MArch(Prof)

An Alternative Archive 

Project Location: Pretoria CBD

Project Focus Area: Memory, Legacy and Identity 

Supervisor: Cobus Botha 

Project Intentions 

Heritage is often contested as it is seen through various lenses. When one approaches an artefact from different contextual points of view, one sees the value of the artefact differently. Thus, as Platzer (2018) argues, an archival collection is the product of strategic selection based on certain biases and preconceptions stemming from the past.  It could thus be argued that preservation activities are subordinate to the needs of the past – and that these needs override the needs of the present.  Jorge Otero-Pailos (2016) proposes a similar argument – that all heritage is political, not cultural. He raises the question of how worthiness (of preservation) is determined and suggests that preconceived perceptions of value influence this.   As a result of this perception-based selection, some artefacts may be omitted from the archive leading to entire pieces of history being lost or maligned (Botes 2022).  Juxtaposing these alternative artefacts with conventional items could yield interesting results.

In conventional archive facilities, artefacts are stripped of their context – decay is prevented, time is suspended, and artefacts are stripped of their primary purpose in order to make research easier (Breakell 2008; Kalin 2018).  This practice makes curated exhibitions necessary if artefacts are ever to be viewed within any context.   Archaeologist Sven Ouzman (2002) writes that artefacts are, essentially, the traces of people in the landscape.  Studying these traces is a way to gain a glimpse into a different world.  Adding the appropriate context to an artefact allows a researcher to see a scenario in the same way as the creator of the artefact. Context also sheds light on what may have been deemed important at the time of discovery/ preservation (Breakell 2008).  This raises the question of how time might alter what is viewed as worth preserving and what is not – an idea that links into what scholars refer to as the Alternative Archive.  Rachel Botes (2022) defines the Alternative Archive as a set of resources that have, throughout history, been neglected.  The result is that these resources are invisible to scholars and only survive through social exchange.  These alternative sources may provide valuable context to recognised sources found in the conventional archive formally. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150, precedes this type of contextual approach.  The curator of the exhibition, Barry Bergdoll (2017), invited a selection of architectural scholars without a particular interest in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to build a section of the exhibition around a single artefact (Bergdoll 2017).  The intention was to get the curators to use other items from the Wright collection, based on their expertise, to contextualize their main artefact. This curation method can also be applied to the Alternative Archive to help identify points where the alternative intersects with the official to expand existing narratives.  Here may lie an opportunity to rethink the way in which artefacts are contextualised when being researched. Instead of solitary objects considered on their own, they may be shown among related materials to paint a more complete picture.