not only the earth we share
Who Makes The City
The Production of Daily Life
Project Information
earth we share
Golden Thread 25.04.21 - 29.05.21not only the earth we share is project by Sol Archer that examines the past, present, and future of a small neighbourhood in Belfast called Sailortown.
not only the earth we share is a film and exhibition work, produced over multiple years of collaboration with superpositioned communities of Sailortown, Belfast, Northern Ireland, first exhibited at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast in 2021 in collaboration with Household CIC.
Sailortown was a working class neighbourhood housing 5-10,000 families which was demolished in the 1960s to construct an as-yet unfinished motorway interchange. Since then it has stood as an iconic keystone in working-class identity of Belfast and is the axis around which cultural identity of former residents and their families revolves. Since 2008 a small social housing block has nestled between parking lots, motorways, and the docks, and is now re-experienced the 1960s exclusion from city planning and development in ongoing encounters with the same unfinished road being expanded, property speculation enveloping them, and lack of infrastructure isolating them.
The film is a construction of acts of producing community, the function of play in mediating identity and trauma, and the production of cultural commons in opposition to the extractive process of development and enclosure. Through film workshops with children, docker poetry, song, prayer as protest, and the structuring of time through ritual, procession, and elective activities, it is an elevation of the cultural commons as an urban quality both under continual threat from and in continual opposition to the imperial project of property development
Sailortown was a traditional Belfast neighbourhood which, until it was demolished in the 1970s, housed thousands of families who worked in maritime trade, factories, the docks, and the harbour. Sailortown is still physically home to a much smaller community of people today, including residents living in apartments built in the early 90’s and 00s, and is spiritually home to those who used to inhabit its dense terraced streets.
Since 2018, at the invitation of Household, Sol Archer spent time with communities intersecting, identifying, or operating in Sailortown and the surrounding area: elderly former residents, new migrant communities, local grassroots organisations, and children and young people living in local social housing. His resulting residency project, The production of daily life, positions the neighbourhood as a microcosm where histories are memorialised and (re-)enacted; the forces of regeneration and speculation are at play and can be playfully examined; and community and communities is formed and (re-)imagined.
For the scattered evicted community of Sailortown, the razed area and unfulfilled promise of return is the centre of group identity. Sol’s work has focused on the production of community and commons, ongoing creative and community activities in relation to this experience of expulsion, particularly in song, theatre, and poetry written by dockworkers and their families, and the performed memory of domestic life and work on the sites of the demolished streets. Alongside this activity, Sol has been running film workshops with the young residents of new social housing – the children that live and play in Sailortown – imagining their relation to the city, and their future as the city develops around them.
The films included in not only the earth we share are informed by strategies of auto-representation and the social and creative practices of the communities of Sailortown. They explore how storytelling, identity and community are constituents of urban commoning and can result from, and act as agents of, neighbourhood resistance. The films are exhibited at Golden Thread Gallery alongside archival films sourced from the community, paintings by The Sailortown Art Group, sculptural props that reference the architectural features of the original buildings in the former neighbourhood, and hanging fabric sculptural interventions that direct movement in the gallery and are reminiscent of domestic community spaces.
Exhibition photography: Simon Mills, courtesy of Golden Thread Gallery
This process involved the documentation of oral histories, with a particular focus on historical conditions of labour in the Docks, seafaring, and the now long-gone mills and factories to which Sailortown provided generations of workers.