This blog documents the process of cataloguing the recently acquired Carlton Mansions Collection housed at Lambeth Archives. While often framed as an act of archival science, here the subjectivities of cataloguing archival material are explored. Carlton Mansions, existed as a short life housing co-op in Brixton from 1979-2014, the material in the collection covers this period - but in fragments. No linear narrative awaits discovery, instead, as seen in the photographs and observations that populate this space, these objects offer competing ideas, clashing voices and numerous gaps. Perhaps most of all though, they reveal evocative traces of an experiment in housing, and a community committed to making it work.
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The Archive is this kind of place, that is to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam
Dust, Carolyn Steedman
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After hours surrounded by sheets of paper, the installation is in place and the catalogue complete. I now await the reactions of others, I’m especially eager and nervous to hear what the ex-residents of Carlton Mansions think. I want to know the items they remember, and how they will frame these fragmented traces - what knowledge will they bring to the pieces that struck me most.
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Trial and error with piecing this together
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One of the more unexpected elements of the Carlton Mansions Collection - a selection of anarchic te-shirts tucked away amid the paper trail
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Aporia
An irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.
The expression of doubt.
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‘At times, the archive compels us to read its minimum signs with maximum energy: at others, it is the aporia within the archive that compel close reading’
Paul J. Voss and Marta L. Werner, Towards a Poetics of the Archive
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Sharon
Today I spoke to Sharon, an ex-resident, on the phone. She shared her memories of her flat, recalling moments such as millennium on the roof of the building and the sound of the freezers from next door through the wall.
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My own doodles morphing into those on the edges of the Carlton Mansions minutes
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Re-ordered in these unremarkable boxes to be shelved next to others the same
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The moving around of papers has begun - my mind is overtaken with serial numbers and missing boxes...my fear of spreadsheets is in full swing #excelphobia
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...as a non historian it's the stuff that might not jump out of the archive's material that may have significance. Material that only builds up into a picture if all the details are closely followed. Like in an archaeological dig. Where you use a small knife and slowly go down the earth.
Matthew reflects on the process of cataloguing an archive, responding to my questions about the value of the Carlton Mansions collecting.
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I finally met Madeleine Boulesteix, a long term resident of Carlton Mansions, and an artist renowned for her found object chandeliers pictured here. Sitting in a cafe in Brixton Village with a resident ginger cat, she recalled her time at the Mansions and her thoughts around the creation of an archive on the subject. We discussed the absences of the collection, the unrecorded conversations and the reality that the best things don’t get written down. We agreed on the potential use of adding a commentary on these absences to the collection at some point, adding another angle and way in to the story.
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The minutes are negative by their nature, they are all things that needed doing
Madeleine Boulesteix
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A rock line-up spotted at the entrance to the archives today
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An added element - the vitrine. Parallel to the paper installation this vitrine will host some of the boxes of the actual archival material and the more ordered outcome such as the catalogue document and accompanying timeline.
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Looking again at the space for the installation, questions around how to work with the walls of the building
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Drafting the installation text...
How to be open and not obvious, ask the right questions without simplifying...the curatorial questions are tricky...
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