After Industry is a creative audio-visual work that uses documentary footage of the steelworks interior overlaid with narrative about its operations.
Displayed as part of a group exhibition involving creative responses to five sites of immigrant labour - Migrant Camps, Snowy Hydro, Port Kembla Steelworks, Woomera, Melbourne Suburbs.
Research statement
Background
Immigration centres and industries that employed refugee and immigrant labour in the post war period can be thought of as nodes in an interdependent spatial and transnational labour network. The physical sites and projects featured in this exhibition convey this network, its nodal points and inter-cultural social interactions through a study of Migrant Camps, Snowy hydro-electric power, Woomera (defence) and raw- material production Port Kembla Steelworks, trans-Asian suburbanisation in Melbourne. ARC DPDP190101531 Architecture and Industry: Immigrants' contribution to nation-building, 1945-1979.
Contribution
After Industry is an audio-visual creation- 10mins. Film footage of the interior operations of the steelworks is rare. This film compiles selections of documentation of a tour organised with 20 past workers at the Port Kembla Steelworks (2021). The creative process explores ways to interrupt a static and abstracted visual image through a tension between the dominating machinic noise and the human narrative. A visual focus on actual manufacturing operations – a moving image – was set against the retrospective narrative of what was occurring. It aims to extract immigrant subjectivity from its immersion within the factory towards an orator/authorial position.
Significance
This work participates and contributes to filmic and art practices exploring irreconcilable tensions between what we see and what we know through which humans try to make sense of their world. It draws on Magritte’s early ideas of the image and the word, but further generating accumulative complexity of noise/word/narrative and image/manufacturing/ environment. Shown at the Museo Italiano - national and international venue. Reviewed two international journals (2023), + academic review; Rete Italia (Radio linked to Il Globo newspaper - Australia). Conference paper 2022; Chapter 2023 - see attachments.
Publication classification
JR1 Recorded/Rendered Creative Works – Film/Video
Extent
1 URL link to the MP4 file - please note we are trying to upload
4 images taken on the tour
1 pdf of the language-text component