Lezing: Architectural archival imaginaries

Speaker: Huda Tayob (The University of Manchester)

In ‘Constituting an Archive’ Stuart Hall argues that in making an archive, ‘the whole apparatus of ‘a history’ – periods, key figures and works, tendencies, shifts, breaks, ruptures – slips silently into place.’ Thinking with Hall, this talk asks how we might contend with the material that does not typically enter the urban and architectural archive through a focus on film and fiction. How do we encounter these silences and absences?  What is the condition of this encounter with archival violence in spatial, material and affective terms? And how do archival encounters enable counter-mappings of architecture and the city, to allow for wider, alternative and multiple forms of knowledge and understanding? The first part of the talk will speak to the potential of archival imaginaries through an introduction to the online exhibition, essay and podcast series, Archive of Forgetfulness as an example of a creative collaborative pan-african project. The second half moves to Johannesburg, and asks how film and footage might enable us to engage with the urban and architectural archive in different ways.