pause-and-affect-residencie-blog

[pause-and-affect-residencie-blog]

A short and unfinished narrative herstory: bodies of water by Ria Hartley

I’m taking residence on the 5th floor of the Islington Mill, formerly a cotton mill converted into an independent arts centre almost 20 years ago. The Mill as it stands today was founded by Bill Campbell in 2000. The ground floor to the 4th floor is occupied by a wide variety of artists, musicians, promoters and small businesses. The 5th floor of Islington Mill is empty and derelict, and yet to be developed. Along with the attic, it is the only floor that is still in the original state it was founded in. Opposite the Mill is St Philips Cof E Primary School. The Islington Mill is situated in Salford, where I live. Salford is the city my Mother, Grandmother and Great Grandmother were born. My known maternal line originates back 3 generations, but possibly longer. I am exploring personal herstories and the transformation of positioning in just three generations of women, leading to me, the fourth generation.

My grandmother Dorothy Barton worked as a seamstress in Salford from age 14 and her five daughters, including my mother, were taught to sew in preparation for this work. I do not know if my great-grandmother worked in the Mills prior, but the sewing factories were the predecessors of the cotton Mill industry. Due to class and economy shifts during the 70s and 80s, my mother didn’t teach me how to sew and she never worked in the industry. I have never really spoken to my mother about this, but I sensed that the obligation to take on this role in life and work was not wanted for my generation. I grew up watching but never being taught, even when I asked. However I did leave school at 16 and I did work in factories for some years, as it was the ‘done thing’ as my maternal family would say. There are many makers in the Islington Mill who sew and teach sewing by choice. I am questioning the tensions between the herstory of the workers in the Mill and the chosen skills of the artists who inhabit this site today. And the tensions within my own body in my class shifts through becoming an artist, and what it means for me to have this privileged position.  

As I occupy the fifth floor, inspired by research into the local cotton industry and machinery, I am currently developing an audio installation and performance for camera. In this first week I have been working with water, focusing on the following:

The River Irwell is said to be the strength of the industrial revolution and the driving force behind the industry in Salford. Yet, this industry polluted the river very badly, to the point that all life in the river ceased to exist. Before the industry, the river was the main source of drinking water for Manchester and Lancashire. The Irwell runs between Salford and Manchester. Manchester is affectionately known as a rainy city. Many of the Mills in this area were built on the river, yet all the dye’s and toxins and wastes were given to the river. The body of water was contaminated and abused. There was no real concern for the life of the river - or the people working and living by the river in the Mills. Working class people were disposable, as was the river. The drive for the industry was so mighty, that it meant that everything else suffered. Thousands of people lost their lives to these buildings including children as young as four. The machinery was extremely dangerous and the cause of many fatalities, the work environments caused sickness. Nearby Islington Mill there is a small park which was once a cemetery for the Irwell street chapel. There is a small plaque in the park which reads ‘Here is the burial place of some 17000 citizens and children who died 1829 - 1858’, nobody is named.

The river Irwell runs through Agecroft cemetery where my Grandmother Dorothy Barton is buried, close by to her Mother. I live in social housing in a high rise by the Irwell, my building is named after a famous Salford writer and dramatist, Shelagh Delaney, who is most famously known for her play, A Taste of Honey, which addresses issues surrounding, class, race, gender and sexual orientation in mid-twentieth-century Britain. I have been walking to the cemetery via the river route. The Islington Mill, my home and the cemetery are situated within a minefield of new developments where Salfords present population are experiencing the impact of gentrification. Around 1844, Friedrich Engels spent time in Salford studying British working class. They described Salford as "really one large working-class quarter ... [a] very unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated district”, in their book The Condition of the Working Class in England. I remember asking my Grandma when I was about 16 years old if we had always been poor. She said yes. I didn’t really link my maternal history at the time since the entire family had left Salford in the early 80s as a result of an economic depression. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are now all located in Salford Quays. There is a possibility Salford Quays will become the new centre of the city. I arrived back in Salford in December 2016 and had a mental breakdown. I wasn’t quite sure why I returned, but most of my family had returned over the last decade. My maternal family members have many complex mental and physical health conditions. I have always thought this has been the result of lives of hardship and traumatic histories. Some life is returning to the river Irwell.

