Interference Archive: a free space for social movement culture

Abstract

This paper discusses activist archives within the context of community archives and the practices of archiving activism. Interference Archive (IA), a volunteer-run independent archive in Brooklyn, New York, is presented as one example of an activist archive. We explain the manner in which IA functions as a transmovement and prefigurative ''free space'' under Francis Poletta's typology of movement spaces. Through this explanation, we illustrate how the structures of free spaces can help us understand the way activist archives forge connections between communities and the ways that they create new networks of solidarity through the archival process.

"We come together as one...and hope for solidarity to live on"

“…In doing this, we also bridged multiple levels of stigma-reduction as described by [32]: technologies served different functions for individuals (intra-and interpersonal) and the charity (organisational), for the different events throughout this day (community), as well as the meaning of the day as a whole (structural). Correspondingly, the Red Umbrella Archive is not only a hybrid of various theoretical archival practices (activist [24,25,31], community and living [56]), but it is also a hybrid of craft and technology, of digital and non-digital interactions. On top of this material hybridity of the archive, the digital and non-digital technologies that were used throughout the day to support, document, or facilitate commemoration and remembrance were useful in different ways.…”

“…There are a multitude of theoretical framings for these archival practices. For example, in community archives the communities about whom the archive is developed play a central role in its development, and in activist archives the practice of archiving or tagging artefacts in the archive may be seen as activism in itself (see, for example, [30,31,56]). Each of these approaches aims to highlight different aspects of justice issues, and are made up of extensive and nuanced bodies of work related to theoretical, methodological, as well as practical explorations which we do not detail herein.…”

“…Our work sits alongside this kind of justice-oriented work, which aims to promote the development of archives that are explicitly political and antiviolent [3,25], and that place important aspects of community, activism, and justice at their core [30,31,56]. Allard and Ferris have written about social justice and community mobilisation through participatory approaches to archiving in their Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project [3].…”

“…Similar to Mori et al's discussions [43], the archive provided people with the opportunity of discussing emotional topics in a supportive environment of peers. Looking towards justice-promotion and collective engagement, aspects often attributed to community archives [56], it also provided people with the opportunity to reflect individually while at the same time thinking about their communal (in the case of the above example titled 'archiving three generations' family-related) experiences of the day.…”

Archives, Education, and Access: Learning at Interference Archive

“…By contrast, institutional archives tend to take a "top-down" approach, often mirroring the bureaucratic organizational structure of the institutions they exist within, and drawing on the efforts of that institution to collect and organize archival material, rather than utilizing the efforts of the subjects of the archival material (Ziegler 107-108). When we talk about how IA fits into the realm of community archives, we recognize the community we serve as an incredibly broad spectrum of activists and organizers (for further elaboration on this, see Sellie et al 2015).…”