In 2019 Adam Lewis Jacob undertook a one year 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.

You can watch Adam’s film, read some of the transcripts and find out more here.

Adam looked at the materials and narratives within TURC (Trade Union Resource Centre) archive, which includes moving image materials relating to the activities of the labour movement and early collaborations between trade union campaigners and emerging community filmmakers, photographers, designers and publishers. Through print and video services, workers at the centre supported campaigns on wages and conditions, public sector privatisation, trade union and employment legislation, unemployment, and discrimination on grounds of sex, race and disability.

TURC had a strong commitment to campaigning against all forms of discrimination, providing access to new technology and improving communication and networks. Working towards a single screen film, Adam used the residency to consider the form, function, and motifs of the distributed, grassroots media campaigns of the trade union movement. Adam examined the visual languages through which we articulate rights, freedom and civil liberties. Repressed historical moments and over-looked gestures from the archive are given new attention; these unnoticed moments brought into focus and form the beginnings of a methodology for understanding the archive.

This starting approach uses theories of feedback, echo and cyclical cultural and political ideologies. He also looked at how the archive relates to contemporary theories and political organising. He has approached the archive, the individuals, characters and stories within it like a portal to another time where moments in history appear and reappear. The focus of the new work was to bring people and characters from the archive into contact with people working and dealing with the same issues today.

Alongside the development of a touring screen work, Adam lead discussions, organised screenings and produced workshops in collaboration with Vivid Projects, examining at the role of the camera and ways to performatively reinterpret the archival material. During 2019, this included curating short programmes of excerpts, photographs and cartoons from the archive to reveal common themes and issues that resonate with the most pressing societal issues we face today.

Archive background

The VIVID Archive holdings represent a unique collection of media work made by hundreds of artists, photographers, film makers, community, campaigning and cultural groups, largely in Birmingham and the West Midlands from 1984-2012. It contains analogue (film/photography/videos) and digital media, audio and print and can be broadly grouped under following themes: Arts and Community Video, Women’s rights, Young People, Employment, Housing Rights, Community Activism, Race. Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre (TURC) was established in 1982 and was one of a number of such centres across the UK. TURC focused on issues associated with working life in the 1980s and 1990s and this extended to unemployment, rights, issues of discrimination, privatisation, poverty, trade unionism, environment, health, international and cultural issues, media, youth, sexuality, gender, national and local government policies. In 1991, with the support of the Economic Development Unit of Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Arts, TURC Video joined with the community arts organisation Wide Angle and in 1992 was established as Birmingham Centre For Media Arts – which t/a ‘VIVID’ until closure in 2012/13. This rich example of community media and early media arts production is part of the archive spanning 1984-2012 inherited by Vivid Projects following the closure of VIVID, and is now under the stewardship of Vivid Projects and former VIVID staff Yasmeen Baig-Clifford and Marian Hall.

During the residency Adam also worked on 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.