A chronological herstory of Islington Mill, the Cotton Industry, Education reform and my family

Islington Mill was originally built for cotton spinning in 1823 by the self-taught Leeds born architect David Bellhouse. A partial collapse of the building occurred and when it was rebuilt additional structures were added (engine room/stables).

In 1880 it was compulsory for children to be in school between the ages of 5 and 10.

In 1893 the school leaving age was 11.

In the 1900’s the Mill was used for the process of doubling cotton.

In 1918 it because compulsory for children to be in full-time education until the age of 14.

The First World War 1914 - 1918, might have been an instigator for the end of the textile industry.

My Nan, Dorothy Barton was born in 1932 in Salford.

In 1933, Japan introduces 24-hour cotton production and becomes the world's biggest cotton manufacturer.

The Second World War 1939 – 1945 brought about a short reprieve when the mills were enlisted to make uniforms and parachutes. Mill owners were forced to rally up new recruits.

In 1944, the compulsory leaving age was raised to 15.

By 1945 my Nan went into her first job in a sewing factory, from 18 she had 6 children and started sewing for the family, teaching her children the skill in preparation for the industry.

In 1948 Empire Windrush brings West Indian immigrants to the UK.

In the 1950’s there was a wave of migrant workforce in from the Indian subcontinent, who moved to Lancashire for work. Mills then introduced the night shift to the working routine, now working around the clock.

By 1958, the country who had given birth to the textile industry became an importer of cotton cloth. The cotton industry act of 1959, intended to help modernise and amalgamate the industry but mill closures continued throughout Lancashire and were failing to compete with foreign competition.

In 1961 my mother was born in Salford.

In 1966 the eldest sibling leaves school to work in the factory.

1967 aunt leaves school to work in the factory, then another aunt and uncle.

During the 60’s and 70’s the mills were closed at a rate of almost one a week.

In 1972 the education act leaving age was raised to 16.

The two youngest siblings finished school at 16 and didn’t go to work in the factory.

Everyone in my family left the North over the 1970’s and 1980s, and settled in the Midlands, as there was more work there in that time. And by the 1980’s the textile industry of the North West had vanished and only empty factories were left as a legacy of an industry that was once the pride of Britain.

I was born in 1983. And left school at 16 and went to work in the factories.

[pause-and-affect-residencie-blog]

Why is She Falling by Máiréad Delaney

In two weeks, I will be travelling to the west of Ireland to a small building called The Embers, which my aunt and her mother once ran as a pub. The Embers has stood empty for more than ten years. When I was thirteen, I lived in the Embers with my aunt. She was still mourning the death of her mother. She would climb the stairs to a big room at the back of the house and sift through the contents of the sea chests there. Her mother brought these chests back and forth on the ship every summer.

I was outside the day she put her legs through the floor. The building has woodworm. The floor gave out under her weight. She punched down through and just as quickly ripped herself back up. When I came home I could see through the kitchen ceiling.

I’ve just told my mother I want to work with the hole.

I want to use the hole in the ceiling. The one my aunt fell through.

What? What hole? She never made a hole in the ceiling.  

She did, I was there the day it happened.

Well, yes. We’ve fixed it now. There isn’t any hole. (1)

In April 2017, my grandmother died of complications from a fall which broke her pelvis. When she died, I was in a plane crossing the Atlantic. For five years, I have been working with women whose bodies were split, the pelvis the point of impact.

This breaking has a name, it is a pro-life surgical intervention called symphysiotomy. Revived in Ireland in the 1940‘s and practiced through the 1990’s, symphysiotomy is a brutal procedure, primarily performed during childbirth. The bones of the pelvis are cut with a saw until the pelvis unhinges. It is left broken, open. This experiment aimed to facilitate and encourage subsequent births. The surgeries were implemented systematically, according to a natalist moral agenda in nationalist, Catholic, decolonizing Ireland. Thousands of women underwent this procedure, their very skeletal structure altered for the building of a new nation. The surgery was often performed without warning, explanation, or medical consent. The history of this surgery is ‘unwritten.’ Attaining medical records is an arduous and often fruitless pursuit for survivors.(2)

One woman sustained such nerve damage that the nerves running to the lower half of her body would flicker out, unpredictably. She fell, over and over, as her legs lost their ties to her brain. She spoke of visiting doctors again and again without result. Finally, her husband came with her, asking the doctor, “Why is she falling?”

The doctor, half-lowering his voice and speaking to the man, responded, “Don’t you know women? Imagination.”(3)

Why is she falling?

