Exhibition: In the Absence of Evidence

Abstract

In the Absence of Evidence: Map(ping) as a Primary Source presents a selection of works produced in the Master’s core course AR2A011 Architectural History Thesis, a ten-week course running from February to April 2025 and building upon the AR1A066 Delft Lectures on Architectural History and Theory. The exhibition invites visitors to reconsider maps and map-making not as a visual or spatial add-on to historical research, but as an essential constituent of the historian’s craft: one of the tools through which historical knowledge is constructed, questioned, and re-imagined.

The works on display emerge from a research-driven pedagogical environment in which students investigated a range of architectural and urban histories through rigorous historical methodologies and approaches, both traditional and new: archival research, oral narratives, document and textual analysis, comparative methods, and other established forms of inquiry. Within this process, mapping did not function as a final representation of their findings; it became a driving, synthesising force in the investigation itself. Each map operates as a crafted artefact that makes an argument and, in doing so, becomes a form of—dare we say—“fabricated” historical evidence in its own right. The choice of the word “fabricated” here is not to be read as a lack of genuinity, but in its etymological sense: to make, to construct. These maps do not only reveal power relations, they produce evidence, while simultaneously pointing to the interpretive, and configurational nature of historical inquiry.
Although the exhibition unavoidably gestures toward familiar cartographic themes—power, framing, omission and silence, the selective gaze—its intention is to highlight the epistemic role mapping plays in historical work. Historians often encounter gaps, silences, and missing traces in the archive. Mapping is used in these examples as a method for addressing these absences, fabricating evidence through a process that remains transparent, traceable, and, most importantly, open to critique. Through the careful assembly of fragments, relationships, and spatial narratives, the maps here constitute dossiers of clues, forms of reasoning that shape how a historical argument takes form.

This exhibition therefore positions mapping not as illustration, but as inquiry. It asks what map-making enables in history writing: What forms of evidence become possible when relationships are visualised rather than merely described? How do such mappings push history beyond the limits of textual or archival data? It also asks how this work situates itself within an established scholarly conversation on critical cartography. And, finally, it questions how mapping can serve critical ends while remaining conscious of the traditions from which it emerges? How might these mappings travel, circulate, and act beyond the confines of a course, contributing to broader conversations on architecture, society, and the built environment?