In 2019 Adam Lewis Jacob undertook a residency with Vivid Projects as part of WORK, a project to produce films exploring ideas and the realities of what ‘work’ means for the ways we live today, engaging directly with the experiences of contemporary working lives. The project was developed by Animate Projects and delivered in partnership with Vivid Projects, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Thrapston; Junction Arts, Chesterfield and QUAD, Derby.

People Meeting in a Room (2019, 18’, UK) reflects on collective film making and workers’ activism. Developed over a year, it connects the histories of activists and film makers associated with the Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre in the 1980s with a group of contemporary collaborators. The contributors interpret archival films and collective actions through animation, performance and conversation. 

I feel that, maybe, every time you reveal something, you might be shutting down something else; it has the potential to lessen the impact…. Everything that I feel about the film will be different in a year.
Adam Lewis Jacob

You can watch People Meeting in a Room, read some of the transcripts and find out more here.

Archive background

MELT

A penguin unplugs, slow smoke pours …MELT is an invocation through sound and light to tempt out the more esoteric and overlooked elements of the TURC archive. Using tropes from popular culture such as the music video, transitions and infomercials Adam Lewis Jacob and Susannah Stark in collaboration, will perform music and improvise with live visuals as a way to communicate with the TURC archive. Listeners are invited into a sincere yet surreal soundscape orchestrated by voice and distorted percussion.

Susannah Stark is an artist based in Glasgow, UK, whose work is an ongoing exploration of the female voice and the ways it is heard and felt across public spaces. She makes music for live performance and is currently working on her first EP. Her installation works treat sound and voice as sculptural tools for exploring strategies of resistance and healing from the capitalist separation of body and mind that is brought about through the influence of new technologies on her emotions and actions.

Melt is supported by the BFI Film Audience Network as part of Changing Times: Women’s Histories.