Live Art Archives - Vitalstatistix

Vitalstatistix spoke with artist Rebecca Conroy about her interests in economics, labour and artist-led study of these topics, along with her new work Iron Lady, in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency.

Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary director, curator, producer, researcher and writer, working across community, PFsite-based events, discursive practices, and intercultural collaborations. She has worked with key arts organisations in Australia including Performance Space, Campbelltown Art Centre, Pact Theatre, ArtSpace, Urban Theatre Projects, Watch this Space, Lismore Regional Art Gallery, as well as collaborating with artists in Sydney and internationally, in the USA, South East Asia and Europe.

Iron Lady is in residence at The Mill, presented by Vitalstatistix and PADA, during the Feast Festival in November

Rebecca, can you tell us a little about your practice and your artistic communities?

Rebecca Conroy: I grew up in the performing arts, but have been straddling disciplines ever since I graduated from theatre school in the 90s. Moving into artist run spaces introduced me to the visual arts world, and now I use my art-swipe-card to gain access to economics, housing, urban planning, and the like. I feel like my practice has always been morphing and lurching in these kind of passionate increments, some conscious and some less so—more like a blurred connection of messy evolving lines of enquiry.

I am interested in work that is cheeky, oppositional, and sort of ruptures things; I prefer straddling, mimicry and Trojan strategies—to survive and maybe avoid capture. Work that is self-aware of its power as art operating within the institution—a self-conscious art.

I also use it therapeutically or as a solution to a problem. Yurt Empire was certainly this, as a response to the housing crisis in 2011 which evolved into a large-scale collaborative experiment; making installations as dwellings we attempted to smuggle them onto a series of development sites south of Sydney. In some ways, I like to make pragmatic works that appear on the outside to be ridiculous propositions, but are actual tools or weapons, instruments that can be wielded, mostly as disguises. I think that’s one of the distinct advantages of the art field—it can use its licence to say what it is and is not, and to alter the frame in which it is interpreted.

When I returned to Sydney in 2004 from a decade living and working in Indonesia, I needed to seek out the ‘kampung’ and ended up in the inner-city neighbourhood of Chippendale setting up a warehouse. With a bunch of others, we co-founded ‘The Wedding Circle’ which ran studios, a gallery and experimental event space. Maybe from a deep longing for Java, the local laneways (or ‘gang’ as they are called in Indonesian) became little capillaries connecting all of our warehouse spaces. Every era feels definitive, but this really felt like the last hurrah for lots of artist run warehouses in that part of Sydney, whilst also being the time when Sydney artists were starting to connect with their nearest neighbours. We used this as a springboard to create an exchange and festival event over four years with artist run spaces and communities from Java. Naturally called it Gang Festival, and published a book called “Gang re:publik”. I like occupying terrain, or wearing its DNA and seeing what happens if you just replace or delete or alter the gene sequence.

You have a body of work and collaborations that explore economics, and do so through artist-led research models. Can you tell us a bit about some of these projects such as Dating an Economist and the Marrickville School of Economics?

RC: Yeah for the past 3 years I have been interested in the superficial distinctions drawn between art and economy and creating works that respond to the nexus of these seemingly disparate fields—I really think they are both involved in the business of making stuff up and speculating, and determining what is of ‘value’. I also enjoy the opposition and friction between them. This is essentially where the ‘Dating an Economist’ project came from. I wanted to reclaim the authority that economists assume in determining and knowing ‘value’, and contest this in a less formal, more intimate setting, which introduced factors of the unknown and unpredictable. By placing them in a date situation, it also put into play feelings, emotions, and the irrational – or rather the way the human behaves in relation to gendered power.

