonial genocide in Namibia endure in the memories and oral traditions of the descendants of the victims, and in the region’s transformed environment. Starting in 2022, Forensic Architecture and Forensis undertook a multi-year collaboration with Ovaherero and Nama traditional leadership and genocide activist groups to produce a series of investigative works into the genocide and its far-reaching legacy.
Weaving together the lived knowledge of the affected communities with digital research practices, these collaborative projects endeavour to bring those traces to the surface, by reconstructing key geographies relating to the genocide and the ecologies forever altered by a century of dispossession and colonial land-use practices.
This presentation will discuss the counter-archival methodologies developed by Forensic Architecture and Forensis throughout this multi-phase project and undertake critical ‘counter-readings’ of colonial-era photographs and cartographic material, re-narrated through inherited testimony. Through focus on a few specific archival encounters, the presentation will demonstrate how researchers can work against the grain of the epistemic violences underpinning colonial collections and in so doing, reflect on the methodological and ethical implications of using colonial photographs in investigative spatial research.
, HIL E 71.1,
Building AMASyria: A Situated Archival Practice in the Making
The historiography of Syrian architectural modernity has often emphasised colonial or authoritarian narratives over locally embedded accounts. This emphasis stemmed from archival imbalances: colonial archives were systematically preserved and accessible, while local archives remained fragmented and restricted. Moreover, under authoritarian rule, independent knowledge production was further suppressed. The consequences of this imbalance extend beyond academia: archives shape collective memory, which in turn informs societal values, enabling accountability and public debate. Without them, memory is distorted, limiting society’s capacity to resist injustice and to assert ownership over its knowledge. Efforts to mitigate these issues often create new dependencies on extractive institutions, which shape value through selective support or by acquiring collections rather than building local capacity. As a result, existing imbalances in resources and authority are frequently reproduced rather than dismantled.
AMASyria was established in response to these limitations and operated within and against them. Its methodology aims to rethink archival practice by rethinking knowledge production in three key ways. First, it foregrounds the local, countering colonial framings and fragmented repositories. Second, it engages fluidly and flexibly with archival materials by incorporating alternative forms of documentation, including oral testimonies, personal collections, and professional networks, while also exploring alternative participatory spaces of documentation and discussion, such as social media, thereby challenging the notion of the archive as a stable rigid construct. Third, it prioritizes accessibility, framing archiving as an act of resistance to restriction and surveillance.
AMASyria aims to operate as an evolving archival practice rather than a closed repository, proposing a plural and participatory model through which Syrian architectural history can be articulated from within its own contexts. Beyond preservation, it pursues knowledge sovereignty: it attempts to construct independent infrastructures that enable collective self-understanding. In this sense, the archive functions as a self-reflexive project, one that must remain open to continual critique and reconfiguration as a condition of its political and epistemic relevance.
, HIL E 71.1,
Collaging the Unshown: Citing and Holding Black Women’s Spaces in Zurich (1980s–2010)
The Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010) was a self-initiated grassroots meeting place and resource centre for Black foreign women in Zurich. It served as a vital site of community, cultural expression, and affirmation within an urban context that often rendered Black womanhood hypervisible as exotic and invisible as social subject. Offering legal and social counselling, a youth forum, accessible childcare, health and gender-based violence advice, and programming on racism and conviviality, the Treffpunkt became the only Black feminist project in Zurich during the late twentieth century to quite literally have a room of its own. Since the demolition of its building in 2013, no physical trace of the Treffpunkt remains. Its history is largely absent from official Swiss archives, existing instead in whispered footnotes and in over 500 family photographs held in the personal collections and photo albums of the women who frequented the space. As Tina Campt reminds us in Image Matters (2012), the significance of such photographs lies not only in what is visible but in the socio-spatial relations that constitute the “social life of the photo.” To archive is to fix, possess, and delimit. Remembering practices, however, open fluid ways of engaging with histories that unfold in places that have left no built trace. Within my PhD, worlding archives of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen in Zurich (1993–2010), I work with oral histories and photographs to reconstruct the Treffpunkt through collage—refusing archival fixity while foregrounding embodied, situated memory. As Katherine McKittrick reminds us in Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), citation can be a way of “sharing how we know.” Through collage, this work resists what Patricia Hill Collins terms “controlling images” of Black womanhood by offering a voiced and visual method that privileges remembering practices over fixed archives—one way to cite and hold Black women’s spaces in architectural history.