project type - Editorial, Visual Identity, Exhibition
year - 2021

Sandberg Instituut’s Studio for Immediate Spaces spent a week in close contact with the collection and the spaces of Het Nieuwe Instituut. Working collaboratively, the participants identified key documents from the drawings, photographs and models belonging to the archives of Dutch architects and urban planners. They considered how things appear, how they are stored, who collected them and why they were kept and deposited. Finally, they mobilized the documents, giving thought and shape to what they wanted the documents to do differently. The result is an exhibition as a critical documentary, exposing modes of operating on the documents: copying, enlarging, folding, displacing, recontextualizing, deleting, editing, reclassifying, translating, hiding. Within self-imposed constraints, the production was kept to a bare minimum: two walls, one printer, one sound system, one tape roll. Four groups storyboarded strategies for a potentially cinematic space, articulated in four chapters, each linking back to a set of documents from the institute’s collection. Using the archive is not a neutral but a creative act with an aesthetic intention, an audience and a purpose. The exhibition is the means to select, present and create new adjacencies, allowing for new types of knowledge circulation.