ANARCHIVE
or, the spirit of Happenings transformed

Roodkapje’s expo of a growing anarchive
with the Hamburger Community, Hogus Bogus Publishing, Alice Strete, Philippa Driest, Maoyi Qiu, Samboleap Tol and Sandim Mendes

In May 2024, Roodkapje began building their anarchive. It currently takes the shape of an exhibition consisting of anarchival pieces and traces that evolve from the Happenings organized by the residents of the Hamburger Community. While the traces are more like leftovers or small documentations of the Happenings, the pieces are commissioned works where artists are asked to anarchive their experience of a Happening. Our anarchive goes from textile work to audiopieces, soap jellos encasing fruit pits and sculptural paintings.. Come see for yourself.

Happenings feeding the anarchive
Core to the public program developed by the Hamburger Community are the Happenings. We are interested in the intersections of art, activism, and wonder. There we see the Happening as an art form full of playful, disruptive and subversive potential, that calls for a radical imagination. If you wish to understand the social context or full sensorial experience of a Happening, traditional archival traditions of documentation are insufficient. That is why Roodkapje initiated a parallel research to experiment with anarchival practices and attitudes.

In a Happening, the message is the moment. We aim to collect these moments in our anarchive. Artists are invited to transform the spirit of the Happenings into anarchival pieces; artworks that suggest new beginnings, relations and ways of being. We hope these processes and affective forces will craft stories about what has passed in ways that may inspire possible action in the future.


anarchive as an antithesis
We do not pretend to offer an objective record of the past, nor will we present any proof that something has happened. We are not interested to establish Roodkapje’s history in practice. An archive decides what’s valuable enough to document and save and also in what way. It decides how we remember the past, how we can consult this memory and who and what is excluded from this collective memory. It holds a claim on neutrality and objectivity, but is in its core colonial and patriarchal. It leaves silences and gaps.

To start anarchiving is to break free from the archive as we know it. It is a proposition to figure out the ways in which the full sensorial experience of lived life can be included. Roodkapje’s anarchive is subjective, polyvocal and unevenly shaped. We celebrate the inherent subjectivity of archives that in a regular archive is often underexposed or even denied. We believe that anarchival practices can offer space for polyvocality and reciprocity in collective memory and meaning making. The anarchive is an antithesis to the archive. Find it within the daydreaming.

opening hours:
Thur 16:00 - 20:00
Sat - Sun 14:00 - 20:00

free entrance

To develop this anarchive’s visual language and house style, we are working with artist and designer Iris van Velzen.