Between 2016 and 2021 I worked as the archivist at MayDay Rooms in London. The archive consists of approximately 50,000 items organised into a hundred collections, with a focus on social movements, radical arts, and the cultures and resistance of marginalized groups from the 1960s to the present. We developed cutting-edge approaches to archiving this material, by establishing inclusive and collaborative methods to the conserve histories of struggle.
Lots of our work involved allowing people to be very hands-on with archival materials, and I have run workshops and seminars with many school, community, and university groups on archives and archiving. Alongside this, MayDay has developed some great strategies around the cataloguing, display, and dissemination of anomalous archival materials such as founding the leftov.rs digital repository of dissenting ephemera. We recently put out a couple of publications: Camera Forward! and Pandemic Notes Workbook, as well as running popular programme of cultural and educational events.
Although I no longer work at MayDay Rooms, the experience has left me with rather too much expertise on radical social movements and arts in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries, with a special focus on the libertarian left, the women’s liberation movement, the alternative press and DIY print cultures, industrial struggles and workerism, green activism, and radical subcultures. I’m more than happy to help people with the expertise I’ve gained – both in terms of knowledge of movements and their material histories, and in archiving practices, especially around political ephemera and objects on the border between activism and art. I’m also available to offer consultancy on archive-building, give talks about archiving from below, and write exhibition texts on a freelance basis. Do get in touch!
A bit more about MayDay Rooms:
MayDay Rooms is an organising and educational space for activists, social movements and radicals. Its building in the centre of London contains an archive of historical material linked to social struggles, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the expression of marginalised and oppressed groups. It offers organising and event space for activist and self-education groups, and runs a full programme of events including film screenings, poetry readings, “scan-a-thons” for digitising archival material, historical talks, discussion and reading groups, and social nights – all free of charge! You can get a monthly bulletin of what’s coming up by signing up to its mailing list, or by following on Twitter or Facebook.
About the space: The building and archive is run by a small, non-hierarchical staff collective in collaboration with a number of resident groups, including Strike! Magazine, Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union, Statewatch, Plan C, the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive, General Equivalent, Industrial Workers of the World, and The World Transformed. More the twenty other activist, social justice, and educational groups frequently use the building for meetings and events.
Our History and our work: MayDay Rooms was established in 2013. Its aim is to safeguard histories and documents of radicalism and resistance by connecting them with contemporary struggle and protest, and by developing new free forms of dissemination and collective self-education. Its building offers communal spaces – a reading room, a meeting and screening room, a large kitchen, and a roof terrace – which are used by a wide range of cultural, political, and activist groups. The building allows a diverse range of groups to mix and get to know each other, while telling each other, documenting, and learning about different histories. It continues to be a place where people who want to break out of the present state of things can come together, work together, learn together, and struggle together.
The MayDay Rooms Archive: MayDay Rooms proceeds from the understanding that social change can happen most effectively when marginalised and oppressed groups can get to know – and tell – their own histories “from below.” Its archive focuses on social struggles, radical art, and acts of resistance from the 1960s to the present: it contains everything from recent feminist poetry to 1990s techno paraphernalia, from situationist magazines to histories of riots and industrial transformations, from 1970s educational experiments to prison writing. These archival holdings challenge the widespread assault on collective memory and the tradition of the oppressed. The archive aims to counter narratives of historical inevitability and political pessimism with living proof that that many struggles continue.
