Future Archive at RIBA

1 June 2022 to 16 July 2022

First Floor Gallery, 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD

Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm (Tuesday, 10am to 8pm)

As part of 2022’s London Festival of Architecture (LFA), RIBA hosted the Royal College of Art (RCA) Future Archive project.

Future Archive was a bespoke publication and exhibition that gathers artworks, texts, and conversations from the Future Archive artistic research laboratory, led by artist Rut Blees Luxemburg. Future Archive focusses on the four year long construction process of the RCA’s new Battersea campus, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, which opened in 2022.

Future Archive explored the construction site in Battersea as a location for field study, generating diverse artworks including paintings, photographs and billboards; performances, sculptures, videos and publications. The opportunity to work on a construction site provided the artists with a productive conduit for exploring urban transformation, memory and the active construction of a future archive. The representation of labour and masculinity; data and ethics; visualisation and material experimentation were key questions of artistic enquiry.

Future Archive aimed to visualise and bring to the fore the often hidden narratives of architecture and construction, which are usually invisible in conventional visualisations of architecture photography or computer generated architectural propositions.