Beyond the Shelves: How a Community Archive Empowers Collective Action
What are community archives preserving and why does it matter?
In recent weeks, more than 2,100 college students have been arrested for acts of social resistance across the United States, creating a wave of activism that some see as an unprecedented crisis. However, these arrests are merely echoes of past movements, following in the footsteps of previous generations of activists who laid the foundation for today’s movements.
But where can we look to find strategies and resources to access this information? This information is not easily accessible on the internet or in a book or even from the teachers at our schools and universities.
Tucked away in the residential neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, a historically wealthy, white neighborhood, Interference Archive hosts a vast collection of artifacts from nearly 60 years of social movements — all completely open access for your viewing.
Getting access to any archive or collection of knowledge usually requires navigating extensive bureaucratic hurdles. You can bet that no average Joe will be let through the doors, but the founders of Interference Archive hoped to change this.
The archive was founded in 2011 as the conglomerate of Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee’s collections of ephemera. As artists and leftists, the two had amassed a huge collection of posters, zines, pamphlets, buttons, records, and other distributed media from over 25 years in the radical political scene.
With their friends, Molly Fair and Kevin Kaplicki, the four envisioned a space to house these materials for the people who created them and with whom they hoped to share them. The group was deeply committed to an open-access archive where anyone and everyone could access and replicate the materials for distribution — their original purpose. As the archive took form, they recognized they saw the potential of the space for community engagement and political education, so since 2011 the archive has hosted 3 to 4 political exhibitions and hosts over 80 events each year that are free to the public.
The influence of the archive extends beyond its exhibitions and events to directly impact individual visitors, especially students seeking to learn from past movements. Julie Evanoff a more recent addition to the volunteer team commented that, “Often, students come in wanting to learn how to organize.”
She continued “They’re not just browsing online; they’re engaging with materials made by past social movements and stumbling upon possibilities.” In turn, these students are bridging the gap between historical documentation and active participation in social movements.
Since its founding, the archive has maintained a completely horizontal structure — every volunteer is equal from the minute they walk in the door. As a completely volunteer-run organization, this structure creates a space where every opinion is valued and most people share similar political commitment and values — which could likely also be attributed to the nature of the materials the space houses.
By speaking to several members of the volunteer staff — some who have been here over a decade and others who recently arrived — I gained a perspective on the value of the archive as a preservation space and as a third space for building community. Each volunteer brings their perspective to the importance of the material and their vision for the space, which is needed now more than ever.
Currently lining the walls of the Interference Archive, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, are several posters informational maps, and paragraphs discussing the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The pieces are part of an exhibit that began in late October. Several volunteers gathered together in the evenings and on weekends to dig through the entire archival collection to find zines and pamphlets and posters and books that all reflect the conflict — and response to conflict — in Israel and Palestine since the late 1960s.
Each exhibit at the archive requires months of coordination, planning, and, of course, digging — a process core to the structure of the archive and its values. Emerald Anastasia, another recent addition to the volunteer staff commented, “Interference Archive is special in the way that it documents things most archives wouldn’t even consider.”
They continued, “It gives space to materials from social movements, especially those from black liberation, Palestinian liberation, and queer social justice, which wouldn’t get the time of day elsewhere.” This dedication to preserving a wide array of social movement materials ensures that these pivotal moments and movements are remembered and accessible — and through events and exhibitions they reach a larger audience.
Brooke Shuman, who began her volunteer journey in 2015, is often the lead coordinator of these exhibits. As her life has shifted since 2015, Shuman has found herself spending varying amounts of time at the archive coordinating exhibits. For her day job, she works as a journalist, but her heart — and one of the things that initially drew her to the archive — lies outside of that.
“I just really care about organizing and the history of organizing the left movements,” Shuman shared, “The thing I like about IA is you learn about a lot of different strategies that activists have taken over the years.”
The documents that lie within the copious boxes serve as a reminder of what came before us to remind us that our struggles and the political trials we face are simply the repeating of history. So, therefore, the pieces documenting resistance and social demonstration lay the groundwork for us to replicate. Most of these pieces do not exist outside of Interference Archive. And especially amid mass organizing throughout the country, reflecting on our past provides a tangible foundation for current and future movements. Linking us to that which came before us.
“There just was this huge UAW win in the south,” Shuman said referring to the United Automobile Workers Union winning a strike in Tennessee, “UAW is trying to organize right in all these states that are difficult to organize.”
