The special ‘Hurrier’ episode of ‘In Process’ ‘In Process’ radio show hosted by fantastic sound artist Lou Barnell and with the Feminist Library, went live on 13th January.
You can listen to the podcast from here:
This episode is a conversation about Class, Art and Bodies, which was mainly recorded at The Feminist Library in December with great contributions from: Michelle Deignan, Sonya Dyer, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Aqui Thami, Charlotte Squire, Frances Hatherley, and recent graduates from Middlesex Fine Art: Chloe Carrter, Polly Murphy, Alice O’Donnell, a performance by Chloe and sonic responses form the artists.
The Feminist Libary event developed from collaborations on ‘The Hurrier’
You can also listen to past episodes from this great podcast series on the link above. ’In Process’ started as a series of cathartic conversations with disabled and non-disabled womxn and non-binary artists who are working to reimagine the future of their field on the link above – and tune in for future live shows at: Repeater-radio.com
Thanks to all involved! especially to Lou as programme host Minna, Maria and the Feminist Library for hosting event.
EVENT: Hurriers: Poor on the Roll, a conversation about class, art and bodies. Saturday, 11th December, 2-5pm: Conversation: at The Feminist Library:
This event will now take place on ZOOM owing to new Covid 19 restrictions.
There are also opportunities to speak to artists about the project and also contribute drawings and writings, at APT and Five Years Galleries in December – see‘Hurriers: Poor on the Roll’ page on this website.
The Hurrier draws on the past to speak to the future: to set up intergenerational conversations about class, labour and sexuality in the present. Wherever possible as the work is shown, the artists involved will set up safe and open spaces to talk and share. Please email Anne at a.robinson@mdx.ac.uk if you are interested in connecting with this! We recently had a great ‘instagram takeover’ with WCCD.
Through the film and the affect of what we can see and hear, the voices of the unrecorded who have something to say now, may be heard. From out of the dark, under the ground, just out of sight, they can join in our conversations about how we are still hated vilified mocked and excluded. There is much to talk about. This new work uses speculation, queering and art practice to think about class as we feel it now: class experienced and manifest in our bodies: ecstatic desiring bodies and bodies hurt from overwork.
Today ‘working class woman’ means Shameless, TOWIE or Benefits Street… the underserving, idle poor are always with us and could easily get off the dole and get a robot job: ‘You don’t get reported or written up by managers. You get written up by an algorithm…’ (19)
Call and response.
The plan is to allow strategies for conversational exchange to emerge from collaboration during the making of the work itself and for any given setting, to facilitate access from communities of working class women and nonbinary people and to remain open to new exchanges.
Some initial parameters for conversations may build on ideas and writings from the work of:
Frances Hatherley who is directly involved in the project and whose concept of the ‘anti-pygmallion’ has been a profound influence, writes:
written-off images of stigmatised working-class women can offer us new experiences of rich recognition of our shared humanity, and provoke sublime encounters full of the exhilaration of rebellion.
(27)
Beverley Skeggs:
…a great deal of energy goes into inscribing, depicting, categorising and degrading the working classes as enemy.
…the access to the resources to make the self is not equally available.
(20)
bell hooks:
broader perspectives can only emerge as we examine the personal that is political
(21)
Françoise Verges:
Cleaning/caring female workers of color are politicizing their field, showing how and why they are performing indispensable work. They push us to go further in our analysis of that work.
(22)
David Graeber:
…the incessant demonisation directed at the poor by those who benefit from their caring labour…
…the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
(23, 32)
Valerie Walkerdine:
It is the ability of this pain to transmit across generations which also tells quite a different story of class transformations and upward mobility..
(24)
Rhian E. Jones:
The female chav fits into narratives of slut-shaming and taste-policing … the Victorian and Edwardian spectre of working class women, ..’with their hazardous lack of morality, taste and discrimination and their unregulated, untrammelled sexuality…
(25)
Audre Lorde:
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
(33)
Walter Benjamin:
it is more arduous to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned
(34)
Artists across several fields have informed my thinking on class, bodies, labour and sexuality, so I am especially indebted to the intense creative thinking of: Kae Tempest, Lois Weaver, Petra Bauer and Andrea Luka Zimmerman (26)
Servant bells you will not hear unless I sound them for you.
Robinson (28)
The paradox of working class as ‘identity’ is that working class is the thing we must stop being. Stop being in order to progress, to be healed, to have comfort – maybe that we should learn to be stingy, blinkered, enclosed. You want me to give up the generosity, decency, humour, cultural agility and honesty of my self, my past, my people, to misrecognise the trauma of financial abuse and class hatred and come into your parlour to play games. But the price of entry is that we learn to despise our former being. And then because we have learned well, you will not see us.
Robinson (31)
(29)
Hurrier 