The Active Archive - a space filled with the Past, the Present, and the Future.
The Active Archive amplifies the conversation surrounding climate and social injustice and the intersecting role they play within one another, building upon the history of Stockport’s cotton industry and the connecting relationship with slavery and exploitation. The programme is based on time, the past, present and future - the space aims to communicate the ever-changing information and ongoing situation worldwide. By facilitating this through the mediums of art and debate, the Active Archive is playing a vital role in educating communities on the climate crisis in local and global networks. The space will connect the historical events of the cotton and slave trade to the modern entanglement of oppression and the climate emergency within current human systems.
The Active Archive hopes to provide a local purpose for a currently derelict and disconnected area while creating wider purposeful human action that will be felt on a larger scale, providing a key catalyst for change. This will be achieved with nature in mind at all times to ensure an equal and interwoven web of human and non-human ways of life.
The architectural embodiment of the concept is shown through a brick rainscreen system, based on the intention of creating space for nature to grow on architecture as an implemented design, “Growing in the Gaps”. Architecture generally does not implement this strategy in its design, rather it is usually seen as an aftermath of overgrown nature on old or abandoned buildings.
