Hidden among boxes, models and old catalogs in the basement of the Architects’ Association, the record left by the twenty-one biennials held between 1977 and 2019 has been gathered to consolidate the first archive of the Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennial. Provisional Archive: The new, anew presents its archive as a device that in itself interrogates the biennial, and in the action of selecting a document, articulates its contents with audiences, discourses with records, awards with critiques, and guilds with disciplines from a single master object. 

 

The archive is presented as a tool that formulates discourses, and the biennials as an object of historical study whose reproduction constitutes a complex infrastructure that takes different forms: closer to a multidimensional device than to an exhibition. Provisional Archive presents a documentary body that seeks to encourage the development of future readings and explorations by opening it up to the visitor, rewriting the text through its reorganization and the visibility of each selection.

 

The labels -always partial-, do not seek to exhaust the vastness built by these reproductions as a record of the architectural debate during the last four decades in Chile, but to test new ways of approaching the history of biennials, their iterations, and their historical relational condition. If everything is architecture, as Hans Hollein argues, in the universe of its archive and its potential discourses, everything is novelty.