The MSE (Marrickville School of Economics) is another example where I tried to talk back to the authority of the London School of Economics and question the general hegemony of economy as a field of discourse and ideological blunt instrument shaping everything, leading us to “knowing the price of all things and the value of nothing”. The MSE by-line was ‘Let’s unfuck the Economy’ and its challenge was to expose the inadequacy of economic thinking to our worlds. It also questioned the increasing influence that bankers and business people have in the arts world. For example, Ian Narev the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank is also the chairperson of the Sydney Theatre Company. Imagine if artists were on the board of banks? Why is there this implicit and presumptuousness when it comes to knowledge, expertise and value? So MSE was a curriculum that I designed to offer artists access points and pathways into interrogating the assumptions of these disciplines. It was also an opportunity to offer up all the research I had been doing as a series of curated reading lists and literature that was responding specifically to the issues that affect artists, in particular how the rise of flexible casualised labour and a precariat workforce was approaching the condition of the artist-labourer. There is a bunch of art-labour stuff happening in Europe and North America but not so much in Australia. With MSE, which also had an iteration this year as part of the Folkestone Fringe in the UK, the intention was to generate some interest and collectivise knowledge and contacts in this field. The sessions were curated around a thematic and readings, and culminated in a presentation with a non-artist or collaborative project that had some pedagogical use-value.

Much discussion of new economies is basically about promoting entrepreneurship and capitalist ‘innovation’. Yet there are ideas and models that challenge neoliberalism too. What are some of the key ideas around new economies that you are most interested in?

It’s a really interesting time when the distinction around words and concepts like community and sharing have been so thoroughly co-opted and integrated into experiential capital. So part of the ‘fun’ at the moment is finding yourself at events that bring together these segments in misplaced and confusing ways.

Recently in Paris I was fortunate to attend ‘Ouishare’, an international gathering of share economy, alternative economy, and community led enterprise activists, entrepreneurs, and advocates. Elsewhere I have described it like TedX meets Vivid Sydney with the catering done by Hillsong. In other ways, the existence of something like Ouishare is testimony to the tenacity of capitalism.

Instead of addressing the systemic flaws—poverty, climate change, housing crises—as driven by the current configurations of power, well-meaning, mostly white activists, add yet more innovative “solutions” to the mix (as if a lack of ideas was the problem) and in the process, elide existing struggles and erase the histories experiences and lessons learnt.

I tend to find these spaces fascinating to the extent that I am puzzled as to why someone could so much time creating a solution to a ‘problem’ but seemingly zero time understanding how the problem emerges and continues to persist, in the first place. I am conscious particularly that white folk, and particularly men, need to put more energy into listening to those who are at the coal face of those problems.

To this extent I don’t push for artist led solutions, because I think artists have some kind of magic solution, but simply because as a field of practice and body of ideas and approach this is the industry or sector that I relate to, and have experience with.

I think in this way also that artists need to see themselves as part of these same dialogues that are happening around different ways of doing economy—and by extension the practice-led seems to be a great way to be shifting politics. Whether your hands are stuck in soil, or energy systems, or food, or other materials, the doing and the practice I think are great vehicles to rethink political economy and ways of being-in-the-world.

You recently spent three months in Europe for a range of residencies and conferences exploring some of these ideas. Can you tell us about this?

I spent time at PAF (Performing Arts Forum) just outside of Paris. This is an old convent, one-time-cult, and now thriving artist community which hosts “meetings” and themed residencies for large and small groups. It’s quite unique and quite my cup of tea, mixing as they do philosophy and critical enquiry form an artist led practice. I also spent 2 weeks in Tuscany (just awful) with a bunch of great thinkers and community workers learning about P2P economy and alternative models for community housing, food, energy, and governance shaped by municipalities. My contribution was thinking through the artist led-laundromat that is currently in development (see below). It was so incredible to listen learn and just bear witness to the sheer volume of things happening in this field. Artists should be really excited about this. It’s good news for us!

Like women and artists generally, Iron Lady is a service provider and she is also in the business of emotional labour. Can you tell us about her and what you will be doing when you are in Adelaide in November?

Iron Lady emerged from my interest in libidinal economies, the role of intimacy, and my predilection for female assassins and the deceptively harmless, in particular how the subversive can be folded into the ordinary and the everyday.

I was also fascinated with how many clichés I could pile into the one-dimensional character as device, and still generate ambiguity. So obviously Margaret Thatcher is one dimension of the Iron Lady, marked as she is by her lack of empathy and shrewd economic rationalism.

Underlining this is the humble domestic ironing service which underscores all other forms of gendered laboured performed by women in the household, which is why the Iron Lady includes these value-added services on her artisanal menu. Woman as soft generous sounding board, Woman as honest appraisal, Woman as bleeding heart, Iron Lady can perform all these. Illicit affair? Iron Lady can also do that.

