To understand what Jermaine Francis is about, it makes sense to pursue thinking beyond the labels we give to each other. His work is compelled by a certain kind of experience. It is an experience that I directly relate to, and this is why it was necessary to write this article and express it beyond only an assessment or interpretation of a work. Broadly speaking, Jermaine responds to the intersections of society and politics and culture, with respect to the systemic and relational effects of race.
Of Jamaican parents, he is effectively a second-generation migrant. Growing up in post-colonial Britain is thus punctuated by how ethnicity and skin colour affects life as it unfolds. A social being who must traverse the institutions of education and employment while being highlighted as different, expected to conform to norms of attitude and behaviour. This brings about an ever-present self-consciousness of how one carries oneself through space. Not necessarily a double consciousness, but more complicated than that binary would suggest. Sometimes a conflicting composite sensibility, sometimes fully assimilated, sometimes in resistance, sometimes confrontational. It is a way of being which is constantly having to be considered, almost never at complete ease outside of the circle of close family and friends.
A Post Industrial Dreamscape is a kind of meditation on the social and political landscape of the authors life. Since the 1970’s the UK had undergone vast changes, from being a product producing, manufacturing nation to being largely focussed on the services sector. This came along with the privatisation of nationalised industries, the stripping of power from workers unions, the advent of liberalism and the free market capitalism of the Margaret Thatcher era. Jermaine’s formative years would have been under the backdrop of peak Thatcherism. The miner’s strike, the Poll Tax riots, the Criminal Justice Bill, the growing resentment of immigrants invading Britain less than a decade after Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. All this further fuelled by the gutter press’s persistent derogation of coloured people, the right-wing protests of the National Front, racial violence, skinheads etc. The idea of working-class solidarity a naïve myth in light of this, giving rise to political blackness as solidarity between anyone subject to this racial onslaught.
That era could be revisited though the music of the period. Music as a resistance to bigotry, xenophobia, right wing politics and its social effects. From Punk, Ska and New Wave through to Hip Hop and then Acid House and the influence of Chicago and Detroit into what was the burgeoning warehouse raves and free parties of the UK’s Summers of Love in the early 90’s. These occupied the spaces of former factories and warehouses from industries that had collapsed. The rave scene symbolised an expression in resistance to the political landscape, a form of collective social protest that paralleled the street protests against the government and its policies. Imported into the UK, it constituted a One Nation vibe, everyone together, the antithesis of conservativism.
A Post Industrial Dreamscape constitutes a multi-format response to all of this but especially so when Jermaine was compelled to ask himself ‘what the fuck was going on?’. The shocking murder of Stephen Lawrence played a pivotal moment in his life when he had realised something was profoundly wrong and then a series of events led to the feeling that nothing had changed in Britain with regards to its relationship to race. Brexit, the Windrush Scandal, Grenfell and the more recent anti-immigration protests, all revealed the latent systemic and social racism that had been hidden under the cloak of multiculturalism. Today it continues despite the foregrounding of black and brown politicians recruited to dupe a diverse British public into buying into the political agenda, the state maintaining its colonial-era logic and keeping that status quo firmly in place. I write this as Britain continues to arm Israel assisting them in their genocide of Palestinians in a modern-day settler colonial conquest of the region.
The material accumulated and collected for the A Post Industrial Dreamscape includes archival elements, personal effects and images of the defunct architecture of Britain’s former industry – turned club venues – turned housing, where even the language of rave culture is co-opted by the market and commodified. The irony that Thatcher’s free market influence on the young is echoed in the DIY culture of the time hasn’t escaped me but complicates how political directions affect the shape of society and culture in unexpected ways.
Jermaine seeks to reflexively embrace indeterminacy in his work by presenting the publication or zine and its text as an abstracted entity taking on material and form in collaborative and radical formats. The work exists both, a zine with text, with an interplay of visual aesthetic and broken linguistic dialogue with collaborators, Matt Williams and Here Press publisher Ben Weaver – and a film (first shown at Camden Art Gallery and later in Galerie PCP in Paris and Sherbet Green in London) which includes a tune made with Tony Bontana, another of Jermaine’s West Midlands brethren. It features dissonant bass intrusions over the techno soundtrack to disrupt the otherwise harmonious, trance-like feel of the visual chaos as its unfolds. The latest incarnation is a set of translucent banners which like rave banners or protest banners offer a visceral engagement and a different relationship to space. In addition to this there is a LP vinyl record in the works holding potential to move the work beyond the white cube of the gallery and back to the dancefloor which is where it was perhaps born. In a conversation with Jermaine, he asserts, ‘this work is for us’ and having lived through the 80’s and 90’s in the UK, I know exactly why.