No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

This pro­ject ana­lyses the social organ­isa­tion of work on a build­ing site and the dif­fer­ent forms of labour that go into the refur­bish­ment of a build­ing. It explores the ways in which the build­ing space is con­cep­tu­al­ised and lived by those who work on the pro­ject – build­ers, archi­tects and engin­eers – and the ways in which their work is ima­gined, visu­al­ised and embodied.

The pro­ject aimed to explore labour as a social activ­ity and the forms of work involved in a build­ing refur­bish­ment of this kind; and to explore the build­ing as an object/product of labour that is trans­formed by it so to map visu­ally the mater­ial and spa­tial changes in the build­ing which is being worked upon, the social/physical con­struc­tion of place.

The pro­ject was based on eth­no­graphic work under­taken in col­lab­or­a­tion with Peter Hat­ton (a visual artist and lec­turer at the Uni­ver­sity of Kent) from March to Octo­ber 2007, the period dur­ing which the build­ing was being refur­bished. Pho­to­graphy was cent­ral to the meth­od­o­logy but was one of a bundle of related tech­niques, includ­ing informal obser­va­tion on-site, par­ti­cip­a­tion in site meet­ings, and inter­views with the project’s build­ers, archi­tects and engineers.

The work that people do pro­duces a dif­fer­ent kind of rela­tion­ship to space/place. Build­ers mono­pol­ise the phys­ical manip­u­la­tion of the build­ing – as pro­cess and object. They live and breathe it, quite lit­er­ally, as its dust and paint and debris get under their nails and skin, and into their hair and eyes. In con­trast, engin­eers and archi­tects know the build­ing as a con­cep­tu­al­ised space, through draw­ings and meas­ure­ments, reports and sched­ules, and observed it as a ‘land­scape of viewing’.

Lived Space

Con­cep­tu­al­ised Space

Build­ing pro­jects are char­ac­ter­ised by mul­tiple sequen­tial and co-existent work activ­it­ies which pro­duce a place such as this build­ing anew, and in which some forms of work are lit­er­ally covered by oth­ers. Indeed, it may be that the product of the labour is the fin­ish that con­ceals it. Or, the mark of qual­ity of labour is that the fin­ish is unmarked.

When build­ing work was star­ted, the build­ing itself ‘was a com­plete shell’ com­ments Michael: ‘We were talk­ing about it the other day, how you can see the end product now.’ Another of the build­ers, Grant, talks about sat­is­fac­tion with the job, with the end product as he calls it, since ‘you can see what you’ve achieved,’ he says. As someone who’s in wet trades doing plas­ter­ing and brick­work, this is true for him. How­ever, this is not the case for all. Ground-workers for instance, never see the end product and their own work is con­cealed even though it under­pins the rest of the pro­ject, they’re ‘unsung her­oes’ accord­ing to some of the other build­ers interviewed.

This makes us ask: what means of rep­res­ent­a­tion can we make use of to hold onto the recog­ni­tion of the labour involved in the pro­duc­tion of place? We came up with the idea of pro­ject­ing the build­ing back onto itself. The images seek to pull apart what has been remade and expose the build­ing in dif­fer­ent states thereby imply­ing the labour of its reconstruction. 

Dado Rail

The jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the images below shows co-existent and var­ied per­spect­ives. It brings dif­fer­ent moments into the same moment of see­ing (now) and offers a way to re-view what might be taken for gran­ted in a single image. In the second set of images, by stretch­ing and super­im­pos­ing them in spe­cific ways, our atten­tion can be drawn to what we are not neces­sar­ily con­scious of in a single image, for instance, the move­ment involved in the labour in the upper body, and the weight and dis­com­fort of the pos­i­tion of the lower body (kneel­ing on the wood).

Lay­ing Screed 1

Lay­ing Screed 2

A gain of the visual, espe­cially for the soci­ology of work, is in get­ting at ele­ments of com­plex­ity it is dif­fi­cult to grasp with other meth­ods, espe­cially in work­places that are not famil­iar to us all, restric­ted spaces, such as build­ing sites.

Whilst there is con­sid­er­able innov­a­tion in data col­lec­tion and research prac­tices in visual soci­ology, there remains reluct­ance to be sim­il­arly innov­at­ive in ways of telling and rep­res­ent­ing research (through image, sound and text). Put­ting things together in novel ways, e.g. col­lage, allows us to gain dif­fer­ent insights — there is there­fore ana­lytic poten­tial in work­ing with the visual as data and representation.

To down­load the leaf­let from the exhib­i­tion that was one of the out­comes of this pro­ject, go to: http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/staff/academic/lyon/rochester.pdf.