FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Let’s start from the very essence of the fellowship, which is structured around the practice of research. How do you approach the idea of research and what it means to do research today?

LUNA BUGHANEM My research practice was not clear to me from the get-go; it evolved only after pursuing multiple interests and questions. It’s heavily based on data collection, mainly in the form of documented oral histories, and is premised on many in-person visits and conversations. Generally, I am closely related to and involved in the contexts that I research, which informs my perspective and approach.

For the project at the Nieuwe Instituut — about diasporic home-making — I started a conversation with a distant relative, whose father was a stonemason by trade and built him a house in Mount Lebanon while he was away in Venezuela from the 80s until the early 2000s. He, in turn, connected me to other relatives and acquaintances; people he knew who had left Lebanon at some point and funded the construction of a house through remittances. I bring this up to illustrate how this research started from a personal connection and in a geography with which I'm very familiar — which can be both advantageous and challenging.

When you're so familiar with a place you want to study, you have to deliberately estrange it and create distance from it in order to discern and identify valuable information. That process was particularly challenging in the beginning because a big part of the research involved framing WhatsApp as a tool of co-making; the platform is so pervasive — everyone in Lebanon uses it, especially given the country’s far-reaching diaspora. WhatsApp plays such a big role in daily life that in 2019, the October 17 protests were in part triggered by a proposed ‘WhatsApp tax.’ As an architect, I found that people expected me to be interested in their houses’ aesthetic choices and material finishes — but I wanted to discuss their WhatsApp images and money transfer amounts. Everyone I interviewed would ask, ‘Why is that interesting to you?’

Then in the process, I take individual, ethnographic stories, in this case of multiple families’ remittance houses, and infer a pattern, to understand how they're emblematic of a larger phenomenon — which is how I can describe this as a “diasporic home-making practice.”

KOOZ You mentioned this idea of ‘data collection’ in person, gathering narratives and experience. What is the value of that as an approach to research today?

LBGWell, in-person data collection captures nuances that might otherwise be missed through remote or secondary research methods. Face-to-face interactions allow for spontaneous and emotional responses that often contain the most insightful data — understanding comes not just from what people say, but how they say it, where they choose to meet you, and what they prioritise showing you in their physical spaces. If you take jetlag and baggage limits and time difference frustrations seriously, these small and invisible logistical realities shape how design actually happens across distances and challenge a lot of our conventional understanding of architectural practice.

KOOZ Daniel and Robin, can you share your experiences and approaches to the importance of undertaking research?

DANIEL FROTA DE ABREU In my case, the research for this fellowship started with an ongoing exchange. I had been in touch with a group of researchers at Leiden University from the Museum Studies and Archaeology department — specifically, with Professor Mariana Françozo, at the University of Leiden — after I came across her research about the displacement of Brazilian Natural History artefacts in Dutch archives and collections. The project evolved and started while I was at an art residency at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, just before the fellowship.

I came across Professor Françozo’s research project about the first natural history catalog of Brazilian plants and animals that was published after Dutch period of colonisation in the Northeast of Brazil; her team of researchers, ethnobotanists and archaeologists, were already doing this research, so I kind of jumped in and was able to follow that. I was fascinated and driven by the content, by the team, and by how they accessed items in different collections.

ROBIN HARTANTO My research involves working with archival materials. This means spending time with documents in a very cold environment, inside buildings: archival institutions in the Netherlands, in Indonesia and everywhere. I think that's part of me and my practice, as a trained architect, an architectural historian and an academic researcher. The way I see the practice of research is actually as work — work in a really material sense, in that it's the obligatory thing that I have to do in order to participate, to make a life out of this environment called university. This largely involves solitary work, writing for a very niche public audience, even engaging with a very small number of experts, in order to progress one’s career.

