MayDay Rooms
Archiving From Below
In their first presentation in Kosovo, Jan Gerber and Rosemary Grennan from MayDay Rooms explore the idea of "archiving from below" and how it can inform the construction of counter-archives. They discuss the historical trajectories of community archiving, worker research and history from below, as well as contemporary ideas about how archives can challenge the status quo and create new possibilities for the future.
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Programme
In Conversation
Project Lead
Participants
MayDay Rooms, Pykë-Presje, Sezgin Boynik
Themes
The surviving documents of our collective past have come down to us in shards and fragments, mostly by chance. This is especially true for the material traces of ‘history from below’. It is very rare that conscious, systematic efforts are initiated to protect the ‘archives of dissent’ from loss and erasure.
- The MayDay Manifesto, 2011.
MayDay Rooms is an archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories. Their 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. The core work of MDR is to activate radical and experimental historical material, primarily through collaborative education, informal research, digitisation and online distribution.
During their visit to Prishtina, MDR's Rosemary Grennan and Jan Gerber conducted a workshop with students from the University of Prishtina and delivered a public presentation at the National Library of Kosovo. The presentation was followed by an open discussion, moderated by Pykë-Presje's Sezgin Boynik.
Rosemary Grennan has co-run the MayDay Rooms since 2015, an archive and educational space in London that seeks to connect histories and documents of social move-ments and resistance to contemporary struggles. More recently she has co-founded AGIT in Berlin, a public residency space that works on archives and histories of the social and labour movements.
Jan Gerber is an accidental archivist and software developer from Berlin. He is one of the creators of pan.do/ra, a platform for densely annotated video material that is used for public archives like pad.ma, but has more recently also been extended to document based archives like leftove.rs. To get away from the keyboard he co-founded AGIT in Berlin, a public residency space that works on archives and histories of the social and labour movements.