Secretly she’s also spraying your collars with Oxytocin—an enzyme that makes you emotionally vulnerable.

During my two weeks, I will be operating a boutique artisanal ironing service, which only caters to cis-white men working in the corporate sector. Essentially, it’s a data mining exercise, a bit like military drills you carry out with friendly combatants. Whilst servicing this ‘market segment’ I will be gathering useful knowledge about how they operate. I will solicit my clientele using a combination of stealth marketing and door to door sales work. And a very good-looking outfit. I will be offering a basic wash and steam press with a free consultation to determine which of the nine value added services from the menu they would like. The work is a made-in-residency work and will expand and move in as yet unknown direction as necessary. For example, recently Iron Lady was given the opportunity to make a cheeky foray into Sydney Contemporary art fair. Moving through the ‘art-kelp’ as my designer Emma Price likes to say with affection, with my business card and my Assassins swag, I discovered that I am going to have to have a firm grip on the narrative otherwise I risk a participant feeling like the jokes on them. OH NO!

Artworks like Iron Lady, and another project you are developing called A Very Beautiful Laundromat, can act as businesses and art simultaneously. They could be seen as a type of public art, or as a type of social enterprise. Are they or are they not? Can you tell us more about the artistic framework of your work?

This is a great question which I always have fun trying to answer as a way of pushing the thinking about art outside of all the tired binaries—art/politics etc.

Essentially I like making work that does both at the same time, or that can shift from one to another constantly. Life is perhaps too short for things to only exist as ‘art’ and not also be threaded into the lived experiences as a response to making life happen, just as social enterprises seem like missed opportunities to also express art or have ridiculous moments, rough up the edges a bit, or carve out some space for deep beautiful thinking.

The artist run laundromat is a response to the feast and famine economy and will provide occasional paid shifts for artists in between gigs, whilst also being a gathering space for the social and the discursive. I am working with three other top ladybirds in the arts and finance worlds to make this come alive. Our business outfit is called Money Laundering.

What could people read to know more about these ideas?

The websites for the projects have some great resources, in particular:

Other artists whose work I dig in the art/economy field are:

Caroline Woolard who has done a bunch of stuff around artist trade schools and commons real estate
Cassie Thorton who is the Feminist Economics Department
Kate Rich who runs Feral Trade

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists SJ Norman and Meg Wilson about their multidisciplinary practices, the queering of feminism, and their upcoming projects for Adhocracy 2017.

SJ Norman is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Their work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Norman’s primary medium is the body and live performance remains the core of their practice: working with extended duration, task-based, and endurance practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks. They are a proud Indigenous Australian of both Wiradjuri and European heritage. They are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions.

Meg Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist who works predominantly with large-scale and site-specific installation and performance. Her visual art and theatre design practices are mutually influential and frequently overlap. Meg aims to provoke imposed perplexity, uneasiness and a sense of drama in the everyday, through explorations of the performativity of space and the audience encounter with the ordinary, set within the context of the out-of-the-ordinary. She is developing live art event SQUASH! at Adhocracy 2017.

Meg and SJ, tell us a bit more about your practices and your artistic communities.

SJ Norman: I make a lot of different things but I’m mainly known for my performance and installation work, and my writing. Many people would call me a live artist, which is fine.

My artistic community is a very dense rhizome which stretches across the globe. It includes quite a lot of people who would not call themselves artists.

Meg Wilson: I’m very fortunate to have an artistic practice that spans several disciplines, from visual and live art to performance and design for theatre. This has come out of fairly unconscious desire not to be defined by or associated with any one genre or form. I started out as a painter and became known as a textile artist, then an installation artist. After art school, I studied interior design and eventually found my way into design for theatre, allowing me to satisfy a constant eagerness for making and resistance to monotony between personal projects.

As I have largely gained experience by volunteering and interning with various companies and designers that I admire, I have managed to form meaningful and supportive relationships with a diverse and extremely generous group of makers and collaborators that I can now call upon for guidance – locally, nationally and somewhat internationally.

It is the overwhelming generosity, sharp intelligence and sheer bloody persistent guts of my community that excites me and allows me to see a future for what we do.

SJ, you are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions with Mish Grigor and Sarah Rodigari. You will be joined by a team of local artists to explore the theme of ‘love and feminism’. What does this theme conjure for you?

