Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper is concerned with workers’ stories and the typographical poetics of the eroding forces of time, materiality and the elements. The rationale for the study lies in a concern with art having political agency when it operates and is exhibited inside the communities of people whose lives are being interpreted. In such instances, the day-to-day community becomes the context of the artworks in preference to the arguably rarefied white walls of the art gallery. Sharp (2007), defines this approach to art generation and exhibition as ‘new genre public art’ arguing that it can operate as a means of ‘connecting’ a community. He suggests this is because it is a more participatory form of public art practice, wherein artists move to “engage with communities and existing social struggles, to develop collaboration and dialogue with residents” (p. 275). This paper will also consider the content of recorded interviews and the communication of the spoken word, moving image and typography, site recordings and the memories of what a place could be, to create a new form of audiovisual portraiture. These elements will work in synergy to form a collection of short film poems expressing the visual content to create portraits of the striking workers who worked in the now abandoned cool stores and freezing works at Patea, in Taranaki, New Zealand.