This workshop will attempt to activate the collaborative digital assemblage created by researchers Lola Olufemi and Agnes Cameron, which displays over 300 archival documents relating to radical social movements collected from five London archives. Using the website’s prompts and material in the Mayday Archives, participants will collectively discuss strategies related to ‘archiving from below’, the relationship between archives and political struggle and experiment with collective writing practices geared towards recording the affective mood of the fascist present. This workshop will be a laboratory for thinking about the value of experimentation with archives in times of crisis, principally focused on animating the connection between theory and praxis and answering the question, what is to be done?

This is a workshop with limited numbers so please only sign up if you can definitely make it.

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. Her writing has been published by Afterall Journal, Architectural Review, Wasafiri, Stenberg Press, Aperture, La Fabrique Editions, Arcadia Missa, Vittles, Extra Extra Magazine and others. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham.