From the Mayday Rooms Website:In 2014 Gwyn Kirk deposited six organized boxes of personal papers at MayDay Rooms relating to her long and deep involvement with the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp that grew up in protest against the siting of America Cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common. Gwyn reflects: “The campaign spoke to me because it was creative and led by women. It pushed me to think about my responsibility for the state of the world: its systems of inequality, violence and greed”. Gwyn, who grew up in Britain, moved to the US in 1982 to work on a lawsuit that Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles brought against Reagan et al. In some ways this collection of materials figures as the background research to this lawsuit as well as to a book, ‘Greenham Women Are Everywhere’ (1983), that Gwyn co-authored with Alice Cook. Amongst the materials are press clippings, self-published newsletters, flyers, film, correspondence, fanzines and documentation of the international support the Women of Greenham received.
The breadth of material collected in Gwyn Kirk's Greenham archive is so extensive that any number of different themes could emerge as the starting point or a body of research practice. I became intrigued by the nature of the space, and its significance to the women camp and their actions as a global as well as 'site specific' movement. This small selection of items from the archive illustrates the importance of the mapping of the airbase and shows different organisations within the wider movement, conveying an expanded notion of the physical infrastructure against which the group was demonstrating by highlighting other sites such as Atomic Weapons Research establishment at nearby Aldermaston, as well as international movements. The image of fence persists in much of the material, and remains a symbolic element of the common now, with the designation of the nuclear silos and their surrounding fences, as scheduled ancient monuments. Through my interaction with the Greenham archive I hoped to engage with the politics of space with the work of Doreen Massey a useful starting point.
Whilst drawn to the physical location of Greenham Common, I do not discount the material within the collected archive boxes. Once opened they are impossible to disassociate from the the space of Greenham Common, indeed the material remains the Common persist both physically as in the copy of Radiator covered in 1980's Greenham mud or more ontologically as in the film poster parody of Thatcher and Reagan, the legacy of who's relationship persists in the neoliberal architecture of contemporary western society and culture. Equally it is important to recognise that the archive is of a certain time. Arguments and ideas that persisted were not universal truths, but rather specific to that particular moment and circumstance. As such, lines of enquires that emerge when examining such material can raise questions as to the nature of the archive not only historical referent, but rather as Zylinski suggests, a series of possibilities that may allow one to connect the past to the future.
A central theme in Massey's writing about space is multiplicity. In On Space she writes:
The multiplicity of the spatial is a precondition for the temporal: and the multiplicities of the two together can be a condition for the openeness of the future...If space is is genuinely a sphere of multiplicity, if it is a realm of multiple trajectories, then there will be multiplicities too of imaginations, theorisations, understandings, meanings. Any 'simultaneity' of stories-so-far will be a distinct simultaneity from a particular vantage point.
These multiple trajectories can be seen to emanate from Greenham Common in a variety of forms, both as a physical space and as an archive of material by an individual as part of a collective. These trajectories are also personal, my own relationship to the space of the Common, my relationship to the archive and personal recollection of the women’s peace movement serving to inform a vantage point through which my practice emerges.
The notion of these presumably still functional military infrastructure within the same context as nearby monuments such as Avebury, whilst restricting public access (signs indicate trespassers liable to prosecution), seems not only to serve as a means to protect a supposed 'heritage' site but also enshrine the memory of the fence as it was understood by the members of the peace camp. And whilst theoretically returned to the commons, these symbols of the past military 'occupation' of the space, such as the air traffic control tower and airplane skeleton used for fire practice nice a sense that the common in itself has been itself turned into a form of archive. Most notable, however, is the repurposing of the former US nuclear command centre as a secure data centre, perpetuating old paranoias of a perceived threat that resulted in the original placement of ground to air nuclear missiles on the site. As Tung-Hui Hu suggests in A Prehistory of the Cloud such militarised architectures within the cloud are...physical manifestations of a resurgence of sovereign power within the realm of data.
