Friday, March 25, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers trapped at their machines. Most of the people who died, either consumed by flames, or jumping out of the windows on the ninth floor, were young women, recent immigrants. This is the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City.

Terrible Karma is project Merle Patchett and I put together. The title - Terrible Karma – refers to both the title of a protest song sung by Cambodian female garment workers at a union rally in Phnom Penh (July 2010) and to the idea that events of the garment industry past continue to haunt the present, that they are always coming back.

Merle  and I will be out this Friday morning and afternoon (10-2) in downtown Manhattan, at Cooper Square, and near the location of the fire, at Washington Place and Greene Street. Follow the path on the map, and look out for our UHAUL truck, containing the audio-visual installation above. If you’re in town, drop by and spend some time in the back of the truck, feeling the reverberations of the fire, 100 years later.

“How would you archive mobile buildings? Buildings that (dis)assemble like Legos…”

She is referring to the work of Alberto Mozó, an architect based in Santiago, Chile.

Mozó has the idea that pre-fab mobile architecture–buildings which can be assembled and disassembled with ease, or the parts re-purposed at will–has great value for Architecture and Urbanism today. The architect’s statement about the office building pictured above introduces the theme of “Transitividad” or transitivity to describe the quality of in-betweeness, or openness to disassembly, that the building embodies.

To get back to Barbara’s question, if the building embodies transitivity then how could it be archived? Well my first suggestion is that the method of archiving, the archival practice, must also have a transitive quality.

To be transitive is to be characterized by transition, to be intermediate, to pass over to or affect, or be affected by something else. Transitivity refers to relations, usually (in mathematics, logic and grammar) relations between three things, a first, second and third. In which the three elements are implicated, or linked, or involved, by way of the second, as in a triangular or circular relation, not a linear one.

So what could a transitive archival practice be? One which, like Mozo’s building, tries to link things in relations of mutal becoming. The first, via the second, becoming implicated in a third, and on and on.

I think collecting things creates these sorts of relations between disparate objects. Also telling stories, especially orally, creates close transitive links. I think dancing, moving through different shapes and forms in time and space might be an archival practice that matches Mozo’s architecture.

What do you think?