When I read the call for fellowship proposals at the Nieuwe Instituut, I was attracted by the prospect of a very different kind of research; one that pushes you to collaborate, to engage with a broader public, to practice generosity and so on. In that sense, I was reminded of what I really liked about research before academia, so that’s what I tried to do. Instead of extending my dissertation or previous research into this fellowship, I try to embrace the spirit of collaboration, of thinking together, making conversations with the broader public, and as Daniel says, exchanges with different people, perspectives and subjects.

KOOZ It’s a really interesting spectrum of exchange, from Luna’s first-person conversations to this notion of making public. On the other hand, you share some practices around archives, and you all engage with the politics of space. How do you read the politics of space, between what can be shared in first person encounters versus through archival material? What kind of tools do you need to be able to understand, read and dissect that which is personal?

RHIn terms of historical archival research, a lot of it requires a certain kind of patience. Of course, interviews also require so much patience and skill, but in archival research, it really comes down to how you use the time with the materials that you have, to understand the details or context in which your document was produced, for instance. How important were they for agents or actors at that time, and how did they end up in the place where you encounter them today? Many sensibilities require you to take time before drawing conclusions. There is a lot of criticism with this kind of research, in how it engages (or not) with the contemporary, in comparison to oral history, which allows you to work with first person narratives. But, I feel like the way you try to see those research archives becomes important for you to reflect on the present.

For instance, part of my project is about colonial plantations; what I did in the fellowship was to make films out of colonial footage and documents that I found throughout the research. In presenting them to a contemporary audience, there are so many ways to engage, in which you can try to see what's different between then and now. For the audience, it might be a path for them to see how close we are; how that past is actually not too far away: it acts upon many, many things that we are experiencing right now. We’re still very much living in part of that colonial register or legacy to some extent.

LBG I want to echo what Robin said, about patience and giving the research process time. On a practical level, a lot of it is about listening, transcribing, parsing through that information — noticing the way people relay their stories. I became super interested in reading and interpreting transcriptions and audio recordings as evidence. What does the specific word choice mean? Where are the inflections and what do they emphasise? Do people pause before mentioning certain topics, or become more animated when discussing particular aspects of their experience? This is similar to the act of questioning in archival practice that Robin described: how did this document end up here, or why is it written and structured that way? Who made decisions about what was preserved and what was discarded, and what power dynamics influenced those choices?

But it’s not just producing and probing data — it’s also my interpretation of it. There’s a constant back and forth: expanding that data set, seeing what emerges from it, and how my perspective might reshape understanding. In an abstract sense, it’s like working with a puzzle, one where every time the pieces are shifted and reconstituted, they reveal a different picture.

DFdA I would also respond with a more abstract or poetic approach. For me, it relates to fishing; at least in the way I do research, there’s always a constant back and forth between following an abstract sense of your interests and whatever led you to that subject, and the act of throwing into the sea to look at what comes back. Sometimes what comes back is a shoe. Quite often, you have to deal with frustration, also in terms of not being able to take the time, let’s say, to find what you were expecting to find. Personally, there is always a phase of frustration; you have all these ideas that you think you would find there, but you don't — you start finding other stuff. That's when the process starts happening, because then you start letting go of the ideas that you have, or things that you thought you would find, and stop trying to make things fit.

The outcome, in terms of dealing with this material and crystallising into something, might be anything from text to film. Until then it’s this process of having to stop looking, to allow some time for your own obsessions or preconceived ideas to dissolve — then you'll be able to reconnect to the material as it actually is. Maybe that has to do with reformulating your questions, find other directions. For me, it's a deeply intuitive and very hard process; it has to do with different gears and different speeds.

KOOZ Daniel and Robin, the research projects you developed at the Nieuwe Instituut really engage with this Dutch colonial history. The institute is deeply rooted in Rotterdam and the culture of that nation. How did that inform the way you approached archival material and questions of access?

