Catherine Debicki, Archive as Practice [×]

The archivist is a collector; through the collection of traces, and artefacts, put into organization to produce knowledge and information. Conventionally, archives intend to contain and preserve, creating an understanding of the past through artefacts. The archives I have created experiment with this notion of preservation to exist in a state of becoming. Through a speculative framework of past, present and future the archive has the potential to be undone and redone with no finite outcome.
Archive as Practice is a process-led project and an exploration into the process of archiving in relation to the practice of interior design. The research aims to challenge, question and recontextualise conventional and institutional ways of archiving through the collection and assemblage of ephemera and questioning the role of cultural value through the process.
Archive as Practice questions what we deem within a social context important enough to maintain, save and essentially what the cultural significance is we place upon these sites.
The process has engaged in a practice of archiving through collecting, documenting and re-presenting temporal and material conditions, from a series of disused or inaccessible sites. Through digital and physical publications, the archive is produced through multiple mediums and distributed across multiple platforms. Working with three sites, the south side Magdalen Laundry, Kooyong station control booth and a private domestic house, each in a state of disuse, the Archive as Practice produces an encounter with the conditions that have been collected, researched and uncovered within these interiors.
The research project has developed a series of in-situ explorations and material led approaches through audio recording, digital site mapping, citation and fragmented extraction.