Working Class fantastic Places.

 

Do you remember the park you played in as a child? A place of magic and wonder, where monsters and fairies could stalk or dance – children’s imaginations run wild and the concrete half built, rusting slide, with mad stray dogs off the leash – were never forefront in our memories. The pubs, and clubs in our communities where we walked past looking in straining to know what happened behind those doors the music, the singing, the dancing and the sweet smells, the disco lights, the happy faces that staggered and danced out into the street or the chip shop. The seaside caravan parks the highlight of any year, sleeping in bunk beds for the first time, or the smell of the damp floral sofa which was also to our amazement a bed. Looking out the window at the rain lashing down in August . Even our homes and communities places of love and belonging where family and people like us lived – familiar faces in the shops, knowing the long and complicated histories of the families who live there, being let in to the secrets of the community, knowing what business to speak and what business to hold to yourselves – these are working class fantastic spaces – we don’t see the rubbish or the badly built concrete structures, we don’t know yet that cocks on a stick from Skegness, Southend, or Blackpool are tacky, in bad taste or kitsch. 

We know our communities, our council estates can appear to be dodgy and scruffy through what is said about them and us  - from people who have never lived in them, we know they are edgy and gritty from the endless high fashion photoshoots, and album covers that feature but not us - we are not invited into  those stylised images. We know the places where we go on holiday, the pubs and clubs our families and communities drink in are ‘interesting liminal spaces’ from the art galleries, the high end and famous photographer who uses our places as their cool/edgy/interesting backdrops for their lens and interpretation they get to say whatever they need or want to say about us – the working class – whether that is ‘divided Britain’ or ‘Broken Britain’ or tasteless stupid spaces that can be photographed/filmed or imagined as a profound show/book/project take your pick as long as the lens and the viewpoint is from afar – from a class above. 

This project – our project is an antidote to that far away lens that visits for an hour or a day or a week and makes judgement, leaving us out, to hire models to replace us –sometimes we are invited their lens on our lives they style working class in their own context in a shit hole, in a dangerous place, or with a backdrop of the absurd – they don’t know or see these places as we do – 

All of us in the working class collective love Martin Parr's work - his take on working class Bank Holidays at the seaside was ground breaking he captured some of what and who we are as working class people - but not all - its beyond time that working class people tell the stories, talk about our fantastic own spaces and show them how we know them - not covered in rubbish or edged out by heavy machinery - but as marvellous spaces full of colour, and wonder.  

Working Class fantastic spaces takes the stories, and the places of working class people as they see them, know them, or remember them – we will work with artists to recreate those spaces with our working class storytellers from their lens. These places might be crap – but not to us. 

Working class fantastic spaces – could be an interactive multi-media show, it could be a book – the boundaries will be set and shaped by the artists and the storytellers. It will challenge the narratives about the working class and our places, our communities and who we are. 

I know how the middle class like a diametric a push and pull factor to their art and narratives especially when it concerns their view of the working class – a cheeky critique of the Middle Class Mediocreness of Britain could be slid in somewhere – The Poultry aisle in Waitrose bland and washed out green and flesh colours, or the yummy mummy café’s crammed full of Boogaboo pushchairs and frenzied mothers outdoing each other on how non- descript the food they feed their children is.