CRUNCH: Imminent Archives: Expanding Architecture's Canon

This seminar posits the archive – and the various ways in which we can dance, play or perform its contents – as a locus for counter-narratives and emerging discourses.

V&A East Storehouse, a working museum store designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, offers a radical architectural and curatorial innovation that remembers history, and the museum form, otherwise. Examining the V&A’s collection of 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and nearly 1,000 archives, Gus Casely-Hayford interrogates how architecture can serve as a medium for new public encounters, critical narratives and a refusal to forget.

The discussion will explore the archive as an anagrammatical site, and how curatorial and design practices might refigure the museum as a theatre of contested histories, knowledge production and new institutional forms. While traditional museums often operate through logics of pan-optic time, counting, categorising and displaying difference, this session asks:

• How can architecture and curatorial work disrupt these logics?

• Can museums become sites for egalitarian discourse and collective memory-making?

With responses from Mpho Matsipa and chaired by school director Amy Kulper.

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Please note this event has limited capacity and operates on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors close at 18:40.

Gus Casely-Hayford is a cultural historian, broadcaster and inaugural Director of V&A East. Formerly Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., Gus leads the creative strategy across two V&A East venues: a five-storey museum on Stratford Waterfront and the research centre at Here East.

Mpho Matsipa is an educator, researcher and independent curator. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. At the Bartlett School of Architecture, Mpho is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Spatial Justice in the Just Environments Cluster. Her curatorial and research interests are at the intersection of urban studies, experimental architecture and visual art. Mpho was a Loeb Fellow 2022 (Harvard GSD), and an associate curator for the Lubumbashi Biennale in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2022).

Amy Kulper is Professor of Architecture and Director of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. An architect, theorist and curator, her teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory and criticism with design. Previously, she was Department Head at RISD Architecture (Rhode Island School of Design), where she was actively engaged in making architectural pedagogy and practice more accessible, inclusive and equitable. Her writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education and numerous edited volumes.

Image: A collage made by the speakers.

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