Library-in-Residence
Workshop

TEST 1 Library Transmission: Notes from the London Commune

Study Sessions

Date and Time:: April–July 2026
Location:: Iqra

Notes from the London Commune is a series conceptualised by James Elsey with The Otolith Collective.

The study sessions present a retrospective look at the histories of struggle in the city, from the vantage point of a near-future establishment of London's citywide workers' council. Each study session is hosted by a guest that brings selected texts from the Otolith Library into dialogue with Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien's Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, and Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris, 1871).

Across each event, Notes from the London Commune highlights moments from the pre-history of liberation of London. The programme envisions the political imagination of black, proletarian, queer radicalisms as the seed, the soil and the star of a London yet to arrive.

Application Details

To participate in the study sessions, please submit the following to otolitheventsbooking@gmail.com

Name and contact details.

A few sentences describing your motivations to attend. If you have a relevant research or practice background, then please include this, but personal affinity and enthusiasm are equally valuable.

A note on which sessions you are able to attend. We encourage applicants who are committed to participating across all or most.

Please send your application by Tuesday 21 April 2026. Successful applicants will be notified by Thursday 23 April 2026.

Session Schedule

Sunday 26 April, 12–4pm led by Lola Olufemi

An exploration of black feminist histories of communist struggle through reading, writing, and archival engagement.

Kristin Ross writes that the commune form is both the context and content of revolutions unfolding across history. The commune form assigns each person a role in the story of creation: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

This study session and workshop explores various black feminist contributions to communist struggle in the United Kingdom, thinking specifically about how engagement with the cultural production of revolutionary social movements can reanimate our sense of communist ethics in the present. Working together in a small group, participants will read closely, engage with archival material, share reflections, and take part in guided writing and discussion exercises.

Sunday 31 May, 12–4pm led by Gargi Bhattacharya

An encounter with Bhattacharya's research interests around revolutionary affect and racial capitalism, explored through materials from The Otolith Library-in-Residence. Further details to come.

Sunday 28 June 12–4pm led by Abeera Khan

An encounter with Khan's research interests around the Gay Black Group, explored through materials from The Otolith Library-in-Residence. Further details to come.

Sunday 26 July 12–4pm led by Mataio Austin Dean

An encounter with Austin Dean’s research interests around working-class music history and the geographies of colonialism, explored through materials from the Otolith Library-in-Residence. Further details to come.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power,and the co-editor of A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. Bhattacharya writes and teaches on issues of inequality, social justice and state practices.

Dr. Abeera Khan is a scholar of transnational feminist and queer of colour critique. Her work focuses on empires' mobilisations of gender and sexuality and the queer, feminist movements that emerge in confrontation and response. She is a Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality at SOAS, University of London.

Mataio Austin Dean is an artist, poet, musician and activist. Austin Dean’s practice is often centred around an interrogation of Marxism as a tool for emancipatory praxis. His work is concerned with the relationship between printmaking and orality, with works often consisting of etchings and other printed matter, along with singing, writing, reciting and speaking.

James Elsey is a writer and activist currently working towards a doctoral project at the London School of Film, Media and Design at the University of West London. Elsey works mostly with text, radio and events to unfurl thinking across the continuum between political urgencies and speculative circuitries.

The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. They create environments that nourish discourse and discussion, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision who are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, we draw a diverse range of audiences. The OC has curated seminal exhibitions and platforms on the work of figures such as Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher, Harun Farocki, Bahar Noorizadeh, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, to name but a few.

- Library-in-Residence
A Flock of Keen-eyed and Far-Seeing Magpies
The Otolith Library-in-Residence
16 Oct – 6 Sept
- Film
- Library-in-Residence
Library Transmission: Tunde's Film
Tunde Ikoli, Maggie Pinhorn, James Elsey and The Otolith Collective
Thursday 23 Apr, 6–8pm

TEST 1 Library Transmission: Notes from the London Commune

Related

A Flock of Keen-eyed and Far-Seeing Magpies

Library Transmission: Tunde's Film