The Belfast Archives

Institutional, militaristic or self-inflicted; destruction has become a banal occurrence in Belfast. This project explores the relationship between destruction and the need to archive the city. The Belfast Archives formulates a rediscovery of the deserted public space, through an alternative relation to the domestic space and memory of the place.

This project attempts to simulate a polemical response to the current condition. By pushing absurdity to its limits, maybe dwells the possibility of a different reality. The artefact is adopted as a narrative tool. Not unlike homemaking, this story is told as a primitive accumulation of artefacts. They will attempt to tell the story of the city and its people, as they learn to live with the Destructive Character.\nAn archive, not the institutional authority on truth, but the narrator of stories. It is the home of things. Liberating the homes, not from the cumbersome and unused, but from the valued and cherished. It allows the void to function as a mediator of stories. It sits in between rows of homes in waiting. Once the void is occupied, so are the ground, table and cabinet inside the archive. \nAt the centre of the new neighbourhood, The monolith. The domestic archive. Two parallel halls hovering above the ground, anchored by the found objects. Some would call it the glorified warehouse, only there isn’t anything glorifying about it. It isn’t a celebration of anything. Things simply sit where they are put. Things are removed and replaced, by those who chose to place them. No record is kept.\nA space for production is at the centre of the archive. Here, things are constantly made to inhabit the void. Craft emerges as an unlikely unifying force. Overlooking the city, the workshops connect the making of things and the city outside. Unlike the refuge, the archive seeks proximity in separation. Everything has yet to be done, or undone. \nThe liberation of the domestic space could not leave the outside unchanged. Both will seek to move towards each other. The outside becomes the generator of a new domestic life. The occupation of the void takes place over time. It is at first disorderly, and does not follow any logical planning. Primitive light bodies live below the archives, attached to its cores and structure, to accommodate unforeseen uses. Unlike in the refuge, steel is used for its appropriable, malleable and reusable properties, rather than its perverted use as a fence.