Barbican Stories is home to a collection of first hand and witnessed accounts of discrimination at the Barbican Centre, written anonymously by current and former employees who have experienced racism. These experiences are not unique to the Barbican, because systemic racism is endemic in the arts & culture sector and in society.

The book exists to record and archive experiences that are typically suppressed, ignored, isolated from each other and explained away as anomalies. Writers are anonymous because it is still not safe for these experiences to be openly spoken about and characters in the stories are anonymised because this document is about looking at the Barbican through the lens of systemic and institutional racism and discrimination, not about individual persons. The book’s opening essay “Welcome to the Barbican” is published on the web browser extension Decolonial Hacker.

Discrimination happens across multiple vectors at the Barbican: race, gender, class, sexuality, socio economic background, and disability. This book critiques the same system that lent zero support to its European employees when Brexit was voted for in 2016, the system that does not supply adequate support for someone coming back to work from maternity leave and the system that uses exploitative zero hour contracts to minimise their responsibility as employers.

The design of Barbican Stories is based on a pre-existing company sanctioned policy handbook that was written collaboratively by Barbican staff in 2016 called ‘Everything you always wanted to know about the Barbican’. This handbook is given to all new employees upon joining the organisation and contains anecdotes to help them navigate the workplace. Though Barbican Stories is not company sanctioned, it has the potential to do the same thing.

This project began collecting stories in June 2020 and the book was published on 10 June 2021.

Barbican Stories was organised and written by People from the Global Majority and funded by our white colleagues and friends.

If you would like to make a book about your institution, please feel free to get in touch with us at storiesbarbican@protonmail.com or submit your questions HERE.