SJN: The very first thing that springs to mind is the question of affective labour. I want to know what a “Labour Of Love” really looks like under late-capitalism. Certainly one of the most enduring questions of Feminist discourse is that of the feminization and devaluation of specific kinds of work: un-waged reproductive labour, certainly, but also the care and service professions. I think about how we do or do not value this kind of labour, how it is distributed, how some bodies are burdened with a greater expectation to provide it than others.

I think, also, about how individual potential to convert this labour into capital- be it monetary or otherwise- is determined by numerous governing factors; if we use very broad brushstrokes, we would say: principally race and class. There are infinite levels of nuance to unpack underneath that, though.

I think, also, about how Feminism as a discourse has had, and retains, a more difficult relationship to certain types of affective labour than others: I’m referring, specifically, to sex work. When you say the words “Feminism and Love” to me I am going to think about the monetization of love and the burden of societal stigma that exclusion which is the reality for so many people who find economic agency by trading emotional and sexual labour. I think, specifically, about the systematic exclusion of sex workers and advocates from the broader terrain of feminist politics and discourse, the way that mainstream White Feminism continues not just to fail sex workers, but to actively work against them. This, along with Transgender rights, have come to the fore (once again) as the battle lines along which one type of Feminist is distinguished from another.

A lot of people are calling this a generational divide, but as far as I can see, this is demonstrably untrue: I know plenty of SWERF’s in their 20’s, and plenty of radical sex work advocates in their 70’s.

Generally, I think about all the sex workers in my life who expend their life energy fighting abolitionists, people who would no doubt identify themselves as Feminists, who are intent on pushing back on their rights, denying their agency and dehumanising them generally. I think about how little this community sees by way of solidarity. I think about how endlessly exhausting this is for a great many people I love and it enrages me, frankly.

I think about what love can look like as a radical act: I think about Audre Lorde’s oft-misquoted doctrine of self-care. I think about what love as resistance looks like, what radical vulnerability and generosity look like. I think, especially, about what that looks like in the context of a de-colonial politic. I think about the love that exists between people who share struggle. I think about de-colonising desire, and what that looks like. I think about the love that is held in abundance by Elders of all kinds.

I think about how words like “No” and “Fuck You” can also be said with love. I think about the loving rage that sometimes seizes me and forces action.

I think also, about the twisted and damaged love I’ve received, as a survivor of both familial and intimate partner violence. In all cases the perpetrators were women, who called themselves Feminists. People are complicated. So is love. The myth of Feminine nurturance is a pervasive and deeply oppressive one.

I think about my marriage, which is not recognised legally in this country. I think about the love I have for my wife, and the love they have for me. I think about our ironic use of the word “wifey” for each other even though neither of us identify with womanhood, much less wife-hood. I think about what this word marriage means when we apply it to the daily lives of two non-binary, feminine presenting trans people, who are spurious of any state sanctioning of our relationship, but very happily chose to engage it anyway, on our own terms.

I think of the ferocity of love that comes from my Tiddas. I think about how the word Sister, when it comes from an Aboriginal person and especially, a feminine person, holds an entirely different bond of kinship and solidarity and love than when it comes from a white woman. I have a white sister- my immediate blood sister to a different mother- and she is the only non-Aboriginal person I would ever suffer to address me in this way.

As a non-binary transperson I don’t permit the use of feminized forms of endearment or address in relationship to me by anyone, at any time, with the exception of Blak kin. I think about how both love and feminism mean profoundly different things in different contexts.

Given all of that, it’s not surprising then, that Feminist is a term that I struggle with. But then, I don’t know any Revisionist Feminists (and I guess that’s my species) who don’t struggle with the term Feminist and the weight of complex expectation and ambivalence that comes with it. I struggle with it in the same way I struggle with Queer, with trans, with non-binary, and, in a different but intersecting way, with Aboriginal. I struggle in the sense that all of these words denote both an identity, an embodied and encultured experience, a struggle, and a political and theoretical terrain which extends far beyond the boundaries a singular terminology could mark out. They contain multitudes and they contain deep conflict, and in all cases it’s a conflict that pervades my life and my body. They are absolutely structural to my existence in the word. And yet, their failure is also inherent. They can only function as placeholder text for something far more immense and slippery. That is not to diminish any of them, or to diminish the richness and the functional political value of language. But it becomes problematic when we assume a commonality of meaning.

