AA Visiting School Zurich 

August 9 - 20, 2021

The 2021 edition of the workshop “Exhibiting Architecture” thematizes notions of labour in the construction of buildings as well as architectural exhibitions and the multitude of agents involved: from designers, curators, assistants, installers, builders to maintenance staff. Bearing the traces of their work, media such as drawings, contracts and photos not only facilitate the design and building processes but also constitute the substrate of architectural exhibitions. Consequently, exhibitions are sites where labour is both represented, for instance through narratives of authorship, and also performed, among others by the gallery staff. Hence within this ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Tony Bennett) structural inequalities surrounding different forms and methods of work, can both be reproduced and exacerbated but also made visible and problematized, untimely fostering a space for renegotiation.

Guest Speakers: 

Daniel Baumann (Kunsthalle Zurich), Kadambari Baxi (Barnard College/Collumbia University), c/o now (architects), Elisa R. Linn (curator/writer), Lorenza Longhi (artist), Kabelo Malatsie (curator), Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Harvard GSD), Ushma Thakrar (editor/writer), Albena Yaneva (University of Manchester), Fredi Fischli/Niels Olsen (gta exhibitions/ETH) & Milena Buchwalder, Sonja Flury, Dorothee Hahn, Larissa Müllner (curatorial team/ProSaffa1958-Pavillon Association)

Assistant

Telmo Escapil-Inchauspé 

Hosted by Kunsthalle Zurich

Exhibition Project at 

Kunsthalle Zurich

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

Blue Gloves, White Gloves

Processing Albena Yaneva’s photographs of the work performed at the Canadian Center for Architecture’s archives and collection in Montreal by

Tommaso Borghesi, Melina Lopez Dueñas, Yidan Huang, Sarah Kimmich, Henry Morgan, Arianna Patton, Marina Bernardi Peschard and Karen Wong 

in dialogue with Elisa R. Linn, Klaus Platzgummer and Lennart Wolff 

with the support of Telmo Escapil-Inchauspé

«There are skills in these thin gloves, their materiality and color; these special gloves allow [them] to do specific things. With the gloves on, [they] ‘manipulate [...] the paper without touching the object’ and arrange [...] photos without touching their surfaces; the soft and thin blue gloves afford a gentle handling of fragile surfaces, a delicate flipping through photographs, and the fine and precise execution of numerous dexterous operations. However, the blue gloves are not convenient for the manipulation of hard wooden surfaces; there is another type of glove for that, a thick, white, cotton glove.» (1) 

For the exhibition Blue Gloves, White Gloves the participants of the AA VS dissect, edit and process ethnographic research photographs from the CCA. Drawings, collages and installations trace the tools and labour of archivists, conservators and curators among others. How are these agents not only instrumental to the preservation and maintenance of architectural media in the archival and exhibitionary complex, and also shape the very practices of architecture?

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