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MSoA — ARCH673 — W23

Family Tree

NCC’s Community Driven Archive
by Julien Rozon

Family Tree is a proposition for a Community Driven Archive at the former NCC/Charles H.Este Cultural Center in Little Burgundy, Montreal. It essentially reinterprets the traditional archive centre into a self-sustaining model. Archives often aren’t in the hands of their own communities - through various cross-disciplinary engagement programs, it envisions a community space that shares historical and cultural issues, but that foremost fosters the creation and the development of resources to build a collective memory that heals historical negligence. This approach focuses on supporting, serving, and learning from minoritized communities that preserve and activate their own legacies. It catalogues and digitize archives as a free service and help place those archives as donations in collections where they will be widely accessible.

Trolleys of materials constitute the exhibitions that will take place at the CDA. They are constantly moved or rearranged by the researchers and curators, reflecting on the contemporary act of the curatorial selection that mediates between a 20th-century object displays institution VS. a 21st-century time based future. Visitors can use them to pick up materials. They replace the traditional immobile display units ; The team at the CDA will showcase and explain in a new decomplexed and informal way the curatorial selection exhibited at the moment. This way of making the exhibitions will encourage learning, through body movement, discussion and exchange, in an exciting architectural parcours. The visitors will also be able to ask information regarding the related material section and thus be able to deepen their understanding of the exhibitions.