(Archive) Archives at Risk

In this exhibition, the network makes palpable how personal designer archives can be, and how vulnerable such design heritage is in the Netherlands. Collectively, the five featured archives show the richness of the national design memory. Designers or their heirs tell us in their own words what it means to create or maintain a design archive, opening up about the painful prospect of the collection being lost if there is nobody to take care of it.

Archives at Risk builds on the research theme behind The Speculative Design Archive (September 2018 – March 2019), an exhibition in which Het Nieuwe Instituut explored and visualised possible approaches and interpretations of a (so far absent) centrally organised, national design collection. This eventually led to the establishment and support of the Network Archives Design and Digital Culture which works to improve the accessibility and visibility of the design heritage spread across the Netherlands with the aim of making visible the relationship between design and social innovation. In the exhibition Archives at Risk, the pain caused by disappearing archives takes centre stage. What is taken for granted in art and architecture still seems unacknowledged in design: its value as Dutch heritage.

Photos and interviews from five designer archives are on display. The archives include those of industrial designer Emile Truijen (whose archive is currently being kept by his heirs pending a formal arrangement), graphic designer Lies Ros (who lives in her own design archive and collection), and industrial designer Hella Jongerius (who admits that parts of her well-maintained archive will go abroad as there is no Dutch option). Then there are artists Jason Page and Karen Huang, who work and live with the archive of textile artist Elma Beks, and textile designer Borre Akkersdijk, who in his practice treats a digital archive as a shared source.