- Single channel video (5 minutes, looped) - 2 posters - A4 Risograph print (edition of 200)
This project started as a video created for Everyday Political (2018), an exhibition at CGP Gallery in London curated by George Vasey featuring artists from the North East of England. (See above - photograph by Damian Griffiths).
Since then it has developed into a larger project, including a series of posters, exhibitions, workshops and public interventions. This page contains details of Part One of the project. Part Two can do be found here.
The project’s aim is to explore aspects of our lives which normally go unchallenged and to create the space and time to explore the systems and rules which govern them.
The video for Part One begins by posing the question ‘How do you contribute to society?’ It then unpicks this statement by challenging what we mean when we say "society" and what is understood as a "contribution" to it. A chorus of voices ask a series of questions as images and video clips float in and out of view. The questions may seem simple, but our answers will not be. The purpose of the video is to start a conversation that can explore and challenge the complicated aspects of everyday life.
The project was then developed for exhibition at Newcastle University which included doubled sided A4 risograph posters. The posters incorporated an interactive element by including boxes that participants could fill in to respond to several questions including: “How do you contribute to society?” and “What do you gain from society?”
The purpose of this line of questioning is not to measure the ways participants contribute and gain from society or by how much, but to question whether these things should be measured at all. Alongside these questions, there are short dictionary definitions of the words “contribute” and “gain”, but the definition of “society” was left open for the participant to define.
Participants were invited to respond to questions by fill in the boxes, and stick their posters up on the wall. See below for examples of responses that participants contributed to the exhibition.
Part Two of the project explores the dichotomy between work and play, and how we place value on these activities. Click here to view.
Installation photographs from exhibition at Newcastle University, August 2018
These are examples of participants responses to the questions.
Part One video includes the voices of Lydia Catterall, Debs Davies, Bruce Davies, Evelyn Davies, Francis Davies, Laurence Davies, Madeleine Kennedy and Hannah Marsden.