What does it mean for me to claim the title of Feminist, when Julie Bindle or Shiela Jeffries call themselves by the same name, and our politics bear absolutely zero resemblance to each other?

I’m generally more at home calling myself a militant Blak non-binary Queer than I am with calling myself a Feminist. Which is not to say I reject the term of the discourse, either. Not at all. I’m just more personally invested resisting gender-based oppression than I am in upholding what seems like a fairly nebulous, flawed and highly selective agenda called “Women’s Rights”. I don’t even know what that is, beyond a fairly narrow set of parameters that excludes me and almost everyone I care about.

Meg, SQUASH! is the third in a trilogy of works about sport, women, aggression and competition. What draws you to these themes?

MW: I feel like there was a point in my life where I made the decision to become an artist over an athlete. Somehow I thought that as a woman becoming an artist was more feasible than making a living as an athlete. I find sport fascinating as a kind of microcosm or intensified version of everyday life. It allows for behaviour and attitudes that are rarely accepted outside of sport, and yet these are attitudes and behaviours that can still be frowned upon for female athletes.

Women, aggression and competitive nature are very interesting areas of investigation. I have experienced high levels of violence and aggression. I would also say that I am a fiercely competitive individual, however, I think that most would describe me as a relatively calm, fair and softly spoken individual. I find this somewhat hidden or unspoken behaviour and the rules surrounding it intriguing. There are platforms in which aggressive behaviour is permissible for women…but only to a certain extent. Then there’s the realm of female aggression and damaging competitive attitudes against other women and ourselves.

You both, at times, work with duration, pain and the body. Can you speak to us about why this is and who/what has influenced you artistically?

SJN: People have been asking me this question for 13 years, and honestly I’m still not sure how to answer it! I have worked with duration and endurance differently in every work I have ever made, so there is not a single answer.

There is an assumption that performance makers who work with pain or physical mortifications of any kind are in it for ultimately exhibitionistic reasons. That might be true for some artists, and you might be able to apply that reading to the work of others if your engagement is superficial.

I am actually profoundly disinterested, and actually quite annoyed, by the Spectacle of Pain. I am annoyed by the fetishism of endurance, too. The fact that I do something for 12 hours is not interesting in and of itself. I’ve worked longer and more grueling shifts in hospitality. Women have longer labours than that.

Likewise, sticking a few pins in myself is not challenging or interesting unto itself- I do much more physically hardcore things for fun, on my own time, and I don’t call it art. What is interesting is the artistic application of those practices. I think there is an assumption that if you are making body based work you are out for the shock value. This is such a boring, persistent and reductive reading. It’s a distinctly elitist, western discourse and a masculinist one at that; this voyeuristic display of physical dominance. It’s also deeply false, in my case at least. I couldn’t care less about shocking people – I am actually much more concerned with ushering an audience past the shock threshold so we can get on with the more interesting and intimate business of transmutation, dreaming, and magic.

Ultimately that’s what draws me to these practices. Repetition, duration, trance states- all of these things are tried and true pathways to the Ecstatic and that is what fascinates and drives me the most.

They are capable of opening doors into the numinous through which both performer and audience can enter. They are ways of dialoguing with the unseen, and a way that the bodies of strangers can speak deeply to each other, there are sublime openings and exchanges enabled in that space if you pilot it right. There is big healing to be found there. I made my first solo work in 2006, after several years of ensemble performance. I set out on solo practice with one objective in mind: I wanted the body of the audience, be that an individual body or a collective body, to be as strongly engaged and implicated in the work as the body of the performer. I wanted to create frameworks for co-manifestation of complex and volatile states. That remains the case today.

A lot of diverse interests have fed into this path: early in my practice I studied Butoh intensively, in Australia and Japan. I had been a self-harming teenager and a BDSM-practicing adult. I have been a practicing witch for as long as I can remember- I was steeped in both western occultism, mysticism as well as the deeply inscribed ancestral cultural patterning throughout my upbringing. I possess more than a passing fancy for techno and entheogens, and have been going to dance parties and raves since my late teens, and these spaces have and continue to teach me a great deal about collective transcendental ritual.

