The site that crashed the Barbican

We have only just clocked the ‘Barbican Stories’ website which prompted the departure of the arts centre’s chief Sir Nicholas Kenyon.

This is from the site’s mission statement:

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 content is supposedly ‘written by the Barbican’s employees of colour and funded by white employees.’ But it does seem remarkable that a resignation should be panicked by stories that are both anonymous and untested by rules of evidence.

These are the times we live in.