“And there’s a history of that same kind of activity happening 60 years ago, so you could look them up online, but I’m gonna go down [to the archive] and like scan some things because a lot of stuff is not well documented or is easily forgotten,” she continued “Interference is unique because we’re documenting the left, which is not [often as documented].”
In this Shuman can take an active role in creating social change, or at least laying the groundwork for it. “When I’m thinking about how I want to use my extracurricular time,” Shuman noted, “I am sometimes like, ‘Oh, I should be doing something [about the political uprisings across the globe] or organizing,’ when I can do it the archive [even though] it isn’t like its primary purpose.”
When you walk into the archive, you are instantly met by a table full of pamphlets, zines, flyers, and stickers, all brought to the space by people hoping to distribute information about their social movements, fundraisers, or events to the people who walk through the archive — allowing IA to serve as the intermediary for the pieces it collects. The front of the archive feels relatively sparse compared to the back half. The front has a few file boxes and a few boxes of buttons and some books that are for sale from local independent publishers but otherwise, it is more of a welcoming exhibit space.
The walls are wide and empty in the interim before and exhibit and two thick plexiglass viewing cabinets are built into the wooden shelves as a place to display pamphlets and zines and other smaller, more fragile materials that are contextual to the current exhibit.
As you continue walking there are desks to the left with the passwords on a sticky note on the keyboard, if you ever wanted to get in, and bathrooms to the right. Currently, the bathrooms are covered in sticky notes from a zine-making class where participants were asked to share their visions for change. “I hope trans children feel safer in their schools,” one reads. “I hope we can come together to fight for the housing rights of low-income New Yorkers,” says another.
The bathrooms are truly public meaning that any person can come in off the street and use them, as part of the space’s mission Every once in a while, a homeless person or a delivery driver will pop in. Once you get past the bathrooms, you hit the real meat of the archive — or perhaps that’s not the right word, considering that most volunteers here are at least vegetarian for social reasons. First, you hit the VHS collection, then the records — one of MacPhee’s special interests — then the pamphlets and zines then the serials (magazines and similar types of media) then the library full of books, then the metal poster storage then hidden away in the corner is a screen printing bike (for portable propaganda parties) and a floor to ceiling collection of newspapers. Amid all these materials held in boxes that line the walls are a scanner and a couple of tables and chairs for people to make use of the space by freely grabbing any of the boxes and digging through them for as long as they please.
Other spaces like Interference Archive do exist but are often much more difficult to access. Through the example set by IA, it is clear that an open archive format resonates with people hoping to better connect with their community through handling archived materials, but that is not always possible, even in other local community archives. Since Covid, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, an archive that preserves records of lesbian life and history, has functioned under restrictions that have somewhat hindered their community archive function. Currently, because the archive is run by primarily older people who are more susceptible to COVID, only 15 people can be in the space at one time.
To visit the space, you can register to come to open hours on their website, but slots fill up in minutes and are only for two hours on Saturdays. Luckily by working a few connections, I was able to find a loophole and get a private tour to check out the space.
Maddie Provost, a member of LHA’s volunteer staff, welcomed me into the space and gave me an overview of the materials. Rather than the somewhat industrial space of Interference Archive, LHA is in a Park Slope townhouse right on the southern edge of Prospect Park. The space is incredible. Stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes upon boxes of lesbian history. Like IA, if you can get a visitor’s spot at LHA, then you are more than welcome to dig all you want.
“In general, it’s important to have a space that represents specific communities that tend to be erased from history,” Provost shared.
As Shuman shared about IA and as is a bit more obvious in the collection materials housed at LHA, community archive spaces house materials that are often disregarded for political or even practical (space-related) reasons, but preserving these materials and then allowing people to access them lays the groundwork for current and future social movements. On a more personal level, they allow us to connect to our shared history.
“I think it’s important to know that there’s others out there who have existed before you and built these foundations for you to show a possible life for you outside of like the heteronormative patriarchal norms of what we’re used to,” Provost commented on the importance of preserving and sharing the physical materials housed in spaces like LHA or IA.
“I’ve seen whole entire collections of people’s lives,” Provost shared, “[Donors] will give every one of their photos to us when they pass away, and I think that it’s just so important to have those kinds of spaces that people feel comfortable and safe to be authentically themselves or give their stuff to.”
“People want to be seen and want others to know that we’ve lived these lives before,” Provost continued.
