Community by Archive: Instituting Memories through Architecture and Art

You are cordially invited to the following roundtable:

Date/Time: Tuesday, 17 March 2026/6-8pm
Venue: SDE 4 Level 5 Forum
BOA SIA CPD Points: TBC

Registration: https://bit.ly/nusdoa_Roundtable

Community by Archive: Instituting Memories through Architecture and Art

To remember, we often rely on mnemonic devices, whether we are dealing with personal, institutional, or collective memories. One crucial mnemonic device for evoking memory, reconstructing the past, and enabling recollection is the archive. Yet archives do not pre-exist their construction, and, as many scholars have shown, they are never neutral repositories of historical documents.

How, then, might we build and read archives with a heightened awareness of their inevitable biases? What kinds of communities, relations, and forms of labour are required to make an archive? Conversely, what forms of knowledge and what kinds of community are imagined by the very act of archiving? What do those archival communities and their practices of knowing render visible or invisible, sayable or unsayable? And how might we contend with such archival saturations and silences when narrating our pasts?

Taking the book As Hardly Found: Art and Tropical Architecture (Architectural Association Publications, 2025), edited by Albert Brenchat Aguilar, as an entry point, this roundtable engages these questions around the making and unmaking, the uses and misuses, of archives and communities in architecture and art.

Panelists:
Albert Brenchat Aguilar is a Lecturer and the co-Director of Public Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His recent co-edited book Wastiary, A bestiary of Waste (2023) is open access at UCL Press. Recent articles include ‘Brutish Brutalism‘ in ARQ, 2025, and  ‘Functional Environs‘, in Architectural Theory Review, 2023.

Joleen Loh is a Curator at National Gallery Singapore. Her past curatorial projects include Fear No Power: Women Imagining Otherwise (2026), Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art (2025) and Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture in Southeast Asia (1969–1989) (2019).

Robin Hartanto Honggare is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, NUS

Saptarshi Sanyal is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, NUS

Moderated by Chang Jiat Hwee, Dean’s Chair Associate Professor, NUS

Organized by the Laboratory for Architectural Histories and Humanities (LAHH), Department of Architecture, NUS