Work Experience: Mementos of (a) working life
07 Jun—22 June (16 dates)
Edinburgh & The Lothians Discussion Exhibition
Event Summary
An incidental archive of 'work experience' that provokes reflection on meaningful and creative ways of remembering - and therefore reimagining - our relations with 'architectural' work.
Book hereTime
Exhibition 7-21 June. Public Conversation 14 June 14.30-16.00
Date(s)
07 Jun—22 June
Location
George Brown & Sons Engineering Works, 5-6 Shore, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6QS
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Supporters
– Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
– Edinburgh College of Art Research and Knowledge Innovation
Organiser
Suzanne Ewing, Voices of Experience + ESALA, University fo Edinburgh
Social
A series of intergenerational conversations between individuals at different stages of their working lives forms the foundation for this exhibition. Conversations have taken place between 2016 and 2024, instigated and documented by Voices of Experience (VoE: Jude Barber, Suzanne Ewing, Nicola McLachlan). They focus on professional working lives connected with Scotland’s built environment. VoE questions the scope and limits of institutional memory, asking how everyday professional working lives are recognised and remembered, who may be ‘seen’ or ‘found’? Where, and how? What projects, people, places, events, ideas, or values are distilled as significant? Who by? VoE Conversations register an exchange of experience, a place to listen and respond, creating space for new connections and often identifying shared ethical or specialist concerns. Audio records and transcripts aim to enrich and expand professional records, to include immaterial, social and personal aspects of architectural work.
The long active lives of VoE participants reveal a wide scope of what is defined as architectural work and how it takes place: from multi-disciplinary collaboration in regional planning, to publicly funded housing, to bespoke landscape design, to institutional governance, to office management, to historic conservation, to modes of spatial activism. To further explore this, VoE invited older participants to select a 'memento' from their own working life and to reflect on it. These material selections are held in their own archive boxes in the public space of this exhibition, which itself becomes an incidental, reciprocal archive of work experience(s).
The curators invite reflections from visitors during the course of the exhibition and in a public conversation event on 14 June. Chaired by Voices of Experience, with VoE participants and invited guests including Melanie Hay of newly established practice Hamilton Hay Van Jonker Architects, and Prof Luca Csepely Knorr from the University of Liverpool, research lead of the Women of the Welfare Landscape project.
