A PROVOCATIVE work of art threatens to expose simmering racial tensions in a market town that is home to thousands of migrant workers.
The six-minute video features a Portuguese woman talking about the trauma of living and working in Boston, in southeast Lincolnshire. While she speaks off-camera about the abuse her young family has suffered, the screen shows the image of a large St George’s flag flying proudly from a local farmer’s field.
The council-funded film, I Hate Boston and Boston Hates Me, by Jordan Baseman, will be projected on to a wall at Boston railway station from next month as part of the Beacon Art Project, which aims “to highlight the good things about Lincolnshire”.
However, the video has attracted local criticism for projecting a negative view of the town and there is a threat that it may not be shown at all. The Times was told yesterday that the film’s anonymous subject claims that she was tricked into participating in the project and is considering taking legal action to stop her words from being heard.
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Baseman said that the film showed “how it is possible in our culture to have people living side by side without knowing anything about the complexity of each other’s lives”.
The woman, who has lived in Boston for four years, is one of an estimated 10,000 foreigners, many of them European Union citizens, who moved to the town in recent years. Boston’s 58,000 residents include a 5,000-strong Portuguese community and many Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian. Many are cheap labour for the agriculture, food-processing and packing industries that dominate the local economy.
That some Bostonians were not thrilled with their new neighbours became manifest when white youths rioted and chanted racist abuse in Boston’s market square during the 2004 European football championship finals.
Since then attempts have been made to improve relations between the locals and foreign workers, but the Rev David de Verny, chaplain for migrant workers in southeast Lincolnshire, said that there was still a long way to go.
He cited the failure of Portuguese Day organised by a primary school in May. “They were going to have Portuguese food, music and dance. So what happened? Scores of parents withdrew their kids for the day,” he said. “There’s so much ignorance. These European citizens are not going to leave because our low-wage economy needs them to do the work in the fields.”
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He also criticised Boston Borough Council’s attempts to encourage integration, saying: “Nobody does anything here.”
Paul Kenny, the councillor responsible for community cohesion, said that he was “not impressed” by the theme of the Baseman film and was “not sure that it is in the interests of unity”. He said that the racial tensions in Boston were no worse than in many other rural communities.
The local authority, which was censured by the Audit Commission in 2003 for failing to show leadership on migrant issues, is one of the main funders of the Beacon Art Project, which commissioned the installation.
Nicola Streeten, who is behind the project, said that the woman had not been deceived and was always fully aware of why she was being interviewed. In one section of the film, the woman says: “I think the word for Boston is difficult. It don’t matter how hard you try in your work, and you want to make friends and fit in, it’s really hard.” She also describes how her seven-year-old daughter was the victim of a racist insult from a “mean” Boston resident.
Baseman, an American who has lived in London for 20 years, said that he was unnerved by the town’s attitude to foreigners. “I was wearing a cowboy hat. In London, no one cares, but the way people looked at me in Boston I might as well have been running down the street naked and on fire. You could feel the tension,” he said.
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The artist said that the majority of local residents were “lovely and incredibly hospitable”, but that did not include the gangs of youths that he saw roaming the streets.
“I wanted to make a piece of work about one person’s experience in Boston. She found it difficult but I thought she showed immense guts,” he said.
“It must be so frustrating, when you’ve given up everything to come here, and all you want to do is to make friends, to come up against such meanness, such ignorance. I’m glad I don’t live in Boston.”
A MAGNET FOR MIGRANTS