Lecture / congress
On Thursday 20 November 2025, the Flanders Architecture Institute organises its annual research day in De Singel in Antwerp. Entitled Hors catégorie, it explores how archival classifications shape – but also limit – our understanding of design heritage.
Each year, the Flanders Architecture Institute organises a research day to facilitate exchange between our activities and the wider research community. The event explores topical research questions which also concern the ongoing projects of the Flanders Architecture Institute’s Knowledge Centre and Collection. We reflect on questions which are relevant to researchers as well as the heritage sector.
This year’s edition explores how archival classifications shape – but also limit – our understanding of design heritage. How do we categorise objects, disciplines, and forms of authorship and what blind spots are produced through these systems? How can we consider practices that elude, transcend, or contest conventional institutional and historical classification? What to do with practices hors catégorie?
The programme of the research day consists of a keynote performance, three thematic sessions with national and international guests, and a keynote lecture by Anna-Maria Meister. Lunch is included in the ticket price.
09.30 – 10.00 | Welcome by Dennis Pohl (director of the VAi) and introduction by Janno Martens (researcher at the Knowledge Centre)
10.00 – 10.30 | Keynote performance by Pia Jacques
Sticky situations. Living on glue and other cheap materials
The unfamiliar visitor meets the archivist of an archetypical archive. Together, they wander around the building, circulating between the acid-free cardboard boxes, listening to the buzzing sounds from the ventilation pipes, and observing the insect paper traps. During the visit, anecdotes from daily life in archives investigate the role of coincidence in decision-making processes.
Pia Jacques is a graphic designer and artist. She develops narratives based on documents from institutional and community-based archives. Pia is interested in the encounter between abstract systems of archival organisation and the realities of everyday life in these enclosed spaces. Her stories can take the form of performances and textile or printed objects. Pia Jacques graduated from LUCA School of Arts Gent and of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
10.30 – 12.15 | Session 1: Sourcing the archive, moderated by Tine Poot (Design consultant at the VAi Knowledge Centre).
When we think of design archives, traditional sources like plans, models, and drawings often come to mind. This session, however, explores non-traditional, ephemeral, and digital sources—such as family videos, activist magazines, personal correspondence, social media and even video games. This diversification of source types reflects a broader shift: the very nature of design knowledge is evolving. What kinds of knowledge are being transferred or preserved through these alternative sources? Who determines what is considered valid, and based on which criteria? How can we ensure that the sources we use—or generate—represent a plurality of voices and experiences, rather than reinforcing dominant narratives?
12.30 - 13.30 | Lunch
13.30 – 15.00 | Session 2: Navigating the archive, moderated by Bart Decroos (researcher at the VAi Collection)
Every archive, library or collection necessarily relies on systems of registration to make sense of its own contents. Such systems are a precondition for accessibility, allowing archivists, librarians and visitors alike to navigate the endless rows of books and boxes with a certain sense of purpose and precision. In an attempt to ensure this accessibility, institutions rely on international standards such as the ISAD(G) or their own internal conventions, fitting the heterogenous contents of their vaults into a homogenic logic of abstracted organization. Bibliographic classifications such as UDC or DDC even aim at a universal structuring of all human knowledge. Yet, such institutionalized systems also transform the content they represent: the labels, categories and keywords provided to the user might also limit the extent of what can be searched for. How can institutions make room for other ways of navigating their collections? And to what extent is it possible to democratize such institutionalized inventories by enriching them with user-based perspectives?
15.00 – 15.15 | Break
15.15 – 16.45 | Session 3: Performing the archive, moderated by Janno Martens (researcher at the VAi Knowledge Centre)
Once design archives are absorbed into institutional collections, they often become detached from the dynamic contexts in which they were originally created. Through this process of institutionalisation, these archives tend to be treated as static resources for research or as artistic material for exhibitions. Whether approached through historical, journalistic, or artistic lenses, research into these collections typically involves a degree of physical and intellectual distance. But what happens when we reverse this approach? What if, instead of distancing ourselves, we actively seek proximity to the material? This session explores the potential of engaged, embodied, and dynamic interactions with archival collections. Can a more performative and participatory approach to archives reveal new insights—ones that remain hidden in more traditional modes of inquiry?
16.45 – 17.00 | Break
17.00 – 18.00 | Keynote lecture by Anna-Maria Meister (KHI Florenz / KIT Karlsruhe / saai archive)
Hidden in plain sight…or which future lies in the archive?
Archives are places of decay and loss. Archives are full of holes and unstable. They are constantly threatened with destruction, whether intentional, arbitrary, or accidental, through changes in institutional policy or forgetfulness, the destruction of evidence or the construction of a canon, wars or migration, fire or flood, flora or fauna. Whether slowly dripping water or dropped bombs, whether paper fish or users—archives are not “safe,” nor are the data they contain. And yet (or perhaps because of this) they still contain the foundations of our discipline. This talk attempts—through a series of case studies—to adjust the depth of field when looking at plans, models, archival materials, or archival environments, and to refract and reflect to reveal what might be overlooked. To this end, archival documents are translated from “worthless” paper into a medium that long dominated art-historical discourse and production; metadata and missing people are found; and materialities are investigated as their own archive. First and foremost, established disciplinary categories and archival values are questioned. What happens when retrains the eye to other levels of information? Can one readmaterial instead of data? When perspectives are recalibrated, loss becomes knowledge and values become transposable. Then, one can hope, the archive holds the possibility of a future—hidden in plain sight.
Anna-Maria Meister directs the Lise Meitner Research Group “Coded Objects” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) - Max Planck Institut, and is full professor for architecture theory as well as co-director of the saai archive at KIT Karlsruhe. Meister’s work focuses on processes of design and the design of processes, the materiality of knowledge systems, history of ideas and methodological experimentation. She is a licensed architect with degrees from Princeton and Columbia University and works across medial divides, including exhibitions and installations. Most recently she co-edited the international research project Radical Pedagogies and the eponymous book (MIT Press 2022) as well as the interdisciplinary volumes Entangled Temporalities (2023) and Are You a Model? (2024); currently, she is editing a double volume titled Coded/Objects and completing a monograph on standardization as societal projection in 20th century Germany.
18.00 – 19.00 Drinks
20.11.2025
09:30u - 19:00u
DE SINGEL (Muziekstudio)
Desguinlei 25, 2018 Antwerpen
Flanders Architecture Institute
Janno Martens
janno.martens@vai.be
There are spaces reserved for wheelchair users in all halls of DE SINGEL. Please contact us in advance at janno.martens@vai.be so that we can reserve a space for you. You can use an elevator to reach the halls. Enter through the main entrance of DE SINGEL and make your way down the ramp to the left of the stairs to take the lift. Read more about the accessibility
You can store your coat, handbag or backpack in the free lockers available at DE SINGEL. These are located in two places: in the locker area under the stairs at the main entrance via Desguinlei, and at the Theatre Square in Beel Laag. Instructions on how to use the lockers can be found on the side of the locker column.
