sol archer
“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”
Dionne Brand
not only the earth we share
Film
Duration: 50:00min
2 channel UHD 4K Stereo Audio
sculpture, curtain, steel, community painting, and community video archive
Year: 2021
Spoken: English
not only the earth we share has been aquired by the Northern Ireland Arts Council Collection in 2022.
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 the 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.