Professional Development Bursary 2018: ‘N scale’ art and activism project

After many years of working on ‘N scale’ and navigating the complex ethical questions of my relationship to the fire at the Kader factories in Bangkok that forms its core, I finally made the decision to travel to Thailand to visit the site where the factory once stood and to meet with a survivor of the fire.

I was fortunate to be able to receive AIDF funding to make this trip in order to do this further on-site research and to make new professional connections with curators, artists and others in the region.

It was really fascinating to travel to Thailand and to visit the site of the former factory which was located about an hour’s drive outside Bangkok. I had expected the area around the site to be quite industrial but in fact it was very much a place of mixed use: residential, small businesses, car dealers, shops and other retail outlets, and a number of impressive Buddhist temples. As we drove out of Bangkok it seemed that we never quite left urban development behind, it just changed in scale, so it was difficult in some ways to tell where the city ended and the new province of Nakhon Pathom began. Eventually however it became clear that we were in the neighbourhood of the factory because when Chai, the Thai driver who was helping me on this trip, would stop to ask for directions to the exact location of the fire, everyone he asked knew about it and remembered it. However when we finally got the site itself, I was surprised to see that a new ‘gated’ housing development had been built on the site where the factory buildings had stood. And it seemed that neither the security staff for the development, nor the people who now lived there, knew about the history of the site itself and the devastating fire that had taken place there.
There was no memorial at the site, nor any sign whatsoever that this event had ever taken place.
Subsequently I discovered that for Thai people, most of whom are practising Buddhists or quite superstitious around the dead, it would be very bad karma to live on the site where so many people have died, and most people would not want to do this. The housing developers however had not informed the new buyers of these houses of the site’s history, so they were effectively living on a grave site without knowing it.

It was a different story at the Thai Labour Museum in Bangkok, however. This small but wonderful museum, itself inaugurated in the same year that the Kader fire took place (1993) tells the history of labour and the caste system in Thailand. It is jam packed with material and crucially tells a story of labour and ‘working class’ activism and resistance, as well as one of exploitation and abuse. At the heart of the museum is a display devoted to the Kader factory fire. Alongside a model of the factory, complete with workers jumping from its windows, are actual artifacts gathered from the site; a worker’s shirt, the toys they made in the factory, a notebook and a page from a ledger. Seeing these things, and in particular the name KADER emblazoned on a grubby shirt in the display case, made the fire and its human cost, so much more tangible to me, perhaps even more so than going to the site itself.
Accompanying this display of objects were a number of photos from the site after the fire, and a video of a TV programme that had been made 6 years after the fire, detailing the harrowing events of the fire and its longer-term repercussions.

The programme also interviewed many of the families of victims and survivors themselves. One of the survivors interviewed was Rasamee Supa-em, who I was fortunate to have been able to meet and interview myself the day before. To meet with Rasamee was a great privilege, not least because she shared her story with me, but also because I was able to tell her about ‘N scale’ as a project and to ask her if she felt it was an appropriate way to remember the tragedy, at the same time as trying to locate the specificity of it in a broader context whose continued drives for profit and expansion mean that what happened at Kader 25 years ago, continues to happen to this day.

She said “Yes”. “Yes. Do it.”

So I am. Or I am continuing to try to realise this work here in the UK and hopefully, when it is ready, to take it back to Thailand itself.
The trip was an important endorsement for the project, and many of the aesthetic decisions already taken, but it also created a new and deeper demand on it that I now have to return to the project with. A new sense of its participants and its responsibilities. New connections that must somehow be brought alive in the context of its meditations on disconnection and irresponsibility.

I was very saddened, though not exactly surprised, to hear through AN’s news about the destruction of  Banu Cennetoğlu’s ‘The List’ in Liverpool last week.
Whatever happened to the work, and no one seems to know as yet, it seems clear that the force of appearance created by Cennetoğlu’s highly detailed act of naming (where she could) all the refugees who have died while seeking refuge in Europe since 1993 (34, 361 of them) along with the dreadful catalogue of information regarding each person’s age, reason for fleeing their respective countries, and manner of dying, was an appearance too much for some to deal with.

The work (both in its appearance on the hoardings in Liverpool  and in its disappearance) resonates hugely with the approach and intentions of ‘N scale’, even though ‘N scale’ ‘names’ a very different group of people who have been ‘disappeared’ – the factory workers of Asia, China and elsewhere. But the willfull disregard, the sense of ‘collateral damage’ that allows for such deaths to continue to take place is the same. And so it is important, I feel, that these deaths are not allowed to remain mere statistics and become a kind of superfluous humanity (as Hannah Arendt would put it) that we ‘get used to’ and somehow, even if inadvertently and unintentionally, come to accept.

