ANCHOR PEOPLES Exhibition and Conversations

This event has ended.

Anchor Peoples emerges from a project which was part of an ESRC funded research programme entitled Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement. The term productive margins embodies an understanding that people and communities excluded from participation in the regulatory regimes that impact upon their daily lives have expertise, experience and creativity that can be politically productive. It was a programme that sought to co-produce research projects that mattered to the community partners that participated.

The two participating community organisations in South Wales were created by local people for the benefit of their local communities 20 and 40 years ago. The organisations developed ways of working that earned the trust of the local people they served. As community organisations anchored in the everyday lives of the people around them, they became the vehicle for the Welsh flagship regeneration (and latterly) anti-poverty programme, Communities First.

The project became witness to the disruption that was felt in these communities when Communities First - and the state funding that came with it - came to an end.

In response to this, Art station has developed a complementary and provocative artwork. These giant portraits stare, they laugh, they provoke and they speak. They are at once representations of individual, real people, but collectively they also represent the life force of ‘community’.

Each standing portrait has a QR code on its back which allows you to access recordings of individual member’s voices on your smartphone. Earphones provide an immersive walk-about soundtrack, the composition of which is derived directly from the data collected in this research.

Participants will be encouraged to respond to the particular issues the exhibition raises, whilst a more formal ‘conversation’ will focus on the politics of participation, regulation and marginalisation.