Notarial Archives Foundation — Before changing the building, we asked what the institution was becoming.
The Notarial Archives Foundation safeguards more than six centuries of Malta’s documentary history. At a moment of physical and institutional change, Bureau 105 was invited to lead a strategy workshop bringing together voices from across the organisation.
We began by asking how the Foundation understood itself today, and what it might choose to become. Through a series of collaborative exercises, we explored its purpose, audiences, strengths, constraints and ambitions. What emerged was an organisation with a strong sense of custodianship and professional responsibility, but also one approaching a larger question about its place within Malta’s cultural landscape.
Researchers and academics remained central to its identity. Yet conversations repeatedly moved towards education, public engagement, digital access, creative communities and greater cultural visibility. At the same time, the Foundation was considering significant changes to its building.
We treated these not as separate conversations.
A new room solves a functional problem. But circulation, visibility, public access and programme space also say something about who an institution is for. Architecture communicates institutional intent whether that intent has been articulated or not.
The workshop therefore shifted the conversation from immediate requirements towards a series of strategic choices: from custodianship to conscious positioning, from research-centred access towards a broader cultural ecosystem, and from operational constraint towards longer-term influence.
Rather than proposing a finished strategy, the process made those choices visible — creating the conditions for the Foundation to consider its space, identity, audiences and future as parts of the same question.
Testimonial: "These sessions have been thought-provoking and have taught us how to look at what we do from an entirely different
perspective." — Vanessa Buhagiar, Assistant Director, Notarial Registers Archive.
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Client: Notarial Archives Foundation
Brand Strategy Workshop: Luis & Jeanette Muñoz
