Thanks to MetalPeterborough for providing and hosting a dinner for potential participants in the work of Creative Interruptions in eastern England on 22nd May 2017. Among the twenty-three people attending were Peterborough-based artists Chris Porsz, who provided inspiration through a presentation from his Reunions project, Jay Gearing of Paper Rhino films, and photographer Hannah Saunders, as well as Jabeen Shafee, city resident and member of Creative Interruptions International Advisory Group. One aim of the evening was to bring people who might participate in the film work being developed in this Creative Interruptions research strand, with locally-based artists. The film work will focus on those who have spent part of their working lives employed in Eastern England’s food factories, packhouses and retail distribution centres. This participatory approach is intended to involve the people who will appear in the films as much as possible in the creative process. This involves working together to explore people’s creativity in making the intensive work in the UK’s food and warehouse sectors manageable, or at least bearable, for example through humour or forming friendships across ethnic or national social boundaries. At the same time, taken together, the films will develop a bottom-up critique of the degradation of employment conditions in these sectors. Importantly, when employers seek workers, what they get are people. Celebrating this, the films will also draw attention to the everyday creativity of factory and warehouse workers outside the workplace, which often goes unnoticed or is undervalued in class-based notions of what counts as culture.
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