DESIGN STUDIO 5.1 - 
MISPLACED IDENTITIES
 

Misplaced Identities takes a critical standpoint against the colonial attitudes and possessive nature of la Archiva de las Indias in Seville, both building and collection forming an architectural dynasty of dictated sovereignty and material anonymity over eight centuries of cultural misappropriation.

The proposal instigates an extension to existing building situated against the urban threshold of the Guadalquivir river, the point of possessive transfer from water to land and final moment of identity displacement. The objects of the archive are re-staged in a new gallery that uses its geological and ecological adjacencies to raise the question of purpose, position, and placement of colonial attitudes.

Combining the traditional manufacturing process of tiles synonymous with Seville, a series of photographs relating archive to city are tessellated and transformed under perspectival choreographies, creating an architectural language that unfolds itself along the river’s edge to create a raised series of vaulted bays to generate a Neo-Baroque response to conventional archival displays.

Engagement with the building is raised through a sequence of field, stair, boundary and vault, an isotropic re-composition of the photographic forms as geometries that use spatial confusion to heighten the critical understanding of the building and subsequently the content it houses, questioning the misplaced identity of oneself in the midst of the archival interrogation.