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Total Truck installation
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This documentary project is my best effort to meld childhood memories of growing up in the environment of trucks and the workers of my fathers company who were union drivers. My documentary project includes film as only one component of a larger work called an installation. The documentary video is projected on the back wall in a 32 ft. trailer. The walls leading to the back of the trailer have 8x10 black and white backlit still photographs of additional documentation of trucking. The initial goal with this project was to use material that can communicate a personal and historical experience to an otherwise unfamiliar audience. My inspiration comes from the installations of Russian environments by artist Ilya Kabakov. By recreating an environment, the audience can imagine themselves in the experience and can feel for themselves what life might be like in that world.
Family History:
During the late 1880’s my relatives from Italy made their way to the United States. They became part of the work force at the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Most likely due to the strikes and activities concerning labor in Lowell in 1905, my relatives moved to Rhode Island. At age thirteen, my grandmother worked in the textile mills in Rhode Island as a child laborer.My mother also comes from a working class background. She was employed in the textile factories, making lace, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Her father was a cigar roller from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. Their lives were an example of the riveting poverty and exploitation people were forced to live with during such a rich industrial age.
In addition to my relatives’ historical experience in the textile workforce in New England, my research has another perspective: that of the business owner on the other side of the picket lines. My family had a hand a on both sides of the unions and labor disputes in the United States contending with the unions becoming too powerful in the 1960's and then in the 70's the effects of deregulation, which ultimately destabilized the industry.
My father Joseph Calore established the trucking company, Calore Freight System, in Rhode Island in 1947. He began with the purchase of his first truck, an open back Ford. He used it for some of the worst jobs and deliveries to get his business off the ground. His breakthrough came with a job unloading meat cars and distributing them to local packing houses. He created the first refrigerated meat packing truck in Rhode Island using dry ice and a fan. This led to a demand for his trucking and opened up his business for expansion.
The railroad, at that time, was having difficulty loading and unloading containers on the trains for delivery.My father, who has a knack for solving problems, created a solution by utilizing the wine press from his grandfather, which evolved into a system known as the piggyback. It is widely used today in the railroad business. As his business grew, he had his hand in many forms of transportation and rigging in this country.
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