Volunteering at Interference Archive: why we do what we do!

I started volunteering at Interference Archive about two years ago. My background is in the arts I’ve worked in nonprofits as well as a gallery and a museum, but my frustrating experiences in those environments made me curious about alternative and more horizontally organized institutions. I liked that Interference was relatively new and still forming—flexible, with room for input from a lot of people. I started by staffing once a week, and slowly got to know the space and its collection.

I was working on the 2014 exhibition, We Are Who We Archive, a showcase of recent acquisitions when I started to become aware of how important the donors to our collection are. For the most part, they are activists who collected these materials throughout their lives—they felt they were important and needed to be preserved. Sometimes we talk about these movements in the abstract, but there’s a very human history attached to each object in our collection, and it made my understanding of the material richer to speak with someone who’d been part of these movements. That context—the lives and personalities of the people who created the movements we document and preserve—is a huge part of the archive as well.

This is the idea behind the Audio Working Group was to share some of those voices and provide context for the collection materials in a different way. Eventually, this working group developed its own podcast, Audio Interference, with a new episode every other week. Right now, we’re working on producing upcoming episodes with Greg Sholette and Diana Block, as well as building skills through informal training sessions and setting up better distribution.

If you’re interested in volunteering at Interference Archive, check out our website for info fon how to get involved, or email info@interferencearchive.org. You can also support the amazing work of all our volunteers by making a financial donation.