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?