Archiving from Below: MayDay Rooms in context

Dr. Pauline van Mourik Broekman is a lecturer in Critical Media Practice on the MA Digital Media, on both the Production and Education routes, at the UCL Institute of Education. She introduced us to the MayDay Rooms (MDR). Based in central London, MDR is an organisation focussing on the preserving and archiving of materials associated with social movements. Pauline offers a summary of her talk:

In this ReMap session, I revisited the research, development and final public opening of the archiving organisation, MayDay Rooms, which I co-founded with others in the early 2010s, to consider whether we could learn from the methodologies it adopted and productively compare the moment of its founding with our present one, a decade later.

The original founders no longer work at MDR, but the organisational mission we outlined was brilliantly developed by successive new staff and associates, as detailed on its website – now a rich resource for archival information, including on MDR’s founding. It explains that MDR has a combined function as “archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements”, with an emphasis on social struggles, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the expression of marginalised and oppressed groups. MDR’s programme format responds continuously to the materials being worked with, and gathered around, and includes film screenings, poetry readings, ‘scan-a-thons’, talks, discussions, reading groups and social nights, to name a few examples.

MDR’s governance structure was carefully developed to align with its egalitarian politics and the organisation came to be run by a small, non-hierarchical staff collective in collaboration with a number of resident groups called the ‘Building Collective’, in turn supported by a board of trustees connected to its charity status. MDR’s core funder, The Glasshouse Trust, granted MDR an annual grant of £50,000 as well as providing it with a four-storey building on Fleet Street, which it has occupied since opening in 2013 on a rolling, ten-year renewable lease. Another result of our structural scoping was the universal wage paid to all PAYE staff, irrespective of job description (the seemingly arbitrary figure of £17.21 was the result of our attempt, in 2012/13, at calculating a national median pay figure and remains in place on this basis). Those with an appetite for the minutiae of this R&D process, the experimental thinking and doing that preceded MDR’s official opening, can read more in ‘A Brief History’, authored in January of 2013, or read the MayDay Manifesto – the ‘manifest’ – which was written in 2011 to announce a broad collective intention and set the project in its proper context, i.e., among other dissident archival endeavours hostile to the status quo. As it stated, “We [called] this new initiative the MayDay project in honour of the lost commons of popular memory, in acknowledgement of the current emergency facing the radical heritage, and in anticipation of future festivities in a better world of our own making. M’aidez.”

Our intergenerational group yearned to put into practice lessons learned over lifetimes in educational, media, artistic and conservation work. Gillian and Iain Boal, Howard Slater, Anthony Davies and myself, together with many other important allies and comrades (listed in detail in the histories cited above), could draw on overlapping and mutually illuminating histories of practice cutting across libraries and archives, art schools and culture venues, publishers and activist groups, to position MDR in such a way (or so we hoped) as to avoid some of the more problematic trajectories that ‘alternative’ organisations tend to find themselves on, playing unanticipated, and unwanted, roles in culture-led gentrification processes especially. This often means that organisations displace the communities they are nominally acting in solidarity with, as well as – equally perversely – undermining their own long-term viability. Well aware how often such projects end up feeding the urban ecologies of capital, not community, we organised the pre-conference, Archiving from Below: Engaging Histories, to test MDR’s initial ideas and sketches in the presence of sister organisations, many of whom had managed to avoid this fate. We asked them about their organisational and archival philosophies, taking profound inspiration from, o.a., the Prelinger Library and Prelinger Archive (in San Francisco), the International Institute of Social History/IISH (Amsterdam), Archivo Primo Moroni (Milan), the Working Class Movement Library/WCML (Salford), and South Side Community Art Centre (Chicago).

The intellectual hinterlands of these efforts can also be traced via founders’ overlapping histories, and included the critiques of sponsorship and cultural corporatisation that many of us had been involved in – e.g. through the magazine, Mute, of which I was a co-founder and contributing editor, and to which many of those involved in MDR had also contributed. There was also a collective commitment to commoning, piracy, squatting and protest – any and all movements against the commodification and privatisation of space, data and life. MDR also responded to the archival and educational turns evident in institutional programming at the time, wanting to dedicate itself proactively to social change, not just ‘awareness’ or increased knowledge. The curation and exhibition practices marking this new turn seemed, to us at least, to tame and dampen the explosive potential of archival material by placing it behind vitrines, making it accessible only to ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’, and separating it from the communities to which it was most relevant. We instead observed the trope of history-as-weapon. In this respect, everything we undertook, everything we cared about and wanted to change, was influenced by the specificities of London’s social and cultural dynamics; all the ways the city was changing to accommodate a global financial crisis, its aftermath, and the long durée of financialised Neoliberalism. The themes that emerged from these preoccupations were imprinted by this context and continue to structure the holdings, e.g., via anti-gentrification struggles, social / secure housing and squatting; racial justice; alternative education; anti-surveillance struggles; social reproduction / feminism; the politics of therapy; experimental art and culture; media, film, publishing; protest (strike, riot, march); and organisational and movement forms.

MDR also worked with built space as a medium: we for example imagined the arrangement of rooms could render horizontal the latent vertical power relationships in society. By centring hospitality, conviviality, and chance – foremost through a kitchen, but also by withholding traditional forms of wayfinding that are performed by reception facilities – users of the building might have more unmediated relationships than conventionally allowed in cultural and memory institutions. In this, MDR encouraged the ‘incidental’ encounter and person – a concept it took from the artist group, APG, which had influenced many – and it hoped to have autonomy (e.g. of the resident organisations that contributed to the building collective) coincide with collectivity (a unifying, but often also somewhat homogenising category). All of this should, we were acutely aware, be disentangled from the seductions of ‘grand designs’; the ‘edifice complexes’ that might otherwise stalk a project installed in a beautiful, historical building, as we had come to at 88 Fleet Street.

Browsing through the events that MDR has put on in the last couple of years (2022-24) – the fantastic free youth programme ‘Uncovering the Archive’, for example, one of whose event flyers introduces this ReMap story – it is inspiring to see that the past decade of activity and organising in the building always already placed any potential edifice complex in abeyance. With all its formal and informal deposits jostling for space (archival holdings, posters and fingerprints on walls, younger and older plants, public event formats and user-groups always changing), we can witness not only the many everyday ways in which MDR’s adherences to the principles of ‘history from below’ mitigate against such vanity, but also how they may have helped to enact the double entendres codified into its name. MayDay Rooms fused the distress call, ‘M’aidez’, or ‘help me’, with the similarly pronounced phrase ‘May Day’, which denotes the annually recurring celebrations of both labour and fertility, to forge an organisational mission which practices safety, celebration and resistance as one.