Grants of up to £3,000 for individual artists or collectives

Deadline: 9am 16 April 2025

We’re looking for artists and collectives to explore creative approaches to activist and community archives.

We can’t build a new world in the shape of the old. How could creative approaches to movement histories expand our political imaginations and spark dreams of liberation?

How have social movements and communities mounted creative resistance to corporate and state power over time? How do materials from the past record what it felt like to resist?

What could a people’s history of climate justice look like; what grows there? Who could create such a place, where?

Background

Platform was founded in 1983 as a radical theatre collective. In 1984, our first action was Addenbrookes Blues, a public performance in support of hospital staff on strike against privatisation. Since then, we’ve amassed a huge archive. Held at the Bishopsgate Institute, it comprises over 300 boxes containing photos of oil pipelines in Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkey; flyers from strikes by dockers, doctors and teachers; plans for a steel sculpture commemorating the Ogoni 9; banners calling for a Free International University, an end to war and climate chaos, and the release of political prisoners; minutes from meetings about community energy companies; Freedom of Information requests; music scores, play scripts, press cuttings, hand-drawn maps… Even more artwork and investigative research is stored offsite, yet to be comprehensively catalogued. 

Scope

Proposed projects will take historic objects, documents, archives or actions as their starting point for a new creative work or event/s. You can start from Platform’s archive, materials held at another institution, or materials from community and grassroots archives or personal collections. 

Proposed projects should focus on struggles for environmental and climate justice in any form, anywhere in the world, and can be as broad or specific as desired. We welcome applications from groups and collectives exploring their own histories, and particularly welcome projects that spark intergenerational and intercultural conversations. 

Participants can work within any creative discipline. These small grants are intended to support the first stirrings of exploration and experiment: we welcome proposals for creative gatherings and workshops; responses to archival materials (such as poetry, performance or visual arts); and creative works as archives (such as oral histories or printmaking). We particularly welcome applications from people exploring these ideas for the first time.

Previous iterations of this programme have been in collaboration with Voices that Shake, and have included academic workshops, intergenerational conversations, riso publications, contributions to exhibitions like Blockadia, Fuel for Thought and oral histories like Fighting Sus.

Apply

Read the full application pack here and submit your application here. The deadline for responses is 9am 16 April 2025.

If you have any questions, suggestions or would like to collaborate, please get in touch.

📢 Workshop Launch 📢

The programme will launch with a When History Wakes, a free creative workshop, featuring:

• Explorations of creative, community and anti-colonial archives, with Sara Salem, co-curator of Archive Stories
• Collective history-making activities with artist Jack Young & director Elinor Lower
• Readings, reflection and creative writing with poet Alycia Pirmohamed

The workshop will be held online on monday 17 March, 18:00-20:00. Register here.