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ARCH.IVE: Exploring Archival Resistance

Harriet Allen

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I am an Architecture student at Central Saint Martins, graduating in September 2025. My work extends beyond traditional architectural practice, encompassing my interests in craft, activism and exhibition design. As a student producer and artist assistant, I've gained hands-on experience curating exhibitions and organizing talks and workshops. I am always eager to contribute to new projects & connect with like-minded individuals.

I am an Architecture student at Central Saint Martins, graduating in September 2025. My work exte...

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ARCH.IVE investigates how protest can be spatially archived in a time when public dissent is increasingly criminalised. In the wake of the Public Order Act 2023, which redefines protest as a public threat, I ask, how can architecture hold space for resistance when the streets are no longer safe?

Drawing on Judith Butler’s theorisation of performative assembly, this project considers protest not just as a political demand but as a spatial practice, where bodies come together to assert collective agency. When such assemblies are prohibited, the banners, structures, chants, and gestures become critical sites of memory and resistance. ARCH.IVE proposes an alternative archival framework, seeking to preserve the performative dimensions of protest, and ensuring that these fleeting acts of defiance are not forgotten, but remembered, studied, and reactivated.

Final work

  • Carousel images showing three moments of a cardboard 'block bloc' being activated by four users.
  • Carousel images showing three moments of a cardboard 'block bloc' being activated by four users.
  • Carousel images showing three moments of a cardboard 'block bloc' being activated by four users.
Mixed media triptych drawing of Speakers Corner, Hyde Park

Speakers Corner Triptych

1. After attending your local marches/rallys, begin to spatialize key routes. This can be achieved by creating memory maps, referring to route plans from organizers or recording routes through sketches or photos.

2. Within your mapping, look for sites for potential occupation. For example, Speakers Corner, in London’s Hyde Park is a site largely left alone by the authorities, due to the 1872 Park Regulation Act.  

3. Undertake site analysis, recording key happenings in chosen area. You may study how certain user groups use lunacy and props to draw attention from passersby. 

4. These findings may be compiled into a series of photographs, etchings or larger drawing, showing the depths of the context surrounding the site, useful in later stages of design.

Research and process

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ARCH.IVE: Exploring Archival Resistance

ARCH.IVE investigates how protest can be spatially archived in a time when public dissent is increasingly criminalised. In the wake of the Public Order Act 2023, which redefines protest as a public threat, I ask, how can architecture hold space for resistance when the streets ...

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