CONTEXT
The village of Avonmouth lies where the river Avon meets the Severn Estuary. It has thus served as a historic entrance to the city of Bristol, a place through which all ships passed on their way to the centre of the city. The port of Avonmouth grew rapidly in the early 20th century, a place where larger ships could unload, avoiding the sometimes treacherous journey up the river Avon to central Bristol. At its height, the port of Avonmouth supported approximately 5000 jobs, however the invention of container ships led to a rapid decline in the number of dockworkers required.
Today, the port is a successful operation, receiving goods from across the world. However, few residents of Bristol travel to Avonmouth, seeing it solely as a site of industrial work. This belies the fact that Avonmouth is a place that many call home; an intergenerational and multicultural community that contains myriad stories that speak to the changing nature of place, labour and globalisation.
The project is produced by IC Visual Lab and supported by the Heritage Lottery Foundation, Nisbets Foundation and Quartet Community Foundation. The project was delivered in collaboration with Avonmouth Community Centre, The Bristol Port Company, The University of the West of England & Bristol Photo Festival to build a resident-led community archive, collecting materials that speak to the contemporary history of Avonmouth. We also produced a series of commissions, supporting artists to work with local residents, helping to include some of the narratives that were invisible from existing collections (e.g. women’s labour histories, the voice of children, important political events…) .
The title All That Flows Comes To Rest is inspired by the work of artist Allan Sekula, creator of The Dockers’ Museum, a vast collection of artefacts that form an image of the world from the perspective of maritime labourer; the one who is always standing on the threshold between land and sea.
THE COMMUNITY ARCHIVE
The idea of this website is to host all the items collected (4500 approximated) throughout the project which form the Avonmouth Community Archive. We understand this community archive as something built from below. Its crowdsourcing nature means that a lot of the materials held in private collections were also reproductions of original materials held in local archives, books or online platforms… We are not approaching this as a traditional and rigid historical system but as a system that is fluid and alive. This means that some of the catalogued materials might have some inaccuracies in terms of dates, locations or authorship like the act of remembering itself.
These materials are catalogued through informal conversations, digital interactions and oral history sessions with members of the community and port workers. This collection was created to visualise a hidden history of a community and a place to help to build a stable and prosperous community with a strong sense of identity.
The archive is initially organised in these categories:
- Community – These are images of people, places and events, all connected to Avonmouth and the wider area. Some images might have been taken elsewhere but show the experiences of Avonmouth residents.
- The Docks – Images of the port including buildings, infrastructure and landscapes. These images might include people in the background, but do not show close-ups of individuals at work.
- Dockers (at Work) – All images of dockers when at work. Some of the images might include dockers not working but were still made within the port.
- Dockers (at Leisure) – Any images of dockers during their free time. These images were taken outside of the port.
- Ephemera (e.g. postcards and cuttings) – Any newspaper cuttings, maps, drawings, objects or other ephemera that were gathered during the project.
All the materials in this website are held under Creative Commons License. All the information about the copyright uses can be found HERE.
DISCLAIMER
If you would like to submit a copyright claim for material found on allthatflows.co.uk, please refer to our Copyright Policy.
If you would like to submit a request for archives of your site or account to be excluded from web.archive.org, send us a request to info@icvl.co.uk and indicate:
- the file number of the material
- A brief explanation about why you would like to remove it
- any other information that you think would be helpful for us to better understand your request.
This will initiate a review by our team. We do not make any guarantees beforehand about the outcome of a request.
Other types of removal requests may also be sent to info@icvl.co.uk. Please provide as clear an explanation as possible as to what you are requesting be removed for us to better understand your reason for making the request. Again, our team carefully reviews requests and we do not make any guarantees beforehand about the outcome of a request.
PROJECT TEAM
Producer: IC Visual Lab
Funding Partners: Heritage Lottery Fund, Nisbest Trust, University of the West of England and Quartet Community Foundation
Community Partners: Avonmouth Community Association, The Bristol Port Company & Bristol Photo Festival.
Creative Directors: Alejandro Acín & Ben GJ Thomas
Project Assistant: Safia Belhaj
Community Ambassadors: Harvey Wayne, Rachael Haig, Sami and John Chaplin.
Commissioned Artists: Chris Hoare, Kit Hall, Holly Black, Jo Barker and Rachael Clarke.
Videography: BlackBark Films
Web development: Sofia Taipa
Digitation Assistants: Wilf Penrouse, Chris Hoare and Jamie Dormer-Durling
Thank you to all the UWE School of Art students volunteering for the project and to all the community members that contributed materials and stories to this archive.
