The Open House / The Open Archive (2019)

MSc Architecture graduation project containing Archive, Research catalog, Photozine, and Thesis book. Awarded 8.0/10, Cum Laude. Presented during own roundtable ‘Unfolding Conflicted Heritage’ at ‘Artists and Archivists #3’ ARIAS, Amsterdam.

Link to the Research Thesis: The Open House / The Open Archive: Unfolding the domestic archive of Gojka Vukovića 11.

The project is situated on the self-chosen site of a former housing settlement, Gojka Vukovića 11, now a ruin in the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In The Open House/Open Archive, physical, domestic objects are catalogued to become part of an archive or heritage, encountered with and by a body. The body and the archive are both subject to time; time as carrier of events, time as agent in the impermanence or transience of material, narrative, and memory. Time as challenger of the techniques and stability of knowledge.

This layered experience, or embodiment, of the place can be abstracted in the archive of a place, where material layers are the items in the archive. If the city is made up out of different archives, each producing a set of narratives, then it is important to investigate the sequence of the layers in the space, harnessing their movements, to transition the narrative and embodied experience of a specific place. It is important to question the dominant, fixed or fossilized relationship of the material in its end form, to transition these to other meanings, and create spaces that remain in transition. We must, among other keywords, grasp the intended definition of transitioning. Additionally the research actively attempts to disrupt normative subject-object dichotomies, meaning the divide between human-nature, conscious-unconscious, and knowing-subjects and objects-that-are-known.

In this project I aimed to transition the narratives of trauma by disrupting traditional notions of archiving. Through usage of architectural concepts of cut, movement, and sequencing in the archive’s collection, I search to transfer the knowledge from the fixed object and to rework tools and surfaces commonly used in architectures of archiving and exhibiting. Aside from the archive’s purpose to communicate shared pasts, the social programmes surrounding the building serve as catalysts within a strategic time-line of appropriation of the site.

Link to excerpt from the accompanying essay, on the cut as queer investigation into traumatic territority: Transitioning: acts of disrupting a narrative or material assemblage through cataloguing, cutting, and sequencing.

Catalog: Catalog of a space