The choice to title our second show Occupation is located in the name and place of The Shoe Factory itself in the context of our community, and how we respond to notions of the art object’s occupation as physical and epistemological  space, occupation as work and occupation as protest. As sites such as The Shoe Factory demonstrate, Norwich artists increasingly occupy spaces left empty by changing economic, cultural and industrial conditions. While churches in the city centre have long been turned over to arts and crafts communities to maintain historical buildings as the demands for them as spaces of religious worship has declined, high street shops and factories left empty stand as signifiers for the failure of consumer and industrial capitalisms to sustain themselves in everyday communal sites, into the 21st Century. As we acknowledge and position ourselves within these contexts of our community and its connection to industry and production, we also examine the changing meaning of the art object itself as it occupies these shifting realms. 

 

We also incite questions around occupations past of these spaces and how the industrial labour therein created a community of workers. As Norwich businesses and enterprises continue to name themselves after the addresses of the buildings they inhabit or the sites of work for which these buildings were once used, clutching at the spectre of past industrial working communities to which the majority of city dwellers no longer or have never felt attached, this motif is more than an everyday rendering of the postmodern condition. It renders the idea of use rather than a practice of use; it references the memory of industry in the pursuit of authenticity and identity in the locale; it layers former meanings until the space itself is left without, what we might try and define as, real meaning. 

 

What we reference here is not, ironically, a new criticism of late capitalism: that our abilities to perceive meaning have been compromised by the overwhelming simulation of reality, a hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1981), wherein meaning itself is overwhelmed by the blurred and infinite interconnectivity of cultural artefacts, and that this condition is responsible for the subsequent disconnection of people, leading ultimately to the loss of community (Macdonald, 1953; Thomson, 2005). 

 

However, our intervention into this is site specific, contextualising this exhibition in the active shifting landscape of the community space and how we, as artists, participate in its Occupation; as a participant at our first show at Nunn’s Yard wrote on the community piece, which you can see on display at on the ground floor of The Shoe Factory, Community Will Thrive if you Give it a Home. 

 

Baudrillard, Jean (1981) Simulacres et Simulation. Éditions Galilée

 

Macdonald, Dwight (1953) ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, Diogenes, 1(3), pp.1-17 

 

Thomas, Irene Taviss (2005) The Theory That Won't Die: From Mass Society to the Decline of Social Capital, Sociological Forum, 20 (3), pp. 421-448

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- Text by Erica Horton