[M HKA, Antwerpen 2025]
Discovery does not require a predefined search. I approach the archive as a system that resists instrumental models of retrieval, shifting instead toward a mode of encounter shaped by presence, intuition, and contingency. Developed as a prototype during my internship at M HKA, the work explores how knowledge can emerge not through targeted queries, but through situated interaction – where the interface does not simply retrieve, but responds.
The archive is approached as a field of unfinished conversations – not as a literal capacity to return to the same point, but as a conceptual condition in which fragments remain open to re-entry, reinterpretation, and continuation across contexts. Participation does not depend on linear access or completeness; one can enter at any point, disengage, and re-engage elsewhere. By introducing a physical, tactile point of entry and reducing the interface to minimal operations, I construct a framework in which engagement becomes exploratory rather than directive.
In this process, the archive is reconfigured as a relational and generative environment, producing associations that are not pre-determined but co-constituted in real time. What surfaces is not information as such, but a field of connections – partial, unstable, and reflective of the conditions of their emergence.