*A conversation about
*Fragmented ephemera
*– or ways to not be daunted by the body of material at your hands


About the Mayday Rooms – meaning location:
4 in core group -
10 in a more remote groupThe building group
The funder/trust bought the building
in Fleet Street -- The journalism street - emptying out.
Controversial funder
Often mistaken for squatters when doing some overt political action.

Do you do, or how do you do, public events?
First floor: library + screening room + meetings (free for politically aligned groups) Material that come to them comes out of this engagement — showing what's hapening


How do you make a relationship with someone who donates to the archive and the archive?
All based on individual agreements
Originally we were not meant to be a permanent archive
But we accidentally developed a rather large archive
In that way we are a transition space that became permanent
We have a very strong relation with the depositors

• sometimes even too strong? Or at least very impactful on our daily work.
• (for example someone who donated a large collection, who also then comes by the office at least twice a week.)

History and contemporary struggle
way of collaboratively working on history

• • • Let's start a list of words to replace/work with/contemplating "activate" or "activation":
      • - Socialising
      • - 'activation' = ways to not be daunted by the body of material (?)
        •  ✶ Activation is perhaps as much about letting the people taking care of the collection be playful, as it is about engaging an audience. ✶ 
          • Or perhaps even more so.
      • - materialisations
      • – Playfullness / play 

Template for depositing material: Protocols for material brought in


How BAL collects material 
***Got distracted forgot to take notes*** 

• • (Filler notes, completely made up, but probably close enough)  ––>  We follow a lot of trails, it is part investigation and treasure hunts, part just leafing trhough archives.
  • Lesbian content (the one we are looking for) is often "hidden" inside categories of feminism, (the supposed gender neutral term) gay movements, (the supposed gender neutral term) homosexual movements etc.
  • We also follow trails of people. For example did we see that a lot of protest photograps of otherwise undocumented lesbian protests were taken by the same person, so we tracked her down, and she opened up her home and archive. Which led us to (among other things) her button collection, which again led us to one of our favourite fragments. Pasted into the bottom of this pad.

It is very interesting to see; What do people keep?


R: Books is not our primary focus
Weird collection: mainly philosophy books Marxist-orientated stuff
Tactics
Past and now, learning from the past
Organisational forms
How to collect new media forms? (Twitter etc) How to archive digital stuff?
Is Mayday collecting contemporary material? Stopping more or less in year 2000
Housing struggle for the last 5 years


Organisation of Mayday:
You can show up without appointment
Boxes can be linked to a person, a collective or a movement Dissenting ephemera is a good catch all category
Hierarchies? (for instance: anarchism contains a more precise category) Broad categories: more a problem
more precise catgories


Second iteration of Mayday collective
Open space, unprecious ways
Interference archive in NYC
Memory of the world (better to have a copy than no copy) =
Inspirations

scannathons: scanning workshops
Lists
And text searches
List instead of Index
Benefited from our non-archival background/ our amateurship


Antagonisms
Building an archive that is more partisan and political
"we put the category, and than see whether it is a good one"
//////////////////////////Playfullness

'Responses to the archive'
Re-assemble Collage Clippings


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