RHI’ll lay some more groundwork: I'm working on a history — in the broadest sense — of colonial architecture. I mean colonial not as a period of time, but rather in the act of colonising — taking land and trying to make profit out of it. I would borrow Daniel's metaphor on fishing: it's very different if you do that kind of research in Indonesia versus doing it in the Netherlands. In terms of colonial architecture, you have the buildings here in Indonesia, so you can actually study how the buildings work, what are the programs, what are the details, the stylistic options and so on. But as I refer to colonial in this active sense, there are so many archives, documents, maps and footage that I couldn't find in Indonesia. That material allows me to really get a clearer image on what colonialism was about: how land was organised in order to produce certain commodities; how, for instance, the architecture of plantations, labour, people to produce certain specific crops.

Those are really like the things that I feel grateful for: the research, the grant, the fellowship allows me to encounter, to see and engage with those materials — and to add to them as well. The nice thing about the approach that I pursue — especially through the spirit of collaboration at the Nieuwe Institute — is that it allows me to think about working with different people. Even though I applied as an individual, I decided — after conversations with the research team — to work together with people I didn't know from before. In the end, I asked two people — Mahardika Yudha and Perdana Roswaldy — to work with me to conceive the film that I wanted to make; that way of working is what the fellowship really gave me.

KOOZ Daniel, you're also exploring colonialism both in terms of its historic past, but also in the present, looking at contemporary CO2 infrastructure. Can you share your perspectives on this?

DFdA As I mentioned, my research came from this film project I’d been making; one of the locations of the film was the port of Rotterdam, or rather Maasvlakte, this specific area of the port that has been a geo-engineering project since the 15th century; it has been like slowly and continuously expanding into the North Sea. I was approaching this landscape through this lens of the project; the exchanges I had with research teams and collections was also through this lens, when I arrived at the Port of Rotterdam, while I was looking into its history. The title of the film is ‘As Far as the World Reaches’ — which was the military motto of the Dutch governor in the colony in Brazil during the 17th century, and which expresses the idea of expansion in terms of colonial projects.

I had already been noting how this model could talk not only about colonial expansion, but also ecological exhaustion, in the sense of pushing the world to its limit. One of the things that led me to the port was the fact that it was the home of the Royal Navy for many centuries, and the Dutch Royal Navy has been using that same motto from the 17th century to this day. So I was thinking about this in terms of the Maasvlakte landmass, which is still continuously extending into the sea. At that point, I came across an infrastructure project on that site, building a pipeline network to bury the carbon dioxide produced by the industrial area of the port under the North Sea. Great craters remain from previous extractions of natural gas; having extracted it, this project would use the same infrastructure to reverse the process, burying vast quantities of CO2 indefinitely. I was trying to formulate the parallels between colonial memory and the geological timeframe of this new project — this in 2022–23 while the pipeline was still in a funding phase, while construction began last year; it's still a very fresh project.

Coming from film research, I could relate to this relationship between capturing and storing. I was also interested in the idea of burying as a strategy for dealing with problems and what that would mean for a future ecology or geology; what this geology is during the Anthropocene, and what would be unveiled in the future, as a consequence. It has very broad ramifications, in terms of legislation, liability periods and so on. My project reflects on the notion of projecting something almost indefinitely while at same time having to operate in terms of legislation. What would be the period of operation for this project — are we talking about millions of years in terms of geology? That problem of scale fascinated me, but whenever I was getting deep into the carbon capture-and-storage (CCS) project, I was also trying to find correlations in terms of colonial history.

My time at the Nieuwe Instituut came at an early stage on this curve; I was working on the film and also parachuting in and out of Rotterdam. What I found very important was the structure; the fellowship gave us this free space of conversation, without really expecting that you would resolve things. I used that time to sharpen my own questions, formulating that intersection between these two historical moments of the port.

KOOZ Going on to the digestion of all this: Daniel and Robin, you processed your engagement with archival materials through video work, whilst Luna’s project attempts to expand the architectural toolkit. How did each of you approach the question of format through which to explore or share your research?

