TOTEMS T.D.B: A Generative Archive

The aim of the work is to render how one acts out one’s (familial) idea of leisure in space, and mimics the archive’s ability to skew perceptions of past events to draw out the most permanent forms of privilege.

The heirloom and inherited artefact are investigated as a momentary resting place for a systemic concept of leisure. Situated in the Archival Hallway, a traversable space which holds a proud auto-curation of family history, the project challenges the underlying sinister aspects of the state-owned museum.

The project focuses on the leisure matrix (one’s personal perspective and conception of leisure heavily influenced by inherited customs and values) as a telltale of how privilege is propagated by individuals in space through their organisation and emphasis of particular architectural parts — their totems.

Privilege is chosen to be maintained as the leisurely products it yields are built into family culture and customs. Ignoring chances to capitalise on one’s privilege is often culturally illogical. To visualise the hereditary systems that define so much of our lives into unnamed casts and preprogrammed futures means to crystallise the footprints of colonialism’s covert transplacement. A game-like instrument is proposed as a proving ground to generate automatic landscape drawings through players’ participation, proposing that the unconscious decisions made in the miniature reflect a collective cultural ideology surrounding spatial planning and privilege. The landscape renderings, coined the Leisurescape, are to be exhibited alongside the various instrument’s components like a large multigenerational family photo one would find in the home’s entrance hall.