This week I have been having fun in the archive with one of my research colleagues, Cecilia. The interesting thing with archives is that you do not really know what to find. Usually you have some idea or expectation, but then you realize that the collectors and keepers of the archive might have had other plans. Researchers wants the archived documents to be keepers of truth. And this might very well be the case, but there is also stuff that is completely useless for your work — or the archives may lack materials that you expected. Pieces of the puzzle that for some reason was never kept as they were not considered important.

Architecture historian Beatriz Colomina touched upon this in her book Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), since the archives of the architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos were each others opposite. Le Corbusier kept everything for the afterworld (literary everything, from blueprints to laundry notes), while Loos sorted out everything he thought useless (basically just the finished drawings were kept). Both practices are of course problematic for researchers.

Cecilia and I had a creative time working with material on one of the medieval churches of Uppland. School teachers, church wardens and people responsible for restorations of the church all played part in a most dramatic story of sold/stold doors, a Marian altarpiece found under the floor of a barn, the lost and partly destroyed head of the baby Jesus (both stored before restoration in the school's material shed - not out of reach of the pupils curious fingers). But the work also brought us new interesting questions that, hopefully, will end up being answered in both an article and a digital installation. Just be patient!