I am also an Aboriginal person who has been divested of a direct connection to my ancestral customs and rituals, or at the very least, the set ritual vocabularies which might have been passed to me by my mob had my family managed to maintain that continuity.

I am deeply driven by the need to give form to the conversation that is taking place continually in my body by other, more improvisational means. This kind of performance has been a way of giving voice to haunted flesh, to a roaring in the blood. I am interested, also, in taking a de-colonial stake in a field of practice which has historically been overwhelmingly white and which has relied heavily on dubious pseudo-Shamanic posturing, unreconstructed primitivism. In some respects, it is an act of very deliberate de-colonial reclamation.

MW: At the moment I know that my body can handle endurance and pain and this is a strength within my practice. I know that there will be a time when endurance is no longer my strength and that the pain will be all too overpowering and damaging. This too may become an area of interest for my practice. I don’t know. I know it hurts more with every project, as I acquire a new injury related to age and relative disuse of certain muscles and joints in recent years. I think of it as a really honest language for an artist. There is no way of hiding emotion in an endurance event and there is no certain way of influencing, determining or predicting an outcome. In this way I find it both exciting and intimidating.

I am mostly influenced by local artists, whom I have come to meet and know through their practice. Artists I have recently been influenced by include: Mira Oosterweghel, who uses both her own body in performance, but also delegates performance to other artists; and theatremakers, THE RABBLE, whom I was very fortunate to spend 2016 with as Lead Artist Intern. Theatre for THE RABBLE is a conversation that sits somewhere between extreme pursuits of the body and mind, exquisite beauty, pain and comedic and political intelligence. Emma Valente of THE RABBLE has continued to act as mentor for my artistic practice into 2017, and is dramaturg for SQUASH!

Meg, you have participated in Adhocracy numerous times over the years, in different ways. Tell us about the Adhocracy experience from an artist’s point of view (participating artist and artist in the audience).

MW: In 2014 I took part in my first Adhocracy residency, Future Present, alongside 9 other SA artists under the guidance of Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects. At this point in time I was at a major crossroads in my career as a purely visual artist. I had become interested in interdisciplinary and collaborative art making, having only ever worked in solitude in a largely isolating manner. Exposure over a two-week period to the methods of artists largely unknown to me, allowed me to explore process and take risks in an environment where no idea was precious. I learnt how to make in a space where it was okay to be vulnerable, experimental and chuck things out when they’re just not working. It was during this residency that I first met and collaborated with performers and theatremakers, Ashton Malcolm and Josephine Were. Together, we continue to decipher and define a language of making that sits somewhere between live art, theatre and performative installation and have been prolifically generating works across all disciplines.

In 2016, I was able to take part in Adhocracy as part of a newly formed collective of artists: Hew Parham, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro and Sascha Budimski, on Tension of Opposites. This was the first time all of the artists had worked together and the work was in its very initial stages of development. The platform of Adhocracy allowed us to test the viability of the team’s working relationship within a collaborative framework, and to devise material in a compressed (and somewhat intense) fashion. With access to multiple audiences and the ability to talk to the work and respond to critical feedback and discussion over the three days of presentation of the work in progress, was extremely beneficial to the team and the direction for the work leading into its next stage of development.

Adhocracy is also just a very excellent opportunity to observe and to chat. To see artists come from all over Australia to share their process, listen to early creative thoughts and engage in a national conversation, Waterside in Port Adelaide, is actually just a giant treat every year.

SJ, last time you were in Adelaide, you presented a new work Stone Tape Theory, as part of PADA’s Near & Far exhibition and the first Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. The work then went straight to SPILL in the UK. What is the experience of presenting your work in Australian and European contexts as a queer, Aboriginal artist?

SJ: The short answer goes like this: I am a bi-cultural, globalised, neo-colonial, late capitalist, Indigenous Diaporic, queer subject, and unpacking what that means is a big part of my practice and life. Just to widen the context: I come from a background of geographical and cultural dispossession: I was raised by a single Aboriginal mother and we moved around a lot. Just as she had done, as the offspring of itinerant workers, and as they had done as people who were dispossessed of their land. So, spatial liminality is second nature to me. I’ve never called a singular place home and I doubt I ever will. I’ve been on the move pretty constantly between Australia and Europe for the duration of my adult life and practice. My practice has grown in the in-between space in geographical, discursive, formal and cultural terms. Thresholds and crossroads are my place in the world, everything I make is generated from within these spaces.

