Attention: Absorption
Tuesday 22 June - Thursday 15 July
An unfolding programme of research by artist Maybelle Peters for When We Worked at Raleigh: Contemporary Art Commission.
Following the factory clock, Nottingham Black Archive and Primary are releasing Maybelle Peters' research for the When We Worked at Raleigh: Contemporary Art Commission at the beginning and end of the office workday. Each set of research will be shared on the project page on Primary’s website every four days between Tuesday 22 June - Thursday 15 July, with the programme launching on Windrush Day. Primary and Peters' have co-curated an assortment of moving image, animation, still images, journal entries, sound clips, and text produced by the artist to be released sequentially. This programme shares key turning points from Peter’s research process in response to the rich oral history archive.
The material in Attention:Absorption reflects on the institutionalisation of systems, processes, and behaviours. For example, the artist has paid attention to the working conditions told by Raleigh workers, their own working patterns and relationship to productivity, or how black bodies navigated gendered and racialised spaces full of hostility and microaggression—“racism was consistent” [1]. These themes have come out discretely, obscurely or overtly through the variety of creative processes employed by the artist.
Maybelle has closely connected with the oral archive through a very personal experience of navigating her environments. Be that through identifying and memorising places by what trees or green space are in the area or navigating toxicity in former workplaces. As a turning point during the R&D, the artist began to veer toward drawing links between physical, environmental and workplace toxicity. She reflected on how toxic substances are absorbed by the trees on Lenton Boulevard outside the Howitt Building (former Raleigh Cycle Company main offices); and the corrosive permeability of a toxic working environment, insidious and subtle in nature, harming Black workers over time. Through some of her artistic experiments or studies such as Absorption, institutional racism and toxic workplace systems, processes, and behaviours could be seen as ‘emissions’. Therefore, visually interpreting these notions as both a substance and process that can permeate with potency, altering the skin and form of the animated body itself.
The conceptualisation of the programme began with thinking about the eight-hour workday, which was advocated by unions and labour movements during the Industrial Revolution. In 1914, Ford Motor Company implemented the eight-hour shift pattern in factories. Raleigh Industries adopted this system. During Episode 7, Winston Smellie recalls that work would “usually start at 7:30am on the dot…and the day would normally finish at 4:30pm” with strictly timed lunch and 10-15 minute breaks in between. ‘The bell will go, everybody will run to the canteen as quickly as they can…then the bell will go at the canteen…and you'll be back on the production line’. Office workers began their workday at 9am and finish at 5pm; and according to Bettina Wallace, ‘office staff never clocked in or clocked out, we just walked in and walked out…and didn’t do overtime’ [2]. There is a recognisable disparity of pace, sense of urgency, and expectation in labour between the office and factory workers. The curation of material during the residency will echo this disparity of speed, with leisurely weekend releases and strictly timed weekday releases.
The cyclic approach to curating the artists’ research was further influenced by the four-stage product life cycle in manufacturing industries, which comes after the R&D; and directly relates to Raleigh bikes being released in batches. You could view every batch of research as a sequence of fragments or snapshots, like a 16mm movie film frame, echoing the slow and generative approach to using analogue processes and a commissioning process that is paced and shifting in response to the artist. Most of the research is being released periodically in twos, emphasising the duality of the rotary, reciprocating, and oscillatory motions of mechanical devices such as bikes. The embodied process of going back-and-forth, to and fro, up and down as a method of relooking, paying attention, and absorbing, has been significant in influencing, like cause and effect, the artist and curators’ methodologies in tandem. Attention:Absorption publicises research and artistic-decision making as performance with a ‘curatorial frequency’ [3] and liveness as defined by the co-curator.
The research for Attention:Absorption has been categorised into the following areas of work that best describes the variation of approaches, working methodologies, and types of exploration that the artist undertook over nearly four months:
Archival
Artistic
Playful
Technical
Theoretical
As a precursor, see below an excerpt from a conversation between Jade and Maybelle that occurred early on in the process that marks a significant rationale to the emancipatory and resistive potential of animation and moving image to communicate Blackness as something not bounded and restricted.
Make sure to look back on the When We Worked at Raleigh: Contemporary Art Commission page sporadically to see how the programme unfolds over time.
Attention:Absorption is co-curated by Jade Foster and Maybelle Peters with support from Rebecca Beinart and Panya Banjoko.
When We Worked at Raleigh is a partnership project by Nottingham Black Archive and Primary documenting the experiences of members of the Windrush generation, and their descendants, who worked for Raleigh Industries from the 1950s to the 1980s. Over the course of the project, Nottingham Black Archive collected oral histories, documenting arrival and day-to-day experiences, and contributions to challenging racism and increasing workplace equality in one of Nottingham’s most famous industries.
Nottingham Black Archive, Primary, 2020. Episode 7: Winston Smellie. [podcast] When We Worked at Raleigh. Available at: <https://soundcloud.com/weareprimary/wwwar-ep7?in=weareprimary/sets/when-we-worked-at-raleigh> [Accessed 25 May 2021].
Nottingham Black Archive, Primary, 2020. Episode 1: Introduction & Bettina Wallace. [podcast] When We Worked at Raleigh. Available at:<https://soundcloud.com/weareprimary/wwwar-ep1?in=weareprimary/sets/when-we-worked-at-raleigh> [Accessed 25 May 2021].
'Curatorial frequency’ is a term Jade Foster coined that articulates the physicality of curatorial practice when working with time-based media and discursive programming; this includes energy exchanges, transmission, movement and pace (both literally and metaphorically). Curatorial frequency is a meaning-making and a decoding process. It is a process of trial and error, channelling, and an embodied practice that actively contributes to how art or knowledge is experienced and disseminated in a moment of liveness.