To Make (Our) Work Song is a film installation that explores the intimate relationship between manual labour and song, and the possibility of creating oral traditions today. Inspired by the Scottish Gaelic ‘Waulking Song’, the project collaboratively creates a new ‘work song’. It examines the traditional role of women in labour and explores ways to resist the devaluation of reproductive labour. Through the act of singing together, the project aims to explore the diversity of narratives and the challenges of ‘solidarity’ in intersectional feminism.

‘Waulking’ refers to the process of making woollen textiles by hand, a labour once carried out by women and lost to mechanisation in the Scottish Highlands. The waulking song was sung to lighten this hard work, and the music is still passed on today. The project began with research and field recording of the waulking songs on the Isle of Skye and developed into a sound, score, song and film production in collaboration with musician/artist Sarah McWhinney. It will culminate in a performance that questions the possibility of ‘solidarity’ in the community, centred on Sakamoto’s everyday perspective of living as an immigrant in Glasgow.

Unravelling the vanishing tradition of waulking songs in the contemporary context will explore the various possibilities for the transmission of oral traditions, as well as songs as a form of resistance to patriarchal capitalist society.