Opening reception UnRuly: Counter-Archiving Women’s Reform, an exhibition of student work created in ARCH540/740 Counter-Archiving: The Architecture of Containment
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025
Time: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: Forum at Fabrik Architects
UnRuly: Counter-Archiving Women’s Reform
I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby—Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage
The archive of the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women preserves the official record of Canada’s first women’s reformatory. Its plans, disciplinary registers, and medical assessments were designed to document order and progress, yet they also disclose absences, tensions, and marks of lived experience. Beneath the rhetoric of reform lay a carceral institution, and daily life inside reflected that reality. From these documents, the contours of the institution emerge. Opened in 1880 in Toronto, the Mercer formed part of a wider network of women’s reform institutions that claimed to offer protection and training. In practice, it entrenched gendered, racial, and class norms, enacted through bureaucratic procedures that produced their own forms of violence. Many women and girls were incarcerated for perceived moral transgressions rather than criminal offences, and the Mercer became a testing ground for new practices in social work, psychiatry, and classification. This exhibition anchors itself in the archive, tracing both its disciplinary force and the agency, refusals, and everyday acts of those whose lives it sought to contain.
About the course
Architectures of containment and archives share a common paradox: they are both visible—as physical sites with complex systems of organization—and invisible, shaped by power structures, temporal administration, and practices of exclusions. Both are domiciles—or homes of a sort—sheltering things and people, respectively, that have been arbitrarily assembled to define a singular, coherent entity. The archives that hold the institutional memory of carceral institutions are usually maintained by the very authorities that once administered them.
Focusing on institutions of containment, such as schools, reformatories, prisons, and other residential sites where people are housed involuntarily and collectively, this seminar explores how the memory of contained lives is constructed both within and beyond the archive. In this course, we will trace the evolution of such institutions governed by the laws and principles of enclosure, by collaboratively examining personal artefacts, plans, memoirs, photographs, and other mementos of evidence housed in their corresponding archives. We will consider how human rights, laws, migration and diaspora, gender/sexuality, labour, and personal freedom intersect with memory. Through weekly discussions, field visits, and collective making, students will position the archive neither as a neutral container of history nor a liberatory institution, but as a contested site of authority, displacement, and affect. Our work will culminate in a series of films or a collective exhibition that reimagines prison-like architectures through counter-archival practices.
This seminar foregrounds the tensions between institutional memory and personal testimony. We will ask: what traces do I leave as I trespass the archive? Where do our own stories of research intersect with institutional erasure? Our work will be shaped by field visits to residential institutions and archives, and guided by thinkers including Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Athambile Masola, and Jacques Derrida. In our final collaborative project, we endeavour to speak with, not for, as we chart the power dynamics between carers and residents, archivists and subjects, and researchers and the refused.