Imagining the Archive: Curatorial Speculation and the PlanChest Project
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PlanChest is an evolving curatorial research project exploring the archive as a site of imagination, refusal, and play. Structured around an imagined physical plan chest, a traditional storage unit for drawings, blueprints, and maps, the project unfolds as a series of fictional exhibitions stored within its fictional drawers.
Each drawer acts as a container for a show that never happened, and perhaps never will... It is both a provocation and a proposal: What if curating could exist in potential alone? How can we archive curatorial process and methodologies? This methodology was seeded years ago during my time leading TROVE, an independent art space in Birmingham. In a 2010 exhibition, POST, co curated with Hayley Lock, a plan chest became the venue itself, its drawers housing individual micro-exhibitions curated in response to the constraint of producing a touring exhibition, the spaces it was to be exhibited, and the storytelling around the exhibition - the collection of work that had been posted by many artists to TROVE. The plan chests contained not only the artwork but also the envelopes and notes that accompanied it through the mail. The experience of realising this exhibition became a lodestar for how I now approach archive-as-structure: layered, tactile, partial, and intimate. 
POST, installation, TROVE, 2010, curated by Charlie Levine & Hayley Lock. Image credit: Charlie Levine
At the heart of PlanChest is a refusal to view archives as dusty or unapproachable. Instead, the project aligns with the ethos of exhibitions such as Archives at Play (Castlefield Gallery, 2020/2023), which proposed archives as live, collaborative, and interpretative. This same spirit underpinned my participatory project Curate the Archive, which was produced for SqW:Lab 2024, where the Lab's fellows, in pairs, were invited to explore the British Museums prints and drawing online archive. Inspired by themes from Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual and Species of Spaces they were asked to imagine an exhibition from the collection, they designed fictional exhibitions using Oulipian constraints: drawing connections between domesticity, process, and drawing itself. The results were poetic, peculiar, and unpredictable, just like the archive at its best.
Similarly, the artist john ros' series dia a dia / buen dia echoes PlanChests rhythm of daily archive-making and meaning-building. ros' process-based approach, cataloguing transient, everyday experiences, underscores the political and personal dimensions of documentation-as-art. Another artist I admire for their work with archives is Theaster Gates, especially his revival of neglected materials and histories, offers another vital influence. Like Gates, I am interested in what happens when we reactivate forgotten or fabricated artefacts not just to remember, but to reimagine. PlanChest wants to keep this whimsy and explore the potential an archive holds for future story-telling and linking possibly obscure or ill-fitting objects as well. I'm thinking specifically of Micah Lexier's Twelve of One. The work consists of found objects in an existing vitrine over a one-year exhibition consisting of twelve consecutive one-month vitrine displays of a variety of items including stationary, coins, measuring devices, printed cardboard, street finds, mail art, artists multiples, lists, tickets, postcards, forms, books, found drawings, etc. PlanChest operates in this speculative mode and echoes Walter Benjamin's notion of the dialectical (true) image, where the past and present collide in a flash of legibility and animates the archives temporal slippage into (non)reality. Each drawer becomes a potential Benjaminian "constellation," gathering fragments of past research and future longing - an idea I visited for an exhibition, The Tale Tellers: The Rag Pickers in 2023, where I took "found" works from instagram and curated them to be a visual interpretation of a chapter from the Walter Benjamin's Archive book.
What binds these approaches is a shared belief that archives are generative, not just commemorative, something that was cemented for me when I saw Triple Candie in conversation with Jens Hoffmann for Performa, 2013. PlanChest proposes a form of curatorial play: a space to experiment with themes, exhibition-making, institutional critique, and narrative without the pressure of production. It invites slowness, speculation, and joy in a field often defined by deliverables. I love making connections and linking works, as well as diving into concepts of 'spaces', such as the corner or corridor, and this is a way I can contain my thinking formally and accessibly. The drawers themselves reflect this diversity and non-gatekeeping approach. Some are thematic responding to solo show, group show, or museum-inspired formats. Others are autobiographical, diaristic, or associative. Some are poetic, others pedagogical. Collectively, they resist curatorial finality and instead revel in provisionality. Through PlanChest, I seek to make visible the often-invisible scaffolding of curatorial practice. What is usually backstage thinking, sketching, failing is brought to the fore. The archive, here, is not a site of closure but of constant becoming. |
