Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I analyse the Fight4Aylesbury (an)archival exhibition, where housing campaigners, artists and academics engaged in a “politics of invention” that convened novel publics to produce imaginings of shared equitable futures.

Paper Abstract:

In early 2023 housing campaigner Aysen Dennis transformed her apartment located on a housing estate in inner London into a multimodal and multisensory exhibition featuring reworked archival materials. The exhibition traced her 20+ year history of political organising against the planned regeneration and demolition of the housing complex. With the help of artists, academics, neighbours and campaigners (the Fight4Aylesbury collective), Aysen used her archive of struggle to create an immersive experience that aspired to conjure collective moments of thinking and organising in the present moment. As a visual anthropologist working with the Fight4Aylesbury collective, I reflect on the way the F4A exhibition became a site that convened novel publics to produce imaginings of shared equitable futures. I argue that the Fight4Aylesbury exhibition was driven by an anarchival impulse (Foster 2004), as materials were copied, reworked, collaged, juxtaposed and ruined in the display. The very idea of archive was also stretched to include the lived-in domestic space - as a repository of personal, architectural and infrastructural histories – prompting questions about that which is unarchivable and excluded from the archive. I argue that my role as the anthropologist in this context was that of a cultural co-curator and co-producer who engaged in a shared “politics of invention” (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). This irreverent inventive process used archival materials to create spaces and moments of communal envisioning, which concomitantly questioned and undid the logics and materialities of the archive itself.