WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > TO MAKE (OUR) WORK SONG

BORDERS TEXTILE TOWERHOUSE
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 34′ (looped)

Content warning: discussion of sexism, displacement.  

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Inspired by the Scottish Gaelic ‘Waulking Song’, Natsumi Sakamoto’s To Make (Our) Work Song explores the intimate relationship between labour, gender and song, and the possibility of creating and sustaining oral traditions today. Taking as its starting point a centuries-old Scottish oral folk tradition, which is today confined mainly to the Outer Hebrides and enacted as a conscious celebration of heritage, the work is also a layered exploration of memory and impermanence.

As explicated in the film, waulking songs were collectively sung by women during the waulking process, a stage in pre-industrialised woollen clothmaking in which female labourers cleansed a cloth of oils, dirt and other impurities by rhythmically and repeatedly pounding it into shape. Presented here in a dual-screen format, To Make (Our) Work Song pairs an assembly of informative interviews about the vanishing tradition with a performance-based video in which a group of women sing a waulking song while enacting a mime-like ritual of waulking per se.

In an opening voiceover, Sakamoto refers to the songs as ‘beautifully sung and somewhat sad’, their wave-like melody prompting images of endless labour. The purpose of the songs, as one of the artist’s interviewees clarifies, was to get the workers through their task; singing might have provided a form of therapy and/or healing, even if the women weren’t conscious of it. Across the work, Sakamoto frames subjects from the neck down, her camera privileging hand and other involuntary gestures, as if to suggest a commonality between intellectual, creative and manual forms of labour.

This is, however, a work of investigation rather than romance. Sakamoto’s approach is knowingly and compellingly sensitive to the pitfalls of transposing the values of one era onto another. Responding to the artist’s queries, one interviewee expresses hesitation in making assumptions about the plight and politics of forebears. For her own part, Sakamoto commits to performance as a way of measuring rather than gaining proximity to the past. There’s something inescapably contemporary about the sequences here in which a visibly diverse ensemble of women waulk an imaginary cloth, framed against a black background that suspends their actions and solidarity in a dream-like vault.