This week at Interference Archive:

Cataloging Party!

Saturday, October 5, 2-5pm

Art Workers’ Inquiry: Who are the Gatekeepers?

Sunday, October 6, 4-6pm
Hosted by Red Bloom: A Communist Collective

Join us and hosts Red Bloom: A Communist Collective for an art workers gathering where we’ll identify who controls the resources in our different sectors of the arts industry, and discuss how we challenge them in our industry and in the streets! As workers in the arts, we labor in an industry where a tiny group of (overwhelmingly white, cis-male) gatekeepers control the resources that we all need to live and create. These gatekeepers often stay out of the spotlight, but they wield the power to exploit and coerce us, to make or break our projects, and to endanger our livelihoods. As communists, socialists, and anti-capitalists, we want to build a broad struggle for worker power in the arts.

Join us to meet up with other arts workers and discuss how we can build a cross-craft, cross-media arts workers’ struggle. Read more here.

Coming up at Interference Archive:

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

Exhibition Catalog available for pre-sale now through October 16

On October 17, 2019, Interference Archive and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) open the exhibition Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing. Building for Us begins in the 1970s, exploring the history of government disinvestment, widespread landlord neglect, abandonment in New York City and how this gave rise to squatting, urban homesteading, and other forms of self-help housing. The ultimate goal is for tenant associations in this housing movement is to take their buildings out of the speculative housing market and own them collectively and democratically.

This exhibition, and the accompanying 34-page two-color catalog, chronicles the history of the movement and tells the stories of people who fought to turn vacant or neglected buildings into vibrant co-ops, as told through photographs, newsletters, training manuals and other materials found in UHAB’s archive. More than just an exhibition catalog, this publication acts as a resource to illustrate the history and how-to of cooperative housing. With fully bilingual (English-Spanish) text and a glossary, this publication features sections on sweat equity and homesteading, UHAB, training and education, TIL (the tenant interim lease program), and community building in the homestead movement.

Read more and get your catalog here. 

Catalog pre-sale now through October 16 with a 25% discount
Exhibition Opening: October 17, 2019, 7-9pm
Exhibition Dates: October 17, 2019 to February 2, 2020

Alternative Archives: a conversation about Alternative Toronto with Lilian Radovac

Friday, October 18, 7pm

Join Lilian Radovac at Interference Archive during NYC Archives Week for a conversation about creating and sustaining alternative community archives. Lilian will speak about her work coordinating Alternative Toronto, an online digital repository that crowdsources documentation of Toronto’s radical, countercultural and trans/feminist/queer communities from 1980 to 1999. She’ll speak about everything from imagining this project to making it real, including the nuts and bolts of building an Omeka-based system, creating interfaces that help contributors share the materials they’ve collected, and spreading the word.

Lilian’s presentation will be followed by a discussion and brainstorming session. Read more here. 

Photo: Rocky Dobey, “After years of tight-fisted colonialism, nothing to smile about,” Queen and Gladstone, 1988.

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The backbone of this community are sustainers who make a regular contribution to the archive, generally of $10 to $50 each month.

Visit our website to learn how you can become a monthly sustainer of Interference Archive!