A work like Stone Tape Theory (STT) travels more easily between contexts because it is speaking quite broadly. First and foremost, it’s a work about mental health and my specific struggle with complex trauma. It’s not a work which has what audiences might see as recognisably Indigenous or queer themes, despite the fact that it is made by a Queer Indigenous artist and my subjectivity has entirely shaped its realisation.

Whether or not a work, made by an Aboriginal artist, which is not explicitly relating to their Aborginality, is still an “Aboriginal Artwork” is like enquiring after the sound of one hand clapping…it’s a question I hope we are all bored of, by now.

One of the tricky things, of course is, once an artist is identified as Aboriginal, they are not allowed to be or make anything else. Queer artists often fall prey to the same pigeonholing, but to a different, and I would argue, significantly lesser extent. Aboriginal artists who choose to (*gasp*) occasionally make work about other things are often treated by the art public and occasionally by their peers as somewhat treacherous or suspicious- it’s just further evidence of our failure to fulfil the criteria of a white-centric standard of Indigenous “authenticity”. This just a part of a bigger, and much more complex, structure of systemic exclusion which seeks to sequester Aboriginal practice away from the main body of contemporary art. It’s just another manifestation of a colonial imperative to keep Aboriginal people and artists firmly in our place. It was a bold choice for TARNANTHI and PADA to jointly present Stone Tape Theory in the context of a major review of Indigenous practice, because the dominant perceptions of what that can be remain quite narrow in Australia. Next Wave made a similarly bold choice by programming Concerto No. 3 in BlakWave.

I’m thankful to the presenters I have worked with in this country who have shown this kind of guts, and it does take guts.

I presented STT at SPILL London within weeks of the Adelaide presentation. It was the second time I had been commissioned by SPILL, the first was Bone Library in 2015. Bone Library had received a thunderous reception at the previous SPILL so the pressure felt very high. I made the work, as I make all my work, entirely on my own.

I had been without a fixed address for about 9 months prior to the presentation, I didn’t have a studio, and I was managing what can only be described as a fully blown nervous breakdown, I was really held together by frayed sticky tape at that point. So to say the work was pretty raw is an understatement.

It went down well in London, though I am sure it confused and polarised some people. It was not an easy work. It required some investment of risk and discomfort from the audience. Some people literally left screaming: even I was terrified to be in there sometimes, the force of energy summoned by the work was immense and occasionally tipped into actual horror.

I have a long history of presenting and working in the UK, in particular. It was really in England that I first established my practice, after I moved there in 2006. The live art community, and specifically the community in Bristol where I was based, had a big part to play in growing me up artistically. Much of my practice, especially with regards to the works which focus on the broader terrain of colonial history, have been born out of my own cultural and political bi-location between England and Australia. England still feels wildly foreign to me at times but then, so does Australia.

That said, adapting Bone Library for an overseas audience was a nerve wracking experience. First of all, there are protocols and relationships that I have to carefully observe and manage in order to take the work off-country. There were a lot of ethical questions which I had to very rigourously engage before the work was ready to tour. That took about 6 months of extra work.

I did not expect the work to receive the rapturous reception that it did at SPILL, or subsequently at Venice International Performance Art Week. It was a really humbling experience, because I saw how deeply audiences from literally all over the world (there were delegations from every continent at Venice) were able to connect with it.

The English really surprised me, to be honest. UK audiences are known for their coolness, and I also did not expect them to so readily connect with the work, and to do so with such depth and sincerity. People were bawling their eyes out, like really really crying, when I read the Elder’s welcome handed the bones into their care. Bone custodians from everywhere regularly write to me to express their gratitude for the work, for the insight that it gave them and the chance they had to connect with some sense of intimacy and agency to a history which has been denied. It’s not just Aboriginal people who are denied our truth when history is suppressed. Settlers are also denied the opportunity to reckon with their own part in that history and to heal their own relationship to it as the descendants of perpetrators. Similarly, the work has yielded incredible, heartful dialogues between me and others whose cultures have been marked by similar traumas. This is part of the cultural labour that I aim to achieve with Bone Library, and many of my other works.

