Intangible Labour and the New Folklore

Intangible Labour and the New Folklore, which has opened at the basement gallery at Leicester’s Adult Education College on Belvoir Street, arrives at a moment when many of the forces shaping cultural life are increasingly difficult to see, measure, or name. The exhibition, and the accompanying radio conversation captured in this podcast, circles a shared intuition among the artists and curator: that much of what matters now happens beneath the surface of formal institutions, economic categories, and inherited cultural narratives. At its core, the programme is concerned with labour that leaves no obvious trace. Not labour understood as productivity or output, but labour as endurance, risk, emotional expenditure, and sustained attention. The artists speak of practices that demand time, vulnerability, and bodily commitment, yet often pass without recognition. This is labour that does not easily resolve into objects or outcomes. It persists as process, atmosphere, and residue. What gives the exhibition its particular charge is the way this labour is framed through folklore. Folklore here is not nostalgia or decorative tradition. It is treated as a living, unstable system of symbols through which societies encode struggle, danger, joy, and transformation. Fairy tales, work songs, punk, graffiti, disability performance, and improvised music are all understood as part of a shared mythic substrate. They carry knowledge forward not by explanation, but by repetition, distortion, and affect. From a metamodern perspective, this is significant. The exhibition neither returns uncritically to tradition nor rejects it as obsolete. Instead, it inhabits the oscillation between irony and sincerity that defines much contemporary cultural production. Folk forms are acknowledged as violent, exclusionary, and often brutal, yet they are also recognised as durable containers for meaning. The artists do not attempt to purify folklore. They work within its contradictions. Several contributors describe practices marked by physical and psychological risk. References to self-injury, illness, invisibility, and death appear not as spectacle but as quiet undertones. These elements are not deployed to shock. They function as reminders that cultural production is rarely neutral or cost-free. To make work, to perform, or to sustain an artistic identity often requires a negotiation with pain, exposure, and uncertainty. This negotiation itself becomes part of the work’s meaning. The emphasis on performance throughout the programme reinforces this point. Performance is identified as a form of intangible cultural heritage, but it is also presented as a mode of labour that disappears almost as soon as it occurs. What remains is memory, rumour, and the altered state of those who were present. This ephemerality resists capture and commodification, placing performance in tension with contemporary systems of documentation and circulation. Music plays a particularly important role in articulating this tension. From improvised flute playing to reworked popular songs and traditional work songs, music emerges as a carrier of collective feeling that exceeds language. It moves between joy and grief, irony and devotion, past and present. In metamodern terms, music here functions as a bridge between individual experience and shared myth, allowing contradictory emotional states to coexist without resolution. Disability art and practice introduce another critical dimension. Questions of visibility and invisibility recur throughout the conversation. Acts of disappearance, misalignment, and refusal draw attention to who is permitted to be seen, heard, or centred within cultural space. Rather than offering clear statements, these gestures destabilise the viewer’s expectations. They ask what forms of labour are ignored because they do not conform to dominant narratives of productivity, health, or coherence. What ultimately unites the exhibition is not a single theme but a shared orientation. There is a commitment to creating spaces that are open rather than explanatory, and to privileging experience over interpretation. The absence of wall texts and fixed narratives is not an abdication of responsibility, but an invitation. Meaning is not delivered. It is encountered, assembled, and sometimes missed. In this sense, Intangible Labour and the New Folklore can be read as a modest act of cultural reconstruction. It does not propose new myths fully formed. Instead, it listens for those already emerging through practice, voice, and gesture. The podcast extends this listening into the auditory domain, preserving not conclusions but conversations. What remains is a record of people thinking aloud together, attentive to the labour involved in making culture when its foundations are no longer stable, but its necessity remains.