Making the zines
Emily from Stanley James Press, hand binds all of the zines. Buy the latest Forester zine here.
East Brighton R&D
In September 2017 I was awarded Arts Council funding to do some R&D in East Brighton. You can keep up to date with that project here. Here's the first post from the journal.
In September 2017 I was awarded Arts Council funding to do some R&D in East Brighton. You can keep up to date with that project here. Here's the first post from the journal.
This is the first post in what I hope will be many that will chart the progress of this project. I say this project, and you might be reading this thinking, 'what project'? Well, a bit of me is thinking that too. Here's the background.
Six years ago I started working on this project in my spare time. In a nutshell, I shadowed people as they worked, interviewing and photographing them as they went about their business. I turned the stories I documented into a website and some zines.
I think it was the beginning of me questioning a bunch of things, top of the list was, how do any of us end up doing the stuff we are doing? It was also the next stage of me questioning how I spend my time and how that might be affecting others. I was doing a lot of thinking about who I was helping and began to feel like I could be doing more closer to home. Wrapped up in all that were questions around money and class.
Yes, it's a bit of a jumble of thinking, so I decided to turn it into another project, and this website is the placeholder for this.
The image above is of a block of flats on the Bristol Estate in Brighton. I lived on the estate between 1974 and 1993 until I was 19. Lots have been said and written about this part of Brighton which includes Whitehawk and Manor Farm. When I was living there, I didn't have much of an idea that the area I grew up in was undesirable. It wasn't until my late teens and early twenties that I began to mix with more people from outside of the estate. I began to hear friends speak ill of the place I'd called home, parroting the kind of stories that stick about a council estate.
Search online for statistics about the area, and you will be sure to find a pretty negative portrayal of East Brighton (for simplicity sake, I will use this term to mean Bristol Estate, Manor Farm and Whitehawk). One of the questions that kept popping up for me, was, who are these statistics serving?
So this project is an attempt to do one thing, to find and document the stories behind the statistics. Over the next six months, I'm going to be working closely with four residents, supporting them in the process of documenting their lives. I have a bunch of ideas on how we might do that, but I'm not going to enforce a toolkit on the residents, I'd rather wait and see what emerges as we start spending time together.
This is an R&D project, and the main hypothesis I am testing is whether this kind of 'research' can have an impact, directly on the participants, in the wider community and potentially on government policy. If I can prove that it does, I'd like to expand the work to a much wider group of residents.
This is quite a challenge because its foundations lay in an art project, and this phase is supported by the Arts Council. Can art be taken seriously and inform policy? Where will my voice be in all of this, as 'the artist', how can we make sure we are transparent about how we are working and how we are picking the stories we share? (this journal will be one way we'll do that).
I will be working closely with Dr Simon Newitt, an experienced anthropologist used to working on social projects around inequality. I'm looking forward to working with Simon because he's done some brilliant work where he is based in Bristol. Most importantly I hope that our working together means the work will have that extra layer of gravitas, a flexible but rigorous methodology and that it will be taken seriously.
A recent Pecha Kucha talk about the next phase of Beyond Work
Shared at the Brighton Pecha Kucha on the 28th June 2017.
Latest Worker - Projects Development Manager, Ben Szobody
Ben's working life has been documented over 4 different visits and locations. The interview took place in April 2016 and covers his early years, education and transition from the southern state of South Carolina in the USA to Brighton.
“Ultimately going from homeschooling to university to a job was all one arc in my mind of independent-mindedness and sprinting after something I thought I could do. I think my parents let me go to university aged 15 because they saw how extremely independent minded I was and thought well ‘This is highly unusual, but if any kid can pull this off, it’s this one’. That’s not to say anything about my talents or my smarts, it’s just to say I was a right stubborn bull headed person, so as a result, for much of my life I’ve developed probably an extreme sense that I’m always the youngest in the room, I’ve always got to prove myself and I will.”
What's next for Beyond Work - The project for the 15 year old me
I am about to embark on a new phase of Beyond Work. I've discovered over the years of working on this project, that the most important question for me is 'how do we end up doing what we do?', and this comes back to something very personal and I think it's at the heart of this project for me.
It comes back to me wondering how I have come from a small post-war council estate on the outskirts of Brighton called Bristol Estate, leaving school with no qualifications and yet somehow I have managed to 'work' in fulfilling or interesting jobs for most of my life.
It makes me wonder what tiny moments, luck, conditions, people, chance, timing, skills I've had in my life that has brought me to this place in time. It makes me question the examples of work I grew up with that have maybe influenced the path I have taken.
How I have ended up here is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I have some hunches. A few things happened in my childhood that changed my path. I went from being a failing GCSE student to setting up radio stations, signing record deals, having music played by John Peel on Radio 1 and managing global music radio projects in the space of a few years.
It is possible those things would not have happened if a school teacher had not shown a real interest in supporting me outside of school. He mentored my twin brother and me, and this lead to us receiving a Princes Trust grant. There were a couple of other mentors along the way that helped, but that teacher was key.
So I want to create an intervention that would have helped the 15-year-old me.
The next phase of Beyond Work will see me going back to the place that I grew up to observe, photograph and unearth the needs of people there now. I want to see what it is like to be embarking in the world of work, to be looking for work or be in a job in a place that’s been unfairly stigmatised over the years. It turns out that if you are a man living in Whitehawk, your life expectancy drops by seven years compared to the average in Brighton. That needs to change.
