Summer – Winter 2025
Archive as Catalyst is a public programme of events and creative works exploring activist and community archives. We received 162 outstanding submissions to our Open Call, and are excited to share the full programme.
Introduction: ‘Provocation and Promise’
“We wrote impossible letters. We talked about music and poetry; housing justice and abolition. Clustered around tables in the huge main hall at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, organisers from different social movements mapped our connected struggles as kids ran in circles around our tables. Members of the Empire’s Endgame collective had structured three days of workshops around a ‘daily reminder’ from the historian Robin Kelley: ‘Love, Study, Struggle’. Inside that hall, in the summer of 2023, we explored what archives of resistance could make possible.
Archive as Catalyst was inspired by those workshops. From Summer to Winter 2025, Platform will bring artists and organisers together to explore movement histories.
Platform’s first action was Addenbrookes Blues in 1983, a public performance in support of hospital staff on strike against privatisation. Since then, we’ve assembled a huge archive — over 300 boxes. Now housed at the Bishopsgate Institute, our collection contains photos of oil pipelines in Iraq, Azerbaijan and Türkiye; flyers from strikes by dockers, doctors and teachers; plans for a steel sculpture honouring 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 of community energy companies; Freedom of Information requests; play scripts, music scores, hand-drawn maps…
These materials are our seeds. Over 6-months, artists and organisers will experiment with documentary, performance, screenprinting, ceramics, oral histories, song, curation and collage. We’ll learn from movements in the UK, Nigeria, Syria, Palestine and the Philippines. Moving beyond institutional confines, we’ll trace histories of resistance through communities, housing estates, woodlands and waterways. Our archives will be sites of provocation and promise.
From here, where the past meets the present, Archive as Catalyst will ask: what’s lost, what’s left, and what’s next?”
These projects represent the first stirrings of exploration and experiment. See the full programme for full descriptions of the artists, organisers and projects. Their public offerings will take place between July and December 2025.
The programme features:
History from Below
Common Scripts – Leonie Rousham & Dorchester Court Tenants’ Union
Ito Ang Aming Mga Kewto – Francesca Humi
Shadows of Industrialisation – Tanya Rideout
Resistance
The Contract – Christina Bartson
Wounded Land – Floor van der Hout and simone rudolphi
Imagination
Cultivating Homeland – Yasmina Seifeddine
Climate Chorus – Emilian Isibo
