Archives in Motion

Brendan Cormier, chief curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A East), is a Canadian curator who explores design as a critical tool for interpreting cultural and urban transformations. With a background in urban planning, he directed the magazine Volume for several years and curated projects such as Values of Design (2017) and A World of Fragile Parts (2016), investigating the relationship between design, social values, and heritage conservation. During the pandemic, he conceived Pandemic Objects, a reflection on the new meanings acquired by everyday objects.

How does your project as part of the Applied Arts Pavilion align with the overarching idea of Intelligens, the theme launched by Carlo Ratti for this edition of the Biennale?
The Pavilion responds to Carlo Ratti’s notion of Intelligens in two ways. The first is through a meditation on the embedded intelligence of things. Museums are in the business of preserving objects, but more importantly, in extracting the embedded knowledge, histories, and stories that objects hold, and disseminating that to a wider public. Museum collections are immense reservoirs of human and non-human knowledge, frozen and framed by objects created across time and space. This brings us to the second response to the Biennale’s theme: if knowledge is only useful if it circulates, then it is incumbent on us to find ways to circulate that knowledge through objects. To do so, we need bold new architectural solutions. This is the ethos of V&A East Storehouse, a machine for both preserving knowledge, but also circulating and disseminating it through opening up access to a wider public.

Your participation in the Biennale unfolds through a remarkable artistic work: a film directed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and exhibition space with architectural models and photographs, which anticipate the public opening of the V&A East Storehouse in London on May 31, 2025, a project unprecedented in scale, ambition, and accessibility, offering free access to over half a million objects from the V&A’s collection, spanning every creative discipline. Which new paradigms in artistic expression and exhibition design have emerged from it? And what makes it unique and potentially groundbreaking?
V&A East Storehouse breaks the mould of traditional museum design in radically new ways. It does so by renegotiating the contract between collection and visitor. In traditional museum spaces, this is a one-sided contract in which the visitor is a passive guest, meant to consume a curated narrative, moving along pre-determined paths and sightlines dictated by intricately configured design cues. V&A East Storehouse on the other hand creates a more two-sided approach. The collection is informed by what the visitor brings to it – through displays that consist of more than one voice, including new insights from researchers and community constituencies – and the visitor is enriched by the serendipitous discoveries and connections made at the Storehouse. To achieve this, a completely new architecture and organisational software is required, one that allows for a freer flow and constant reconfiguration of objects, and that encourages visitor engagement, which is what has been so successful about DS+R’s design.

The film at the heart of On Storage offers a meditation on the role of storage in our lives. A seemingly marginal element becomes a symbol of our contemporary condition. What broader reflections emerge from this investigation?
The funny thing about thinking about the architecture of storage, is that you start to see it everywhere. You can’t unsee it. Architecture is 99% storage solutions. From the oldest settlements which formed to collectively store grain, to the primitive hut, meant to store and keep the human body alive in harsh climates, to the reems of pages that fill IKEA catalogues advertising bookshelves, food containers, flowerpots, etc, to the rapidly proliferating typology of the data centre meant to fuel our AI revolution. It is wild that we consider storage as marginal, when it is in fact everywhere and everything. The broader revelation in doing this project is that one of the very core design principles for any piece of storage is to render itself as invisible as possible, which turns out to be its biggest problem. If storage is invisible, we lose track of the immense accumulation that humanity has already produced, and in so doing, continue to overproduce more things, while not capitalising on the embedded usefulness and intelligence of the things we already have. The invisibility of storage leads to waste, overconsumption, and a constant forgetting.

Through their projects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have demonstrated a democratic architectural vision – a manifesto of architecture as a perceptual device, a lens through which to reinterpret the world. Which aspects of their design language guided you in the curation of On Storage?
DS+R are interested in all forms of architecture, from canonical masterpieces to everyday spaces. Their ability to think about architecture taking shape in many forms was especially useful in thinking about the film. Our goal with the film was to create a global sweep of storage architectures through a simple narrative device: the life and death of a toothbrush. By following this one simple object, we create a sequence of unique storage spaces – factory, port, distribution centre, home, airport, plane, luggage, hotel, recycling centre – each of them a form of architectural device, fundamental to keeping our global system of logistics alive. DS+R’s design language, which can deftly visualize the world as a series of interconnected architectural typologies, has informed the aesthetics and composition of the film, which in turn, helps us communicate the idea that storage and circulation are interlinked and vital.

The V&A, a long-standing promoter of creativity in all its forms, presents a contribution to this Biennale that transcends traditional architectural formats, through a film that explores the relationships between parts and the whole, addressing the complexities of our present from an expanded perspective. How do creative languages help shape a new grammar for interpreting contemporary life?
I think creativity is essential to creating new grammars, new frames, and new interpretations for understanding contemporary life. That is what is so important about museums and other institutions that champion creativity. It is not that creativity simply produces new forms of entertainment and consumption – which is sadly a view that many people have – but that creativity is essential to unpacking and understanding the ever-evolving complexity of modern life, giving us tools not only to survive but thrive and build a better future. For museums to be successful in that endeavour, we need to be able to levy the embedded intelligence of the objects we hold. And to do that, we need daring and innovative architecture.

Featured image: View into the Collections Hall at V&A East Storehouse © Diller Scofidio + Renfro