Advanced Researcher (Forensic Architecture/Goldsmiths, University of London)

Agata Nguyen Chuong is advanced researcher at Forensic Architecture and PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She leads FA’s research on the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in present-day Namibia. Her research focuses on environmental and colonial violence and evidencing their enduring legacies in support of Indigenous land claims and advocacy.

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.

Researcher and co-founder of AMASyria (The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria أرشيف العمارة الحديثة في سوريا )

Ahmad Salah is an architect, researcher, and cultural practitioner whose work focuses on built and natural landscapes and their intersections with cultural and social domains in the Middle East, with a particular focus on infrastructure. He is the co-founder and director of AMASyria—The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria. Ahmad holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Damascus University and a Master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. He has collaborated on research projects with institutions across Europe and the Middle East, and his work has been supported by the Gwaertler Cultural Foundation, Edinburgh College of Art, and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC).

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.

PhD Student (EPF Lausanne)

Akshar Gajjar is an architect and urban & territorial designer and currently a PhD student at EPFL. His research transects architectural material production, ecology, labor and territorial change. He studied architecture and urban design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, EPFL and ETH Zurich. He is the author of Living together: More-than-Human Ecologies for Architectural Thinking published by Birkhaüser (2025). In his textile- based art practice, he works with regional embroidery to explore questions of archives, identity, sexuality and ecology.

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.

Researcher (Nieuwe Instituut)

Delany Boutkan (NL, 1993) is a researcher at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where she, amongst other projects, coordinates the International Research Fellowship and has co-organized Collecting Otherwise, a long-term research project on rethinking museum practices of collecting and collaboration. At the institute, she also develops frameworks for publishing, research, and situated knowledge. She is a thesis mentor at the Sandberg Instituut’s Studio for Immediate Spaces and founder of Design Drafts (2022), a publishing network for embodied and experimental writing in design. Her work as a writer, curator, and educator explores how organisational conditions and infrastructures shape what can be remembered, shown, and imagined, often engaging with absences and fragments to ask how curating might intervene in the conditions that structure cultural work.

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.

Assistant Professor (Birzeit University, Palestine)

Faiq Mari is assistant professor at the department of architecture and planning at Birzeit University, Palestine. His work studies the spatiality of Palestinian anticolonial and socio-economic struggle, with a focus on collective labor and property therein. Faiq has practiced architecture and taught at Birzeit and Al-Quds Universities, he is also an editor of the magazine Arab Urbanism. His writings appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Babelwad, and other journals and edited volumes.

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.

Director gta Archive (gta Institute ETH Zurich)

Irina Davidovici is an architect and historian. Since 2022, she is the Director of the gta Archive and Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich. She is the author of Forms of Practice. German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (gta 2012 and 2018) and The Autonomy of Theory: Ticino Architecture and Its Critical Reception (gta, 2024). She edited Colquhounery. Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA, 2015) and co-edited thematic issues for Architectural Theory Review (‘Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History’, with Laila Seewang, 2021) and OASE (‘Authorship’, with Tom Avermaete, Christoph Grafe and Véronique Patteeuw, 2022). Her latest book Common Grounds: A Comparative History of Early Housing Estates in Europe will be published with Triest Verlag.

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.

doctoral fellow (gta Institute ETH Zurich)

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk is an architectural researcher and designer. She is the founder and creative director of Matri-Archi(tecture) , an association of African and diasporic spatial practitioners exploring entangled histories, realities, and imaginaries through spatial expression. A doctoral fellow at gta, ETH Zürich, her PhD examines how Black foreign women in Zürich have constructed forms of kinship to create liveable geographies in the wake of racial-sexual violence since the 1980s. Khensani works across visual, written, and sonic media to remember untold histories and envision new spatial futures. Her practice frames architecture as a storyteller of place, memory, and possibility. She sustains a practice grounded in the geographies of both Switzerland and South Africa.

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.

Researcher and co-founder of AMASyria (The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria أرشيف العمارة الحديثة في سوريا )

Mirma Al Wareh is an architect, artist, researcher, and Co-founder of the Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria (AMASyria). She is currently a peer researcher at the Institute of Development Studies and the University of Stirling. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Damascus University and a Diploma in Cinematic Arts from the General Directorate of Cinema in Damascus, and is presently pursuing an MSc in Urban Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Mirma’s written and artistic practice explores the intersections of politics, society, architecture, and urban life in both modern and contemporary Syria. She recently authored The Physical Manifestation of City Dynamics in the Cinema Theatres of Damascus as part of a fellowship with Ettijahat – Independent Culture. She is also a current recipient of the Chevening Scholarship and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) Creative Writing Grant.

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.