To gain a perspective on the larger topic of preservation in the context of community archives, I spoke to Maggie Schreiner, an Archivist and Professor of Archival Studies at NYU and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Primarily I wanted to understand why we even need to preserve things in an age where everything is digital.
“Digital materials are less permanent than we might hope,” Schreiner said, “ I think a good example is we can pick up a book that’s 500 years old and reasonably expect, if it’s a new language we speak, to understand what it says and what it’s communicating and be able to turn the pages gently, but we don’t expect that with digital material that’s even 15 years old.”
She noted that digital material serves as a useful platform in areas like Gaza where physical documents are being burned; it is all about finding the most sustainable method of preservation. As we learned from Provost and Shuman, preserving the materials found in community archives live LHA and IA is important because they provide a foundation and a reference point for people in the material’s respective community to act on today. But why do we need these community archives?
“Looking at Interference from the perspective of a traditional archive,” Schreiner began her thought, “Many of the materials that Interference collects, wouldn’t otherwise be preserved because of the ephemeral nature of the material.”
“Historically,” she continued, “Archives haven’t collected or prioritized materials like flyers, zines, or posters, and since these are major components of social movement and political culture, this material wouldn’t be captured through sort of traditional archival practice.”
As a volunteer for over 12 years at Interference Archive, Schreiner is well versed in the space’s ethos and format, but as a professional archivist, she can provide context on how the Open Stacks format at IA differentiates it from other archival spaces. We discussed how the open format impacts the space as a whole, and how it creates a space for those of us who may not be archivists professionally to engage with the preservation of history.
“I think [it comes down to] Interference Archive’s core community not academic researchers,” said Schreiner, “[Also,] I think that Interference, by being Open Stacks and allowing anyone to come in and write is really important and it does a lot of the work.”
Back in October, I met a new volunteer at the archive named Florence Low who had the most delightful British accent yet to be polluted by our American dialect. It was clear that their move to the city was relatively recent — as they were sitting at one of the tables in the back of the archive eating veggie dumpling soup from Dumplings & Things, a staple restaurant for volunteers taking long shifts — because they were talking about hoping to find community and looking to join new book clubs and such. In fact, that is why they were at the archive in the first place.
“There’s a lack of hierarchical interaction that enables people to arrive in a much more standard way and relate to each other in a very immediate way,” Low shared.
“I think people struggle with, just on a day-to-day basis of like, getting to know people who share your values,” they continued, “There’s something about the posted value set as a DIY ethos [at the archive] that enables this very immediate way of making relationships and the physical space to helps.”
This prompted an obvious question of why the physical space matters so greatly, to which they responded with the same sentiment as every other volunteer which is that there are no free spaces to spend time outside of the archive — especially none that are community-centered.
“Part of the loss of those spaces is part of broader gentrification movements,” Low expanded, “And the gentrification cuts us off from a sense of the People’s History and what’s come before us.”
Even if you could find a physical that had some sort of archival purpose, it would likely be very hard to get access. As an artist with no institutional ties, Low — and many others like them who exist outside of academia — cannot access another archive, even those with a community-driven purpose.
“Often you need to have accreditation or proof that you need to look at archives,” Low said when discussing their perception of a typical institutional archive when compared to IA, “I think it’s so powerful that at Interference Archive you don’t need to even be inducted into the space to use it.”
“I think that’s an incredibly powerful thing,” they continued, “and I think it’s a very beautiful way of pointing to the [archive’s] values of openness and accessibility of information with a really practical, meaningful way of making that happen.”
The materials in the archive can only serve their purpose if they are put into action, so often Interference Archive becomes a space for political organizing.
Lou Hines, a regular volunteer since 2012, explained that the value of the space is not only the materials, but the people within the space. The archive becomes a sort of defacto-organizing space where like-minded (relatively radical) individuals come together to share ideas, which in a time such as this is incredibly important.
As Hines and I closed out our conversation, which covered the importance of the archive as a community space and adjacent topics, she offered a bit of advice about the ongoing Pro-Palestine campus protests.
“Just expect the crackdowns to get worse and crazier,” said Hines, “But accept the idea of growing the struggle and not making it just about the campus because once that happens, then it’s dead.”
In this, Hines is suggesting that we turn to our communities share our struggle, and grow resistance. And that, perhaps, is exactly why Interference Archive matters so greatly in our current time. It is the tangible expansion of struggle, into the past through the materials and into the future through the community.
