Richard Weaver is a digital curator, archivist, and creative coder based in Amsterdam, NL.
Raised in Birmingham's Black Country industrial district, his interests lie in critical decolonial approaches to heritage, technology, and curatorship.
In Amsterdam, he works as a digital archivist and curator for The Black Archives, and as a Marketplace Curator for Creative Fabrica.
Within Studio Imaginalis, he oversees the implementation of all digital projects and organises community carpentry workshops in his spare time. As an avid gardener, he loves prepping ground and building raised beds. His hobbies also include embroidery, hiking, basketball, and DIY.
Co-Produced Exhibition - 'Interwoven Histories of Solidarity: Documenting Black Pasts & Presents' exhibited at Documenta 15 (2022)
Framer Framed: Project Tulou - Superimposing Diasporas [14th July - 17th July 2023]
An ongoing project exploring the capacity and potentiality of the virtual medium to challenge colonialist and imperialist discourse in modern China. The project
centres around the traditional Hakka earthen building known as the 'Tulou', virtually abstracting this important architectural form as a VR community hub where Hakkas and descendants of Hakka families (like myself) can reconnect with and learn about their shared cultural roots.
The value of such a project lies in the history of the Hakka people as both a migratory and stigmatised community - dichotomous as both an insular, yet, extremely progressive and expansive diaspora spread throughout the world.
In light of globalisation and digital ubiquity, the project seeks to harness the interconnectedness of the digital medium to refine a shared cultural identity in the face of ethnic and cultural erasure.
Read more about the project here:
CROSS-POLLINATIONS: Art and The Petunia Collection [31st March- 13th April 2023]
A Multimedia exhibition created in partnership with the Universiteit van Amsterdam, CROSS-POLLINATIONS utilised artistic research to explore the porous boundaries between the humanities and natural sciences, between discourse and matter, and between plant and human worlds. As the digital curator for this project, I created an app that incites visitors to play with the digitally-rendered petunia flowers, learn about their scientific importance, and take their findings home from the exhibition.
The digital platform is custom-made for the open-source archiving of this living/botanical heritage. Users can interact and play with the collection’s photographic and watercolour reproductions on the platform - leaving their own impressions on the exhibition by saving and loading their custom flower arrangements.
Read All About it Here:
QR Code for the CROSS-POLLINATIONS App
QR Code for the TBA Archival Database
The Black Archives - ARchival Database
Coding an Open Source Archival Database over the course of 2-years (https://collection.theblackarchives.nl/), this project was the initial reason why I began working at The Black Archives (TBA). The archival database was motivated by TBA's desire to take digital ownership over its own collections, and my own personal interest to understand how an Open Source, modular, and customizable archival database may be used to achieve this end.
By collating together all of the institution's books, objects, and protest signs into one online platform, this project provided tangible benefits to TBA in the form of fewer financial outgoings, greater public access to the collections, and greater public engagement by the source community in the archival process. My database continues to be used as the official digital archive of The Black Archives to this day, existing as a lasting and mutable tool for the Black diaspora in The Netherlands to document their own histories and lived experiences.
See the VICE News reporting on the Project:
https://collection.theblackarchives.nl/items/show/542#page-1
The Allard Pierson - Mapping Out Colonial Cartography [February 2021]
Working with the Allard Pierson Museum to curate a temporary digital exhibition of their colonial map collection, this coding project overlaid a colonial-era ‘Sketch Map of Central Sumatra’ using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript onto an open-source satellite image.
This interactive map was intended as the single interactive component of the exhibition, showing how digital forms can work to break down the dichotomies between producer and consumer, enabling individuals to participate and symbolically insert themselves into the chains of cartographic production – mapping out new narratives through playful comparison. Digital maps like this allude to the new possibilities presented by the ‘digital turn’, challenging users to simultaneously interact with the exhibited material whilst also questioning the ‘false objectivity’ of cartography.
See the Allard Pierson's blog post here:
QR Code for the Interactive Map
QR Code for the Facing Blackness Virtual Exhibition
Facing Blackness - Virtual Exhibition [31st March -23rd December 2022]
This project saw the curation of a virtual accompaniment to TBA's Facing Blackness on-site exhibition (https://collection.theblackarchives.nl/neatline/fullscreen/facing-blackness-virtual-exhibition). This virtual exhibition orientates visitors in the exhibition space, linking the displayed objects and books to their data entries in the archival database.
By building this virtual exhibition, I was able to create an English translation of Facing Blackness for non-Dutch speakers and provide remote access to the exhibition for visitors with limited mobility, and create a schematic plan for every single object, book, and information text contained within Facing Blackness. This project was principally motivated by a push for greater public awareness of the important historical contexts surrounding the exhibitionary material. Through this virtual exhibition, visitors were given the opportunity to research items through the archival database and recontextualise them in the wider history of Dutch colonialism - thereby providing them the means to construct their own narratives.
Museum of Fine Arts Houston - The Renaissance Reception of Antiquity
Acting as a curatorial assistant to the head curator of the Prints and Drawing department at the MFAH, I was tasked with curating an exhibition titled 'The Renaissance Reception of Antiquity' put on display to the public in February 2017. The exhibition involved me creating the exhibition from start to finish, not only selecting, researching, and constructing a narrative for artworks by famous Renaissance artists such as Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, but more importantly, doing so within an educative and publicly accessible framework for visitors.
See the Exhibition Information Boards Here:
