Furniture Without Memory (2022)
Event: Counter-Memory Installation and Workshop
Date: October 5, 2021
Location: Het Nieuwe Instituut
Exhibiting Artists: (Trojan Horse Cell Team) Clara Balaguer, Isola Tong, Czar Kristoff, Alfred Marasigan
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Furniture Without Memories critically examines the lingering colonial and class structures embedded in modernist architecture. Developed as part of To Be Determined Trojan Horse Cell (TBD THC), the project draws from research conducted at Sonneveld House, Het Nieuwe Instituut’s museum house in Rotterdam. Designed in 1933 by Brinkman en Van der Vlugt in the style of Het Nieuwe Bouwen, Sonneveld House exemplifies early 20th-century ideals of functionalist living, health, and hygiene. However, beneath its progressive architectural vision lies a hierarchy that persists in the invisible social architecture of modernity. A key feature of the house, is the minimally porous wall separating the Sonneveld family from their in-house staff. This architectural element reflects a broader system of class divisions that, while often concealed within democratic design principles, remain deeply entrenched in the built and social environment.
The project expands upon critical discourses on power structures within modernism, referencing Toni Morrison’s concept of “furniture without memories” and Avery Gordon’s analysis of social hauntings. By interrogating the co-optation of European modernist ideals into American consumer capitalism, the research highlights how architecture reinforces, rather than dismantles, systems of othering. While early modernist movements such as the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne and the Bauhaus promoted a utopian vision of functionalist equity, these ideals often masked exclusionary practices. In a house in which as a rule, the Sonneveld family staff can only be heard but not seen, the separation of labor and privilege within Sonneveld House serves as a metaphor for how modern systems grants marginalized bodies visibility with limited agency.
Activated as part of Collecting Otherwise at Het Nieuwe Instituut, the research engaged in a series of discussions and interventions. These gatherings explored alternative approaches to archival and institutional practices, centering decolonial methodologies. The installation invited participants to mark surfaces using edible ink on rice paper, engaging in a practice of counter-remembering. This act of inscription on edible materials, positioned as a form of co-designing against rigid modernist structures, echoes the notion of ornament as an act of resistance. Adolf Loos’s declaration that “ornament is crime and crime is ornament” is subverted in this work, proposing that to decolonize architecture is to imagine against the grid.
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