Making History “resistance expo”
P had been talking about an exhibition telling our history for many years. H had been thinking about an exhibition for many years as a project of (re) telling our history.
We were both invited to a all-day academic conference coming out of the V&A disobedient objects. Sitting in the audiences listen to the academics circle around the empty camp fire of our history. H turned to P “let's do the grassroots expo, these guys are not going to do it”. So during the lunch break H and P told the organisers of the conference that we had an announcement.
Up we went and together we announced that we would do a “bottom up” grassroots DIY history of activism of the last 25 years. Straight away P started to collect contacts, I fleshed out the draft I had in my head on how this would work. A little later I outline a workable project structure and we meetup in the Hive to work through how to move this beyond talk. P brought a list of contacts and a outline for subjects.
I outlined that for the project to move it could not be done without funding, DIY bootstrapping would not sustain. We need someone to do fundraising. A project structure make it a real project rather than just talk. Neither me or P had anyone reliable in mind. I suggested that R could do the fundraising, P expressed the issue that I did not have a good relationship with R which was true. This went back and forward for a bit but we had no other alternative. OK lets get R onboard to do the first tranche of funding then we can expand the crew and he would have less of a role in the actual exhibition itself. After working with him for many years it was clear to me that he is not the right person for the “open” expo I had laid out.
Fundraising can take month´s if not years so I would be taking my boat across the channel to europe as there was nothing to the project till funding was in place to move the project into existence.
P agreed to this and he would make sure I was kept in the loop during this “fallow period” till funding came through. Parting words from H “Dont let R push the project into motion as soon as the funding comes through make sure to get me back in the loop” on this agreement the project was booted up and R was brought in ONLY to do the fundraising.
An exciting radical grassroots open data project was in motion. The issue that our own history was being told by people who had second hand sources and clearly different agendas to the people who actually made the history. The exhibition set out as a project to organically push into shadow the crap history of traditional/academia by an influx of original accounts and objects from the people who made that history themselves. It is a fresh open exemplar of how the world could be. As P would say a positive alternative.
I sailed across the channel, as promised regular updates arrived from the meetups, I fed back into these, expanding the original draft into a full expo structure, as I felt the expo going off course I asked to attend the gatherings via video link but this was never replied to. Funding shapes agendas as expected the expo started to go off-track this is how the outreach for funding pushes grassroots projects agendas. My plan once we had the funding the agenda would be refocused. For once this normal fuckup would not be a BLOCK.
After about 3 months, I was coming up to Paris on the boat, the communication stopped, silence the communication went dark. I asked what was happening and there were no replies. Just before this I had been pushing for more connection - asking for video linkups to meetings etc. funding is hard and it's not surprising that people have down times, my life was full of my boat journey. Another few months went past I was thinking that the funding had fallen through nothing unusual there.
The money for the project had to go through visionontv which am a director of. Was surprised and shocked to get a message from our bookkeeper asking if it was OK to pay a women called S 500 pounds out of the new funding that came in. An email back who is this women and when did we get a new budget. It turned out that D did not have any information on this which was why she was emailing me.
OK something shitty had gone wrong and that moment of “silences” was not the funding failing and them running out of energy. It was the opposite the funding had come though and the expo project was put into motion by a person I did not trust to run an open project.
The project had been “stolen” by the person we brought in to do the fundraising. R had pushed the project into motion as soon as he new funding was coming in and cut communication to me “Don’t let R push the project into motion as soon as the funding comes through make sure to get me back in the loop”.
This Power Politics is shitty and this was well shitty, that a project I had worked on for years had been stolen by a person who had done this repeatedly in the past.
I was already coming back to London for a long winter break (as french canals closed and are iced-in) I was going to spend time in London and visit my parents in Wales. On arrival I found parts of the full story. And that the first expo was on in the Hive in Dalston in a few weeks. Shit happen, think positive there is work to do.
There was a lot of power politics “smoke” to hide the shit - though the smell was not at all pleasant. It’s my project so let's try and get it back on track I dived in to refocus the horizontal grassroots DIY and push out the hierarchical curated NGO that had been put into place during the “silence” and pushed into place by mainstreaming agendas.
The process was think with the miasma of power politics “we did not know you wanted to be involved” “we thought you had left” and obscuration - took me a week to find out who was being paid and how much, this came from D and P. Everyone was being paid but me, money corrupts and in activist circles it pushed crap agendas. Nobody wanted to talk about this.
I put the DIY scanning and open data soup back in place as the core of the expo “history for the people who made history” This had slipped from being a priority to being something we could maybe do latter in the NGO curated vision. Over the next few months I face a continuous hard BLOCK on getting the expo back on course.
The headboard text template was blocked at every meeting for a whole month till it was implemented in full. Then it become something they had come up with - this was obviously not so.
The Physical structure plan was blocked for two weeks at every meeting until it was implemented in full. Then the process for creating this was fucked up by control freakery of restricting contact to the funders. A week delay while the whole thing went into crapville with the funders went silent for a week and then employing a “pro expo builder” on a big budget. Our layout was self build DIY from local sources thus needed a basics carpenter local to us (london Hackspace would have been perfect). We ended up with expensive, nice looking setup but at double the weight and complexity.
P was off on holiday for the next two weeks. I then put nearly two weeks full time work trouble shooting the crapness of the frames build for a outcome. Then started the headboard layout with plenty of time for the big budget deadline. Over this time the other crew R&S were to source 40-100 photos to fill the frames, and R was to do the templated text. I got A a pro board designer to come in and do the final layout after the text and photos arrived, all well within the deadline. Everything was ready to go.
During this time I sent out a continues stream of open process mails and CC´ed in all the mails to the frame builder to the central email address. From S there was silence back, from R no direct replies to my questions. Got loose drafts of Templated printed A1 to judge working text sizes and photo quality all ready to go to meet the big budget deadline.
Still silence from S&R about the photos they were suppose to source over these two weeks. Then had to chase up R to get him to start the header text a few days before the deadline. Then I had a horrible realization that they had fucked me over and fucked the main budget deadline by doing NOTHING over these two weeks to find the photos or finish the text. If this was power politics there was NO room for it.
Things just went downhill from here.