RH I should say that before this project, I've never really worked with film — so it was a new thing for me. It came about after working and collaborating with the various people that I encountered. I did go to the film museum; I also looked into the archives of Institute for Sound and Vision, and found a huge amount of footage and photography from Leiden University Libraries. There's certainly an immediacy that you feel when you see the footage of people working on plantations, as a moving image, in comparison to when you see a picture or try to understand it through text. It's the kind of immediacy that brings up emotions — different kinds of emotion, it could be anger, sadness, frustration. I thought, if we are going to deal with this subject, we need to use this emotion as a means to communicate; to portray, to try to understand the subjectivity of the people in the footage.

Another mission of the project is to make sure that people in Indonesia know and have access to that footage. That's why I insisted that this film should be screened in different parts of Indonesia, so that people at least have exposure to those materials and are aware of it, if they want to understand more about the plantation world. Of course access is a privilege, but the fair way is through the field, and we hope that people could at least get a sense of what exists.

KOOZ What was the reaction in different parts of Indonesia?

RH There’s a very interesting difference between audiences from Europe and those from Indonesia. I remember some very sharp criticism when we screened this in Leipzig — the first screening. Some people criticised us for using reenactments, for recreating those violences. I guess it's a really good criticism; we have to be careful in how we enact these kinds of images, right? But the way I want to really answer that is that if a film about colonialism didn't disturb you, then you have to question what that film is really about.

To come back to the Indonesian audience, it's a very different kind of reception. They're really very appreciative of the way that we depict something that we all know by heart: that colonialism was there, it really governs our past. But perhaps most of us don't really know what really happened on the ground. The film allows one to imagine or even to get a more concrete sense of what happened — and to reflect on how that past really affects our present.

DFdAI'll try to be very concise for my part, as I do think that there are so many layered concerns — especially if you are dealing with the language of documentary — in terms of the voice of the narrator; at least that one of my interests, and maybe yours too. Something Luna mentioned resonated with me, about the tension between testimonies and evidence. In terms of data or an archive, the material that I’ve been dealing with is rather institutionalised; for instance, the archive of Natural History in Brazil. However, these materials were at times very personal accounts, by specific people who traveled inside the landscape of Brazil. I’m thinking of a certain catalogue, which was a product of expeditions — slave-hunting expeditions — where a few painters and scientists followed along, gathering plant species and making drawings. A major question was, what is the voice of the film? Who is the narrator? I wanted a localised voice, contemporaneous to when these archives were made — by people who had their own personal views, which they strongly projected even as they were fabricating images of that distant place.

I found my entry point when I came across a watercolour painting of a Brazilian parrot, made on one of those expeditions, which happened to be the Dutch governor’s pet. There is a personal account where he explains how he was fascinated by this animal that could reproduce the human voice and could have long exchanges with him. In this anecdote, he describes a conversation with the parrot about a few chickens, or something very banal. That struck me somehow, in the way they were imagining, fabulating at the same time as making this archive. So the film uses a parrot, not as a narrator but as a character that starts to talk, to interpret the paintings and material archives that I encountered. I was interested in how the documentary language also involves a lot of construction and invention; the film has a tension between images of authoritative volumes, those big books listing botanical species, and at same time, a voice that questions the authority of its own character, its own documentary status. That's how I navigate those questions in the film.

KOOZ Luna, whilst Robin and Daniel perhaps open up to a broader audience, your approach seems to be somewhat oriented towards the architecture community. I’m interested in how you approached the process of ‘digestion’ in terms of your research.

LBG My time at the Nieuwe Instituut was spent talking about the work, soundboarding with staff, with other researchers, and also with the creative community in the Netherlands, which was a great opportunity. That reinforced my initial instinct that this project needed to work with multiple media to be ‘digested.’

Because what I'm researching is contemporary — though there are similar echoes of it through history, including archival material tracking remittances sent to Lebanon back in the 1880s — I cannot yet fully grasp and communicate it comprehensively and in one medium alone. Audio, screenshots, screen recordings, pictures, news articles — they all need to be brought into a helpful constellation. I used our final presentation at the Nieuwe Instituut as a testing ground to help the audience enter this layered space, tying together so many elements — from global-scale movements down to the size of someone's window.

