Over the course of a series of chance commissions, Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess developed set of strategies for the display and preservation of archives. For this lecture we discuss our design practice through the notion of the proxy archive. We draw on examples from recent work with the curatorial collective, freethought, for the Bergen Assembly.

A proxy is that which has authority to represent someone or something else – a placeholder that may or may not bear resemblance to the original. As designers tasked with presenting often inaccessible and incomplete archives, we ask: How to conjure the archive in its absence? How to touch without touching?