PUNCTUM

Past and Future Pact has been developed from an Artist-in-Residence fellowship with DePOT (Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time) from 2023-2024. The project connects with residents and the place of Sunderland, UK, exploring identity, more than 30 years since heavy industry closures. Working with community participants and members of my own family, I recorded perspectives of differently marginalised gendered experiences of care and work in the family home and paid employment. Recently announced government and cultural investments means that the city is now potentially on the precipice of transformation, with the chance to regenerate like many other post-industrial cities in the global north. It therefore feels like a vital moment to take stock of the effects of its deindustrialization – to capture where it is now and consider the possibilities of what it could become.