For the homeowners, this constellation of fragmented communications, remote decision-making, and mediated experiences is normal — it's the everyday reality of diasporic life. But for architects this fragmented way of conceiving and creating space challenges conventional practice and has unsettled many fundamental architectural concepts for me as a result. This is why the audience for the project as the architect was the most impactful.

As an example, my final hybrid-video presentation did not show any full images of a ‘homeland’ house. It was only shown through the mediation of devices that a diasporic homeowner would use — so it was made up of screen recordings of WhatsApp conversations; pictures where you can zoom in to the point where pixels will fail to show detail and texture; snippets of text messages... This format deliberately goes against things that are often taken as standard in architectural practice: the idea of designing something from the beginning, having full capital funds to realise it, and the measure of success being the extent to which your final house matches what you wanted to start with. This work has pushed me to reassess those measures of success. And I hope that is also the takeaway for the audience.

KOOZ The reality is that when one engages in architectural labour, it's much more akin to what you are describing, right? It may just be that digital technologies like Slack and WhatsApp have somehow altered the rigidity of architectural work, or how it is structured. It's really quite interesting to look back at digital exchanges as sites of design, in and of themselves

LBG I started the project with multiple aspects that I really wanted to deep-dive into, and WhatsApp was what I got deep into during my time at the Nieuwe Instituut. Our physical realm is so intertwined with the digital realm. In architecture, traditionally, we start with a site analysis, we have a site visit. That's one of the first things we do. But in the context of diasporic homemaking, ‘site’ is accessed via a screen, in fragments, and the rest is imagined. When you don't have full access to a place, you relinquish ideals of precision and completeness; this reality has pushed me to reconsider designing incrementally, embracing uncertainty, designing for adaptability — not just the adaptability of a physical structure, but an attitude of adaptability in the design and construction process itself.

KOOZ I’m thinking about some of the digital tools we take for granted, like Google Maps. We mediate through Google Earth or messaging platforms are ever-more corporate in their intentions, and it does feel as if we have to really pay attention to what is being represented, how and why certain things are being depicted. For instance, the way that digital maps are adjusting the image of Gaza. Obviously, it's a very different territory than it was just a couple of years ago; how fast those images are updated, what they reveal and what they don't is a political question. Are there still topics and themes that you're engaged with, several years after your fellowships?

DFdA You prompted some thoughts around who makes those representations and where they circulate. To give an example from the port, this project of CCS, which has been in discussion as a possible mitigation technology for reducing the CO2 and then in terms of climate change. While diving into that specific landscape of the Port of Rotterdam, I found out that actually this project was a ‘compensation plan’ that allowed the construction of two massive coal-fired power plants in 2016. That compensation never happened; they attempted several times to implement this very experimental project. It has dragged on for so long that now it can be rebranded as a completely new climate change mitigation project, that is nevertheless linked to those coal-fired power plants. It's very sensitive nowadays in terms of how those projects are presented, who owns the image of those climate engineering projects.

Now I'm based in Brazil, and I'm still following the CCS project from afar, still collecting materials. For me, this is part of a larger interest of mine about preservation practices, not only in terms of ecology, but also art. So part of the film also dealt with the extraction of Brazilian wood and how a particular tree was used for pigment in Dutch paintings. Again, it’s about connecting materials from those paintings, talking with art conservation people in different museums and also looking into the fire that destroyed the Brazilian National Museum in 2018. That's the current territory of the research. The challenge is always to be able to draw this constellation, as Luna described it; how, by looking at the Port of Rotterdam, you can recognise things inside the museum here in Rio, which was burned. You can go back to another place and trust that these threads will lead somewhere, or that you’ll find the right metaphor. That’s more or less how this project has evolved.