Once I have done my observing and research, I am going to set up an alternative Job Centre. The alternative Job Centre will be very different to the one you find in the back alleys of the UK right now. It will take a long-term approach to work life instead of just being interested in getting people off benefits.
It will look to unearth latent talent in people and support them to make the most of that talent, and it will consider well-being, fulfilment, health, family life, dreams and other things outside of work.
It will look at all the new possibilities in the world of work that at the moment might be reserved for people with different backgrounds. And it will bring together a bunch of artists, mentors and teachers to inspire and make this happen.
I know it sounds slightly utopian at the moment, and it is early days for the project, but it is important for me to use the kind of work I do for good and to make some changes in areas that need it. Work and life are better when there is diversity, it opens up perspectives, challenges pre-conceived ideas and creates opportunities for amazing new things to happen.
This project is now being updated here.
The so called gig economy - What's it like to work for Deliveroo?
An experiment in autoethnography - we have given a disposable camera to a Deliveroo worker to see how they document their own working life. We'll share the results, good or bad, once we get the camera back.
Latest Worker - Graphic Designer, Printer and Bookbinder, Emily Macaulay
The latest worker is Emily Macaulay, Designer, and maker of mainly paper things. The zine will be available soon.
"I hate mornings, so when my alarm goes off I often just want five more minutes in bed. But after that I am a creature of habit, I work between 9-6, Monday to Friday. Most of the time I look forward to work, I run my own business so I should be enjoying it, if not I severely need to re-think things. My studio is in my house, so once I'm up I don't have to go far. I'm pretty disciplined. I've prided myself on that for years, but it's only been recently that I see it as a hang up from working in a shop for so many years. I run my own business so I shouldn't be so restricted. If it's sunny out I should be able to switch stuff around to be able to enjoy that, there is nothing stopping me. That is something to work on."
Anthropologist Margaret Mead on Work, Leisure, and Creativity
“On another South Sea island, Manus, I found in 1928 a people without clocks, without a calendar, with only the simply rhythm of a three-day market and the monthly rush of the fish over the reef, who nevertheless drove themselves from one unrecognized and unmarked year to the next, seeing feasts as harder work than days which had no feasting. To them the white man’s periodicity of hours to start work and hours to stop came as a blessed relief and the Christian Sabbath as a day of undreamed-of rest. They spoke with enthusiasm of the bells which punctuated the hard labor on European-owned plantations: “When the bell sounds at noon you can stop, and you don’t have to work again until the bell sounds to return to work.”
Read more at Brain Pickings
Beyond Work Radio - Show 4 - Mark Shayler
In this week's show, Curtis sits down with Mark Shayler at The House of St Barnabas in London to discuss his thoughts on how he's ended up doing what he's doing.
Find out more about Mark Shayler at www.thisisape.co.uk/
Intro sounds by www.simonsound.co.uk
An Italian saying about work
"Il lavoro nobilita l'uomo, ma lo rende simile alla bestia"
(Work makes people noble, but likens them to beasts).
Peter Fleming on work
"Our society is currently gripped by a pervasive ideology of work. It is continuously preached to us as the pinnacle of human virtue. If you’re not doing superhuman stints at the office then something is wrong with you. And don’t even mention the word unemployed … that’s blasphemy."
Read the full article
Working life on the railways
Brighton Station, 13th December 2016
If you use the trains in the South East of England, you are probably already aware of the issues with the service over the past year or so. Today see's both the drivers and guards striking, which means Southern Rail won't be operating any services.
I went up to Brighton Station to interview some people about how this situation is affecting their work and home lives. I'm looking for a few more people to talk to, so if you fancy being interviewed over the next two days, please get in touch. I'm interested in hearing stories about the human impact this is having on people's lives, and these stories will be used in a special edition of my radio show.
Beyond Work Radio - Show 3
Join Beyond Work founder Curtis James in conversation with workers, talking about working life. In show 3, Hannah
Beyond Work Radio - Show 2
Join Beyond Work founder Curtis James in conversation with workers, talking about working life. In show 2, Darius Norell talks about the opposite of work.
Beyond Work Radio - Show 1
Join Beyond Work founder Curtis James in conversation with workers, talking about working life. In show 1, James Box talks about whether it's important to love what we do for work.
Latest Worker - Santa Claus And Actor, John Prior
This months worker is John Prior, Actor and Santa Claus.
"My earliest memory of Santa Claus, I suppose is the same as every other child, you just get told it by your mother. I certainly wasn't taken to see Santa Claus because I was a baby in World War Two, visiting Santa wasn't something that you did, you know. I'm retired from my main business, I've been an actor in my time, I've been an Arts Council bureaucrat in my time and I could go on for a long time talking about what I'd been. But I'm a retired old man now and I do this at Christmas time." John Prior
Sounds of the story
I try to record sounds when I'm out photographing. Here's some sounds from my time at the rubbish depot in Halifax.
Thoughts from Andy Swann on taking part in Beyond Work
“I find the Beyond Work idea so interesting, as it really reaches the people behind the job titles. We’re all humans with different ideas, aspirations and obstacles to overcome.
Having now been a subject myself, it’s been fascinating to see how things I say and do look to the outside world through someone else’s lens. It’s a great challenge to my own self-image and perception, which is nothing but valuable!
Beyond Work is, in itself, amazing work.
I wonder what it might look like if Curtis became the subject of his own study at some point too! Something for the future?”
Take a look at Andy Swann's photo essay.
If this has inspired you to want to take part, here's all the information you need.