Only a few minutes into the Zoom conversation with brothers Akil and Seth Scafe-Smith, the initiators and directors of Resolve Collective, and some thought exercises on how to reimagine everyday institutions and infrastructures have already come up—from Akil proposing to use Uber to transport Seth’s forgotten laptop charger back to his house, to trying to picture what role translated transcriptions can play in re-organising digital conversational spaces on a much larger scale. “Organisations, including our own, could still utilise this time of digital communication a lot more,” Akil says as we are trying to set up the Zoom recording of our conversation. “While we are making so much use of digital conference call software as infrastructure, we should probably be trying to reach out to organisations across the world who don’t share a common language with us—in order to share stories and learnings from across the world without having to rely too much on the English language.”

Conversational space

Conversations, interpersonal interactions and especially how, where, and with whom these are constructed, take centre stage in many of Resolve Collective’s projects and ways of working. Resolve Collective is an interdisciplinary design collective, using architecture, engineering and technology to address social issues. The collective has worked in the UK and Europe, often with cultural institutions, local community groups and public sector organisations. “At the heart of our practice, we work alongside local communities through the design process,” Seth states. “Working both with and for those communities, we use our practice and research methods to challenge traditional concepts in design and traditional ideas of institutional work.” Resolve started off in a rather informal way, working in and with the local community in London in forgotten and underused spaces. The collective is now transitioning into working with more formal spaces and institutions, while still pulling together concepts of informality, relationship formation and forms of care.

Conversations also lie at the basis of Resolve’s thinking about making institutional spaces infrastructural. Not only in the fellowship project for Het Nieuwe Instituut, but also with students at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA). “In our classes there, we often host small scale sessions where we think collectively about what an institution could be,” says Akil. “We encourage the students to think much more broadly than the idea of museums.”

Institutional ethnography

Institutions are often predominantly understood as clusters of opaque, established and homogenous rules and behaviours practised in particular architectural buildings (formal institutions such as museums, prisons or city councils). Resolve encourages us to think of different kinds of family organisations and marriages as institutions, too. In this the collective is practicing institutional ethnography, a form of critical ethnographic research which considers social relations and institutional sites as dynamic shape-shifters instead of static entities. While practising institutional ethnography, Resolve explores the social relations structuring people’s everyday lives, specifically by looking at the ways in which they interact with one another in the context of education, religion, the economy, work or family, and by understanding how those interactions are then formally and hierarchically institutionalised. Instead of reflecting on institutions as those top-down rules practised in specific buildings only, Resolve's practice is informed by learning to understand institutions as the day-to-day variety of patterned social relationships between people as well. “We are more interested in broader understandings of ‘the institution’ and how certain types of behaviour and certain practices have persisted through time, across societies, genres and of course spaces,” says Seth.

When thinking about what institutions could become, Akil gives the example of learning from roads and transport systems and how these infrastructure systems, despite many contexts where they are also weaponised, are essentially about moving resources from one place to the other. “Whereas some institutions, like museums, are often about self-preservation and conserving,” he says. “During our work we realised that this is not always negative. In many places where collective memory is at risk, as it was for example in post-civil war Beirut (Lebanon) or in contemporary Cairo (Egypt), institutions of memory are absent but often desired in order to support in saving and celebrating lost built heritage.” 

However, in many British and European institutions that Resolve Collective is familiar with through work, this form of self-preservation and conserving starts to manifest as a problem. Especially in terms of how self-preservation can limit an institution’s reach and access to certain groups or audiences; where many communities outside of the institution’s walls are not able to engage with the museum, or the museum with those communities. “And that barrier, I think, is where this ability to distinguish between institutional and infrastructural space becomes very important,” Akil states. “We do not, however, propose a direct opposition or hierarchy between the institutional and the infrastructural but rather an understanding and convergence of the two from the very beginning.”

Dialectics as institution

A first step towards this infrastructural mode of thinking about institutions, is to understand those structures not as monolithic entities housed in an architectural building but rather as a space determined by organised sets of relationships between people. “When we think about conversations, even the small tick to tack conversation that we’re having right now, those are great examples of how institutional space is condensed into dialectics,” Akil points out. “For our research we focused on those dialectics rather than on the architectures of institutions, their management protocols or other kinds of prescribed managerial structures, which can sometimes be misleading or opaque.”

Through their small-scale conversations with groups of individuals working in different roles within Het Nieuwe Instituut during their fellowship, Resolve concentrated on understanding the nature of an institutional space by analysing behaviours as a result of institutional bureaucratic structures rather than the structures themselves. Their current research shows that only through these conversations one can start to grasp the specific characteristics of an institution. 

“In our research, we are concerned with ‘network spaces’; how relationships between people and also non-human actors create spaces and not necessarily how walls contain space,” shares Seth. Resolve Collective shows how, without the conversations and (institutionalised) interpersonal relationships contained inside and subtended outside by an institution, it is merely an empty building. 

“Perhaps after both of our experiences working in local authorities, we learned to understand how speaking to the ‘right people’, having the ‘right conversations’ or being involved in the ‘right gossip’ contains the difference between a project coming to existence within an institution or the project not getting off the ground at all.”