RH There are two strands of work that I'm currently pursuing, both of which are influenced by my time at Nieuwe Instituut. The first is a monograph on the architectures of colonial plantations. This is an extension of my dissertation, so it's something that I'm doing in the context of academia. It tries to understand what the plantation system really means, how it operated and how architecture participated in that construction. A lot of this deals with the technicality of buildings and the efficiencies of the plantation grounds. In so far as it is influenced by the fellowship and by the film project that I made, I'm reminded that a lot of this space, that we call plantation, is highly influenced by different kinds of affect: fantasies, anxieties… What I’m trying to balance is allowing those feelings to be present in the writing.

The second project — which I’m actually working on with Nieuwe Instituut — is a project on the Sonneveld House. I experienced the house when I visited the institute for the first time; in the reading room on the second floor, I saw tobacco packages from Sumatra, from Virginia, so I was wondering what's going on with this house. It turned out that the owner was a former director of Van Nelle, a Rotterdam company that sells commodities such as tobacco, coffee, and tea. And many of the commodities that they produced actually came from Indonesia; they also redistributed the products that they package back to Indonesia, in addition to the domestic market. And so now, I'm working with Nieuwe Instituut to use that opportunity to understand how design actually participated in the construction and in the production of commodities that was very much part of Rotterdam’s past. We're planning an exhibition and probably a publication in the next year or two.

KOOZ We’ll be looking forward to that. It’s fascinating how your research threads intertwine, isn’t it? Have you thought about your next steps?

LBGAs the fellowship was just six months ago for me, it's still very much on my mind. I will continue to collect more stories and listen to diasporic people's advice for home-making. I'm also increasingly interested in how the research exceeds these houses and in shedding light on the social networks and forms of kinship that make this construction possible. So, zooming out from the scale of a device and from device to a room to observe the social support system that makes this building of homes from afar possible. These networks are all coordinated through WhatsApp chats and groups that connect members regardless of their location. These digital interactions are like an alternative design methodology premised on corresponding and relating, and these virtual spaces are equally sites where diaspora members reconstitute their community, eventually generating real-world material benefits, either in the form of economic remittances or in the physical structure.

It's important for me for the research to go beyond just being presented to audiences as an exercise of ethnographic gazing. Maybe that does bring us a bit full circle to your first question about research: I consider asking questions about what we could learn from the work and testing it representationally across different media itself a form of research. And now that I have a better understanding of the conditions, tools, and media through which this type of homemaking happens, I'm interested in testing what an incomplete incremental drawing looks like and what a fragmented contingent model looks like. That's where the project is at: I’m synthesising it into different mediums but also using it as a launching point toward other generativedesign questions.

KOOZ The beauty of this conversation — which we very much believe in, at KoozArch — is this idea of generating new questions and connections. Maybe this becomes another moment of exchange, and who knows where that might lead in the future? Thank you all for taking the time to talk.

Bios

Luna BuGhanem is an artist, researcher, and architectural designer based between New York City and Beirut. In her practice, she investigates, documents, and represents the intertwinement of travel and the built environment across scales, including objects, materials, tools, and networks.⁠ Her research develops "diasporic homemaking," the process through which diaspora members build houses in their homeland while and from abroad or back and forth between.

Daniel Frota de Abreu is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual arts, design, and moving image. With a background in typography, his practice approaches legibility through multiple perspectives, taking the critical reading of objects, images and texts as its foundation. Combining archival research, printing techniques, sculpture and filmmaking, his work investigates how history is materially fabricated, transformed and preserved. Daniel runs Interno Bruto, a publishing and design studio where he develops editorial projects in dialogue with clients, fellow artists, curators and cultural organizations.

Robin Hartanto Honggare has a background in architecture, curation and filmmaking. Building on his focus on the architectures of cultivation and histories of colonial modernities in Southeast Asia, his current research explores commodity buildings and their entanglement with environmental techniques and imaginaries in the Netherlands Indies. Robin is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.