The first of the public programme events to accompany the exhibition, Long time we’ve been working at Project Arts Centre, includes a screening of Adriana Monti’s Scuola senza fine (School Without End) with an introduction from Cinenova’s Charlotte Procter, and the launch of a new work from Soft Fiction Projects, made in association with Belfast Feminist Film School alumni.

Scuola senza fine (IT, 1983, 40 mins) was directed by Adriana Monti in collaboration with students from the worker-union-sponsored adult education ‘150 Hours’ secondary school diploma course, with whom she had been working for a year. The film shows how the experiment extended into the lives of women taking the course, most of whom were housewives. The work turns the curriculum’s question about the representation of women into the questions about the representation of themselves.

Soft Fiction Projects is an initiative run by artists Alessia Cargnelli and Emily McFarland, dedicated to producing digital and printed matter on film and artist moving image culture. For Long time we’ve been working, they have collaborated with Belfast Feminist Film School, hosting a screening of Scuola senza fine followed by discussion group and workshop to co-create Riso-printed posters. Co-authors/participants were Isabella Koban, Laura Morgan, Sinéad Anya, Rachel Bunting, Gwen Stevenson, Jade O’Neill, Suzanne Barrett, Jan Uprichard, Oonagh Parish.

Charlotte Procter is a member of Cinenova and co-curator of Long time we’ve been working, along with Alice Butler of aemi and Project Arts Centre. She is an archivist, programmer and Collection & Archive Director at LUX, the UK’s most significant collection of artists’ moving image. In 2013 she joined the Cinenova Working Group, a collective formed to preserve and distribute the feminist film collection Cinenova.

Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers.