Deep Encounters with the Design History archives, from 1968 Brazil to now

When describing her methods for imagining historical possibilities and impossibilities, Saidiya Hartman proposes that historians strain ‘against the limits of the archive’ (Hartman, 2008). Her ‘deep encounters’ with archival materials consist of working with ‘scraps of the archive’ [...], ‘with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus’ (Hartman & Siemsen, 2018). In my paper, I argue that design historians, in their current endeavour to reframe and decolonize the discipline and its methods, can align with Hartman’s deep archival encounters. Beyond the discipline's roots in colonial museum collections and victors’ biographies, design history's methods and forms of knowledge have produced radical anonymous object histories, collectivist narratives of de-patriarchization and fierce critiques of capitalist modernity by engaging with multiple, scattered and unorthodox archives. Foregrounding design history’s decolonizing potency, my paper narrates a deep encounter with the archives in search of a particular historical event: the protests staged during the first International Design Biennial in Brazil in 1968 by design students discontent with the biennial's imperialist ethos and their professional education. In narrating these events I reflect purposefully on the entanglements of place making, design education and political imagination in 1968 as well as contemporary archives - their contexts, silences and incompleteness - whilst proposing new methods for (re)writing decolonial design histories that go beyond the solutionist ethos of case studies. I hope my presentation will offer novel perspectives for the collective decolonization of design history, and beyond.