EXHIBITION: 08 DEC 2023 – 10 DEC 2023, Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK
Join us for screenings of A Question of Choice and Precarity Story followed by a conversation with Annie Goh, Jenny Woodley (Sheffield Film Co-op), and Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí.
This event has been organised by artist Annie Goh who has been involved in the UAL End Outsourcing campaign since 2019, a campaign calling for the University of the Arts London (UAL) to end the outsourcing of cleaning contracts across all its college and campus sites. Invited into conversation will be Jenny Woodley from Sheffield Film Co-op, and Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí, the Directors of Precarity Story (2020).
The event forms part of an ongoing Cinenova programme titled The Work We Share, a film programme of ten newly digitised films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.
Film programme:
A Question of Choice features a small group of low-paid women workers – two cleaners, a cook, a lollipop lady – and a male caretaker in a school in Walkley, Sheffield. The participants describe the limited employment choices available to women when family remains their first priority. While the work they do is hard and poorly paid, it does offer them flexibility, with hours that fit in with their family lives, as well as affording them close contact with the community and their childrens’ education. Beyond the work that they do in the school, these women run activities at a local community centre and organise events for children in the local area.
Precarity Story (2020)
Precarity Story tells the work story of Isabel, a cleaner, hourly-paid teacher, and researcher in the same British university. Her story stands as an example of the increasing casualisation of university labour and its human consequences. Filmed during the 2018-2020 UK higher education strikes, Precarity Story exposes the little-known reality of the academic precariat and fuels the ongoing public debate on the devastating effects of neoliberal policies —and, now also, Covid-19— in British higher education.
