Embedded Files
Archives can work as a design tool by connecting collaborators to place histories. The contents of archives themselves, as reflections of power, have become sites to reflect on the limits of official ways of knowing and inspire alternative spatial and social futures based on historical precedents. Using Ann Laura Stoler’s terms, work that reads archives with but also “against the grain”, designers can “ask a similar set of historical questions about accredited knowledge and power – what political forces, social cues, and moral virtues produce qualified knowledges that, in turn, disqualified other ways of knowing, other knowledges.” (Stoler 2002:95)
Specific archives for such work include town and building plans, as well as the legislation that produces and governs them. Early plans that record pre-colonial or pre-enclosure histories and hence territories of common use, wild places and autonomous settlements have significant value for projects of co-production of reparative space. Such places might become points of entry for renewed conversations about urban and landscape figures that can be brought into public or community trust.
Further traces within archives are those of practices that predate or exist in parallel with imposed techniques, including Indigenous knowledge related to more-than-human worlds, making, and social organization. Using archives, including colonial ones, restores pride to communities who feel that their pasts don’t matter in national or regional scales of growth. For this reason, the creation of community archives - sometimes through oral histories, but also with collections of images and artefacts - are often a locus of activism and, in turn, inspire physical projects of collective memorialization.
by Hannah le Roux
key references
Stoler, A. L. (2002). "Colonial archives and the arts of governance." Archival Science 2(1-2): 87-109.
KwaThema beerhall, partly demolished in and after 1976 by the community, was reappropriated in 2007 in the KwaThema Project by students of the University of the Witwatersrand with ANC Youth League and Technical College volunteers. Mural based on archival photograph of boys with fists raised, Soweto. June 1976. Source: SAB K345 (Pohlandt-McCormick 2005).
RESEARCH PROJECT
RESEARCH PROJECT
Archives in Co-design
Archives in Co-design
team
Prof. Hannah le Roux, School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield
This section presents links to archives that might work as activators of (co-) design and care.
District Six Museum: Established in 1994 in Cape Town, South Africa, this project emerged from the “desire to reassemble and restore the corporeal integrity of District Six through memory"(Rassool 2006:10). District Six was a mixed-race area of the City from which over 60000 “coloured” residents were forcibly removed under apartheid. The museum, which emerged from a years of collective archive creation, also supported a land claim by former residents for the restitution of their land.
Things Don’t Really Exist Until You Give Them a Name: Conceived as an assemblage and addressing sublimated heritages across Latin American, African and European sites, this project created two exhibitions, artists’ projects and a publication. Lee and Misselwitz wrote that it “opens a more explicit link between heritage discourses to critical urban studies and the “right to the city” discourse”. This work further allows for claims on urban space through mechanisms such as the recognition of intangible cultural heritage, as well as artist-led projects.
Barnsley Archives: The closure of coal mines in England and Wales not only created derelict landscapes and infrastructure, it also radically reshaped spatial logic with consequential social impacts. As an example of local archival work to reconnect communities and seed physical projects, the Barnsley Archives has assembled rich material including historical documentation of mining, and resources from activist groups such as the Barnsley Women Against Pit Closure collection. This includes aural material.
Archives that are attentive to other ways of narrating space also open us to diverse design approaches: The ǂKhomani San Hugh Brody Archives and the Digital Bleek and Lloyd both produced at the University of Cape Town, document the heritage of the first known people living in the Northern Cape who were displaced by external settlers, resulting in their enslavement and loss of language and land. Their role in land claims, the creation of memory places, and the revival of cultural practices have been supported by co-design work.
Envisioning Seneca Village uses historical GIS to collate material from photographic, cartographic and census data along with historical scholarship to reconstruct the largely Black village situated in an area destroyed in the creation of Central Park in 1857. This rich project presents a diverse perspective on the political impact of grand, even beloved public spaces. (Baics, Linn et al. 2024)
references
Baics, G., M. Linn, L. Meisterlin and M. Zhang (2024). Envisioning Seneca Village
Barnsley Museums. (2020). Episode 9 - International Women's Day [podcast].
Lee, R. (Editor) ; Barbé, D. (Editor) ; Fenk, A.K. (Editor) et al. (2023) Things Don't Really Exist Until You Give Them a Name : Unpacking Urban Heritage. TU Delft OPEN Publishing. 319 p.
Pohlandt-McCormick, H. (2005). "I Saw a Nightmare…” Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976.
Rassool, C. (2006). "Making the District Six Museum in Cape Town." Museum international 58(1-2): 9-18.
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