Primary Agents Of A Social World

DESCRIPTION

The film Primary Agents Of A Social World documents a participatory performance through which a new "community" is formed through its material relationships to coal. Travelling together by coach throughout one day, a group of participants discuss human transformations of coal and coal's mutual transformation of human, social life, following the coal-seam from north to south through South Wales. The work uses a "snowball" approach to identify participants, each of whom has a relationship to the specific coal sample – some 1.5 tons in weight – held in the Museum's stores. Beginning with the coal sample itself, the process follows the connections between mineral and human, human and other material things such as reports, photographs, and tools. Participants include the driver who transported the sample from the Coal Research Establishment in Cheltenham to Big Pit mining museum, the coal’s current conservator, former-colliers from the mine where the sample was extracted, environmental regeneration workers, members of miners' support groups during the 1984-5 strike, and curators of mining and geology collections. In establishing this ‘radically heterogenous network’ of ‘human and nonhuman things’ (Dolwick 2009), this film imagines novel social forms – new kinships and affinities – and will have resonance for those who ask “what constitutes "us" today, who "we" are today” (Critchley 1999, 56).

From Art Council Wales, (by Nicholas Thornton, Mererid Velios and Simon Pope):

Simon Pope Residency at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

In 2013 Simon Pope was awarded an Arts Council Wales residency at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. The residency gave Pope the opportunity to develop lines of enquiry across the Museum’s diverse sites and collections, engaging with the work and interests of a wide range of Museum staff. His interest in how an artwork can actually produce a “community” rather than connecting to or targeting one that already exists, led him to search for an artefact in the collection that would connect with other artefacts and people. “I went to the collection with a couple of questions in particular: which artefact in the collection would suggest something radically Other, furthest away from being a human,animate, living thing; and which would be most likely to be richly-connected to other people and things.”

The focus of the residency became a large 1,300kg lump of coal extracted from the Deep Navigation Colliery in 1955. Pope researched the history of the specimen: its extraction from the coal seam at Treharris, the time it spent at the Coal Research Establishment at Stoke Orchard near Bath, and its subsequent journey back to Wales and entry into the Museum’s collections. These investigations involved talking to Museum staff at different sites including National Museum Cardiff, Big Pit and the National Collections Centre.

The result was the creation of a network of people centred around the coal that soon ‘snowballed’ to include a wider community of former miners, engineers, geologists, doctors, social-activists and academics. “The residency and the Primary Agents film were therefore ways for me to work out how a ‘participatory’ art practice could itself generate a community or public, starting from one artefact and tracing its material relations to all these other things, forming a diverse, more-than-human ‘community.’”

Through sustaining a conversation with the members of this community, establishing trust and an understanding of his project, Pope was able to produce a new film Primary Agents of a Social World (2014). The film captures a series of conversations on a bus journey that followed the coal-seam from Blaenavon to Cardiff, stopping at various points along the way to recruit new participants from the network. The film culminates with the group encountering the specimen of coal in the Museum’s large-object store at the National Collections Centre. Through documenting these conversations and capturing the connections between the specific coal specimen and those in the network, the film encourages us to explore the way coal is transformed by humans, and the way human lives have been transformed by coal.

As well as the rewards from building new relationships, there are of course risks in working in a participatory way: projects are dependent on the qualities of the relationships formed; a project may depend on someone’s word for its success, that they turn up at the right place and time to do whatever is asked of them. “Primary Agents was at risk in this way, with the performance and film-shoot taking place on one day, with all participants trusting that each would play their part. Working with the AC/NMW was reassuring in this respect, with not only a budget underpinning the project which allowed me to have made many repeat-visits to participants in order to ensure their trust in the project, but also in day-to-day coordination of the production and exhibition of the work.”

“I hope that the contribution made by my residency is the way in which to understand ‘community’ as something produced through a specific engagement with an artefact, rather than something which exists ‘out there somewhere’ and which can therefore be ‘targeted’. Some of the participants in my project were museum employees such as conservators or curators of the coal sample, for example; equally, there were people who never engage with the museum yet have an equally intense relationship with the coal sample...Being able to trace specific relationships that an artefact from the collection has over its life meant that people who have immense knowledge and experience across many disciplines and contexts could contribute...The project proved, I think, that ‘publics’ for the collection can be hugely diverse and that the most-related people (and things for that matter) can be drawn from beyond the kinds of ‘audience’ that an institution would ordinarily imagine for itself.”

Primary Agents of a Social World was first shown at National Museum Cardiff, 20 June – 7 September 2014. The film was projected in an installation featuring the Deep Navigation coal specimen. Extracted from the store and placed on public display, the coal acted as instigator and silent witness to the events and conversations unfolding on the screen, and by extension the wider workings of the Museum uncovered through the residency.