Paper for the NORDIK 2022 Association,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
October 25-27, 2022.
University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
October 25-27, 2022.
Not all archives are created equal: some are treasured while others are trashed. My recently-completed PhD in architectural history relied on the latter—archives and documents that were not considered valuable or worth preserving. In part, this was due to the marginal nature of my research subject, a large construction company Moelven Brug, a type of actor still often sidelined in conventional architectural history. Deemed too ordinary, the company’s activities were hardly recorded. The few remaining archives were quickly discarded, dismissed and shredded, deemed not valuable for future generations. In order to fill these absences I had to chase archives long lost and dismembered, cross-reference materials from different disciplines and stitch together a patchwork of unconventional sources.
This process in itself led to something new—an archive of research. My PhD defence was then accompanied by an exhibition titled Marginalia that offered a behind-the-scenes view of the PhD project in-the-making. Not a curated collection but rather an assemblage of notes, images, and archival pieces accumulated over the last four years, the exhibition presented just a small portion of the diverse range of sources scavenged and mobilised to write a history of quite a marginal research subject. By showing personal notes documenting the thinking as the project progressed, the exhibition exposed the many indeterminate detours that research can take. The final product—a published monograph—was shaped not only by the conventions of academic research but also by the physical constraints of a paper medium, with many aspects and information pieces left yet again beyond its margins.
So what is the value of these throw-away bits? By showing the archive of my research, marginalia notes that are often discarded as the project is completed, I wanted to engage with broader questions on the nature of archival practices that we both encounter and propagate in our research.