Proxy Archives: Touching Without Touching

Across a series of commissions, Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess developed a set of strategies for the public display of archives. For this lecture, we will 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?