SMOKO (New Zealand slang for a work break) engages with two sites and two publics. Clay from an Auckland infrastructure site is crafted into cups and saucers, then used to serve morning tea in Melbourne to symposium participants, who keep their set. Engaging with the elimination in New Zealand of the right to two 10-minute tea breaks in the working day, the Public Share collective invites exchange within the setting of an institution symbolic of the notion of workers’ rights.

SMOKO flows from the first Public Share project: A break in proceedings / Irregular allotments. It continues a focus on the workplace ritual of the ‘break’ and the implied relations, social and political, that pausing for a 10-minute ‘cuppa’ brings. The projects embrace the ‘everyday’ as the means through which to engage in notions of making and sharing. Site, place and production are interrelated through a series of exchanges – discussion, negotiation, collection, testing, making, sharing – to form, in essence, a small revolt: a free offering and an invitation to stop work.

SMOKO extends the project into the Australasian context, drawing connections between Auckland and Melbourne through two interconnected events. Without irony, the collective temporally joins the flow of New Zealanders across ‘The Ditch’. Whilst not seeking work, we too bring a focus on working life in our engagement with both the Performing Mobilities community and the site workers operating Alice, the tunnel boring machine cutting an underground motorway through Auckland. Public Share acknowledges that project’s history of controversy, whilst collaborating with workers to access the displaced clay to make cups and saucers recalling those that workers throughout New Zealand historically used in their collective tea breaks. Sets of these will be brought both to Performing Mobilities and to the Alice site tearooms for shared events that claim back the right to take a pause, to reflect and converse.