Don’t you know women?

Imagination

Her falls were after the break. My grandmother broke as she fell. She fell on a Sunday in April and hours ahead in Ireland, on Sunday night, I was breaking branches with my own body. She died on Monday. I was in a plane over the ocean. There was time and distance in between. Miles of conduit line the floor of the ocean. I think about the darkness inside the body punctuated by flickering nerves, this inner electricity like lights seen from a great height. Then the outage, like the velvet surface of the night and black-topped, unplumbable water. I think of sparks inside the dark of a broken body, a blinding light at the split-second of the break, the pop of new space created by the punch-crack of breaking.

  Silence met the falling woman, the impact of hitting the ground was swept away by doctors words. I am looking at the pressure which causes the ‘break,’ and then the silencing of both afterwards. This is a silence that contains pressure, a silence capable of breaking bones. I make in an effort to speak to that silence.

If I were to qualify the silence I attempt to speak to, I would say it is a chasm made by the lack of justice. It is a deflecting shield made by the denial of recognition. If this justice is denied perpetually, silence becomes at once a cliff-face and sink-hole of absurdity. Can we talk back to silence when the silence is a swallowing, when it is an erosion of the ground underfoot, when it comes behind the teeth to frost-bite all movement of the tongue? This kind of silence is active. Never absence, this silence opens a hole where an accountable party ought to stand.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

The world would split open

Muriel Rukeyser (4)

Yet, I have found, the world does not split open. At large, there is a lack of rupture, a lack of visible evidence of violation, no break, no radical discontinuity. Instead, life goes on. Violence coagulates with grief and time and it bloats, overflows. (5)

If an event goes unrecognized or is delegitimized, the suppression of it produces a pressure. Under that pressure, is not as though the event never occurred but rather that it never ends. It is just there, with that pressure-- that grappling constitutes our ‘real.’

I am not interested in reverse-engineering the event, in creating a rupture to access ‘original’ violence. It is plain that such methods do not have the effect Rukeyser prophesied, not in this present world, where the forces of silence police actively and reseal efficiently.

I am interested in making the conditions of our present existence clear. (6) I came to performance as a practice of embodied speech acts, gestures which attempt a simultaneous holding-at bay of crushing violence and an affective entrance into its structure of feeling. I undertake these actions so that we might come to collective sensed knowledge of violent realities and recognize the effects of this violence and our grief over time.

Staking the unthinkable against the everyday charges the every day with what it contains. This ‘charge’ is both innervation, a frisson of electricity, and the levelling of a demand for accountability.

Staking the unthinkable against the everyday charges the every day with what it contains. The everyday ‘contains’ the unthinkable, it is both saturated by it and yet the unthinkable is imprisoned, unrepresented.

Yet amidst the lack of representation, excess blossoms. Under strata, a bruise expands, color blooms. Fragments surface.

I site my questions now in the undertow of silence, on the tender, treacherous ground which threatens submersion, where the air is thin, where our surroundings are desaturated and heightened at once. I imagine this space as between contained experience and the forces of containment. It refers to contained experience, but it does not merely contain and batter its occupant with the forces of that containment. Up against the impenetrable, the unheeding-hard, the faceless, A branch breaks. A pop, a gasp, a gap, a little pocket of space. The body gives.

In the making of work, I work small un-makings. I have broken, cut, compressed, bitten. I do not see these gestures as destructive, rather they apply pressure to pressure. They speak to silence. Perhaps these specificities of sensation might reach such a pitch of intensity that we all hear the pressurized hiss or see the fissured surface. Tongue against metal, a cracked branch. These are my own answers to silence.

These women, breaking, suspended in shuddering silence, continue to fall.

1. My mother, phone conversation with author, November 2, 2018.

2. Marie O’Connor, Bodily Harm: Symphysiotomy and Pubiotomy in Ireland 1944-92, (Dublin: Johnswood Press, 2011)

3. Sheridan, Patricia (survivor of symphysiotomy). Interview with Mairead Delaney. Dublin, October 26, 2015.

4. Muriel Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz,” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman, Anne F. Herzog, and Jan Heller. Levi (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 460.

5. Andrea Long Chu (2017) Study in blue: trauma, affect, event, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory,27:3, 301-315, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2017.1365440

6."The conviction that everything that happens of earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden that our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality — whatever it may be…This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”

 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 2