Giving specificity to these deaths by naming each person, is an important step to holding back the push to superfluousness, and in the context of memorialisation it is also a very recognisable way to give presence and duration to the dead. And in doing so to provide a space in which the living congregate and witness the presence of these absences.

But it also makes me ask a question, which I have been asking myself many many times since starting the ‘N scale’ project; what then? How does the act of naming become a force of political mobilisation. Or how are the living who read these names enabled (through or beyond such an experience) to act in such a way that these lists stop growing. Or is the naming enough, at least when it comes to what it is that art can do?

I don’t know the answer. But I am trying, through ‘N scale’ to at least pursue the question actively, and with others.

For now, naming is a first step, and an important one.

‘The List’ can be read through a link to it from Chisenhale Gallery website – https://chisenhale.org.uk/exhibition/banu-cennetoglu/

The funding from this artists bursary has allowed myself and Andrew to undertake a number of trips around the UK to initiate conversations with potential supporters and/or producers of ‘N scale’.
We have been having these conversations over the last few months and it has been a really interesting process. For me, as an artist who has generally worked in gallery or site-specific contexts, this process of developing a live project with so many different components is very new. So too is the process of thinking through how to sustain a work which will grow and change over a long duration. Consequently each conversation we’ve had has opened up different aspects of the work and its potential, particularly in terms of how it might relate to certain spaces or communities in the places we’ve visited.

One of the things that has really struck me as a result of these visits and conversations – aside from the specific relationship they have to the development of ‘N scale’ – is the extraordinarly rich physical legacy, in terms of buildings and archives, that there is in this country from the Victorian and Industrial era. And with this, the amazing work that people are doing to both protect and remember the literal fabric of these histories, at the same time as they are trying to give them a renewed life and purpose in the present, for their own communities and for national and international visitors.

Places such as ‘The Mining Institute’ in Newcastle, which is currently working on exciting plans for redevelopment of the building and the institute under the management of their new charity ‘The Common Room’ led by Liz Mayes. https://mininginstitute.org.uk http://www.thecommonroom.org.uk

And ‘The Piece Hall’ in Halifax, an exquisite former cloth trading hall from the late 18th century. Following HLF and Claderdale funded redevelopment the hall reopened just under a year ago, and it is a stunning place to see. We met with Helen Moore who is the curator there and she has many exciting plans for its cultural activities over the coming years. https://www.thepiecehall.co.uk

And of course there are many more established museums, libraries civic and industrial buildings that are are already exploring the legacy and history of the industrial era and house fantastic collections of material related to it, many of which we have been visiting or hope to visit. Places such as the People’s History Museum, Manchester, the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, M Shed and Cargo development in Bristol, Preston Museum,  The Tetley, Leeds, and others.

Our intention with ‘N scale’ is that the physical and social specificity of these contexts in the present is linked with the present reality of industrial (in particular toy and textile industries) production in Asia, China and elsewhere.
These are not new links anyway as many of these former Industrial towns and cities are home to large Asian communities who moved to Britain because of skills they had in textile production.

‘N scale’ as a project wants to explore these histories in the context of the present, both locally and in relation to global industrial production and trade (particularly in relation to the toy and textile industries).
Consequently it has been very interesting and exciting to begin talking to many of these organisations about how the project might work with them; their buildings/spaces and communities.

As part of the bursary I recently made the first of two visits to ‘Lunatraktors’ studio in Margate to begin working further on the ‘Song of the Shirt’ with Clair Le Couteur.

Clair has taken Thomas Hood’s very long original poem and edited it into a shorter composition. They’ve devised a new version of Lindsay Cooper’s melody from 1980 and it now is quite a haunting and beautiful song. While I was in Margate Clair made a sketch recording of a solo rendition of the song. You can listen to it here on the project blogsite
https://n-scale.org/2018/05/16/may-2018/

Our plan is to meet again soon and for Clair and Carli – the other half of Lunatraktors – to develop harmonies for the song and to explore some clogging and percussion for it too.

As a visual artist I’ve always been a bit envious of musicians and singers – something about the immediacy and sociality of their craft  – so it’s really exciting to work again with musicians on one of my projects.

Also while in Margate Clair and I put together a proposal to the recent English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) bursary awards to be able to explore this collaboration further. It would be so exciting to take this simple but moving song and gradually expand it in the context of the ‘N scale’ performances; into something multivocal, as well as to see how it might be divided into shorter motifs that could be situated differently across the space and time of the performance.
Well, fingers crossed. We’ll see!

For now it is great to be able to take it this far.