Professor of Architecture and Head of School (University of Liverpool)

Nwola Uduku is Head of School at Liverpool School of Architecture and Co-director of the AHUWA Research Centre, which focuses on Architectural History and Urbanism in Western Africa. She is also involved with Docomomo International, and the Shared heritage Africa project, She co-edited the recently published Modernism in Africa, Birkhauser, 2024), has written on School Design in Africa (Uduku, 2017). She has recently contributed to ‘Who are Godwin and Hopwood” (Tosland, 2024) and The Architecture, Empire and Trade, (Jackson, et al 2025). Also through her membership of the University of Manchester-based African Cities Research Consortium, ACRC she regularly comments on urbanism and social infrastructure issues in Africa. Her most recent publication is the chapter, Learning Spaces in Africa: From Missionaries to Development Hubs in Learning Ecologies in Architecture, ArchiTangle, London, 2025.

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.

Design Historian / Postdoctoral Researcher (gta Institute, ETH Zürich)

Paola De Martin (b. 1965) is from Zurich and Belluno (Italy). She is a former textile designer and a design historian. She has lectured in history and sociology of cultural production at the PHZH, the ZHdK and the HSLU. She completed her doctorate at the Gta-Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich in 2020. Her dissertation was published in 2022 under the title Give us a break! Arbeitermilieu und Designszene im Aufbruch (Zurich: Diaphanes). Paola De Martin is co-curator of the ethnographic-artistic, anti-racist collective Schwarzenbach-Komplex and president of the NGO TESORO. Her recent focus is on classism in Swiss architecture, in relation to migration and human rights violation. In 2024, her interdisciplinary approach was honored by the Federal Office of Culture BAK with the Swiss Grand Prix Design. In the same year, she received the international Diaspora Prize of the Associazione Bellunesi nel Mondo ABM.

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.

Assistant Professor (National University of Singapore)

Robin Hartanto Honggare is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He works at the intersection of architecture, environmental humanities, and commodity histories. His current book project investigates the extensive network of buildings that enabled commodity production in the Dutch East Indies.Robin received his PhD in Architecture and MS in critical and curatorial practices from Columbia University. He also holds a BArch from Universitas Indonesia. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American-Indonesian Cultural & Educational Foundation, and Nieuwe Instituut.

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.

DIZH Bridge Professor in Digital Cultures and Arts (University of Zurich / Zurich the University of Arts ZHdK)

Roland Meyer has been DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since July 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre «Virtual Lifeworlds» at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he worked on virtual image archives.Roland Meyer’s work as a media and visual culture researcher focuses on networked image cultures. He is particularly interested in the new aesthetic and operational functions of digital images under the conditions of global digital platforms, ubiquitous computing, mobile media and big visual data. He has published on the history and present of facial recognition, practices of image forensics, navigation in augmented spaces, and generative AI and synthetic image worlds.

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.

Researcher and Curator (Nieuwe Instituut)

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut whose practice focuses on feminist, decolonial, non-institutional, and more-than-human perspectives in the way we build, remember and change cities. Setareh argues for alternative futures that foreground underexposed voices and forms of collectivity, translating research into exhibitions, publications, and public programmes.

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.

Curator of Collections (Nieuwe Instituut)

Stefanie Korrel (1995) is an architectural historian and programme maker, working as a curator at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She conducts research and acquisitions for the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, and is responsible for the Sonneveld House museum. Her focus is on bringing to light underexposed stories and individuals in architectural history through projects like the Asterisk*. She is working on a new collection policy and making the collection accessible to a wide audience, both within and outside the institute. Together with local (architectural) initiatives, she positions architectural history as a source of inspiration for current spatial challenges.

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.

Assistant Professor (Princeton University)

V. Mitch McEwen is an Assistant Professor at Princeton’s School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office. At Princeton, McEwen directs the architecture and technology research group Black Box, exploring biomaterials and algorithmic processes in design and construction. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen’s design work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion, as well as awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.

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.

Director of Content (Wereldmuseum/RCMC)

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of Wereldmuseum, with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.

Associate Professor (Columbia University)

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an historian of architecture from the eighteenth century up to the present. Çelik Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She co-edited, with John May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data, an account of storehouses of information in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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?

Postdoctoral Researcher (ERC Project BEYONDREST) (Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin )

Zoya Masoud works at the intersection of postcolonial studies and post-foundational theory. Her research focuses on marginalised individuals within dominant discourses around identity and heritage. Currently, she is conducting her post-doctoral project, “Irrestitutable. Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage.” She received her PhD from the Technical University Berlin, titled “Dislocated. Heritage Construction through Experience of Loss in Aleppo.” Her first book, based on her PhD thesis, is scheduled for publication in 2026. She has worked at several institutions, including the German Archaeological Institute, the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art, BTU Cottbus, Forum Transregionale Studien, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. She has been teaching on heritage preservation, restitution, art, and archival collections, as well as commemoration and violence, since 2021. Zoya studied architecture and urban planning in Damascus, Hamburg, and Dar Es Salaam.

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.