From Archive to Action: Save Soanes Research and Advocacy Team

‘Research in Place’ residents Sarah Goldzweig and Rhea Martin, part of the Save Soanes Research and Advocacy Team, reflect on building community resilience through creative resistance.

We began our Research in Place residency asking what we could learn from the Save Soanes campaign, as a specific urban struggle for spatial justice. Our live campaign is centred around contesting the displacement of social infrastructure and the threats this poses to local senses of belonging, and the residency has offered a parallel space to process and expand our thinking, while continuing to work towards a long-term lease for the Soanes Centre.

We arrived at the residency with two core questions. Firstly, in what ways can a campaign supporting a community space hold a generative role, in bringing new information to light and highlighting future possibilities?

Secondly, the Save Soanes campaign reached its one year mark during the residency. How do campaigns against displacement, which are often long, sustain themselves? And beyond that, how can arts-led and ‘alternative’ forms of cross-generational activism be used as a way of building long term capacity in community spaces under threat?

We’ve explored these questions in two parallel strands of work. We’ve been using the space provided by the residency to create an archive of policy and other research, correspondence and records of activity to document both the campaign, the history of the Soanes Centre, and the networks forming across the borough. This will become the evidence base for future conversations and collaborations.

We’ve also used the residency as a starting point to develop and test community workshops at the Centre.

At the beginning of the residency, we presented our research and challenges at an internal We Made That ‘Show and Tell’, introducing the campaign to the team and beginning to explore common questions and themes between our work and the practice’s.

We also hosted a walking Practice Pin Up, which brought the team to the Soanes Centre and situated our campaign within the wider context of Tower Hamlets. As well as talking about our connections with other local organisations, we visited the Roman Road Trust’s Common Room.

In July we launched the Soanes Centre Summer Programme, framed around an exploration of the past, present and future of the Soanes Centre. The workshops aim to facilitate engagement with our research and help us to envision and enact possibilities for the Soanes Centre’s future while exploring participatory ways of using and governing the space. We have been collecting oral histories of the Soanes Centre alongside developing our practice of creative caretaking of the building. Making functional artworks in textiles and ceramic is a method of promoting engagement with the archival material we’ve collected and reflecting on how we can embed stories within the space even as it faces ongoing insecurity.

We’ve also hosted discursive dinners for campaigners and community members to support our reflection, sustain our activism, and nurture our imagining of possibilities for the future. These dinners consider how we might continue to tend to our community and our network, to build resilience moving forward.

The campaign reached a huge milestone while at the residency when we shared our petition with the Council alongside other community-led lease campaigns, for Lola’s Shop and Mudchute Farm. For now, the campaign continues and we’re looking forward to continuing to build and deepen connections and relationships both within and around the space.