I dearly wish I could say I had had the same experience performing the work in Australia. But sadly the work has only been performed to scale in this country once in its 7 year life span, for five days in Melbourne in 2010. Likewise, Unsettling Suite, the body of works that Bone Library comes from, has also only been seen once in this country, at Performance Space in 2013. Elders and Aboriginal community have expressed their appreciation of the work, as have quite a few emerging Aboriginal artists who have personally expressed to me how influential Bone Library and the other works of the Unsettling Suite have been on their own practices. This is hugely rewarding and sustaining for me to know. I had wonderful audiences for the 2010 performance and I know that and, that said, I’ll repeat that the work has been produced to scale once, in its 7 year life span.

In the 7 years I’ve been performing it, Bone Library has received a total of about 600 words in coverage from the Australian arts press, and a good 200 of those were expended by a critic fixating on my fashion choices, hairstyle and “air of contemporary urban sophistication” which apparently undermined her own expectations of what an Aboriginal person looks like…this is not me having sour grapes, by the way!

I also have a lot of really, deeply wonderful and nourishing support here, and owe a tremendous amount to the people who have backed my practice fiercely. I’m just alluding, perhaps not so subtly, to some structural disadvantages that have affected me as an Indigenous queer experimental artist working in this country.

We also have a problem, in Australia, with devaluing our own artistic legacies. This is a very colonial problem. Institutionally, whole local performance histories have gone criminally under-recorded in favour of a focus on the European and American cannon. This shows up, for me and other artists, in peculiar ways. For instance, recently, I was made aware of a graduate show at a well-known art college in which a student had made a piece that directly plagiarised a work of mine. I’m not talking about an obscure piece, either, but a work which I have performed all over the world, at least once a year, for the last 12 years. If a student had made a piece that was, say, directly plagiarising the work of any of my European or American peers, I can’t imagine they would have gotten away with it. But “local” artists are fair game because we are fundamentally valued less. Art students know everything there is to know about Marina Abramovic but they’ve never heard of Jill Orr. And our cultural memory here is so alarmingly contracted.

People who are students now, even in cities with such rich local performance histories as Sydney, know everything about the 70’s in New York but nothing about the radical work that was being produced in the 90’s in their own town, by living artists who probably live around the corner from them. I find this confounding and deeply saddening.

All of these things have been very good reasons for me to put a lot of distance between myself and Australia, at times. Distance is also essential for me to gain perspective on the things that I want to talk about here, especially with regards to de-colonial discourse. It helps me to generate and clarify ideas. It’s hard to do that here, because the problems you want to address are inches from your face at all times.

Tell us about something you are currently obsessed with?

SJ: I’ve been too concerned with survival recently to have the time for many obsessions, sadly. Hopefully that will change. Other than that, I guess my thoughts are quite occupied by environmental calamity and existential collapse, and the looming specter of theocratic fascism.

Planting a medicinal herb garden while the world burns, basically.

I’m also trying to finish writing a couple of books. I’m heavily pre-occupied with re-grounding back in Australia after 9 years predominantly based in Europe – that is a shock to the system. I am obsessed by all the things that are fucked about Australia politically and continually strengthening my own agency and that of those around me to resist, agitate and transform this neo-liberal colonial white supremacist political cesspit we’re all trying to survive in. I’ve also been pretty obsessed with body-building and weightlifting for about a year now, lifting heavy shit keeps me sane.

MW: To be honest, I’m not great with obsessions. I don’t really have interesting ones. I do become engrossed with current projects and then ways of switching off from projects.

The problem is that my projects often require a huge change to my lifestyle in order to realise a project outcome. Right now, I would say that I’m obsessed with the game of squash and becoming quite good at it (I hope).

The counter obsession is watching mindless documentaries on Netflix such as Locked Up – a documentary that follows prisoners in penitentiaries in the U.S., but I always find a link between these mindless obsessions and the things I’m currently working on.

As independent artists what are the kinds of initiatives and programs that you want to see further support for in the future? What excites you in Australian arts?

SJN: Top of the wishlist? I would like to see independent artists become unionised, the same as any other industry. I would like to see an end, once and for all, to the cult of genius and the speculation economy. I would like to see more initiatives that increase the industrial organising power of artists and arts workers, because we are an extremely exploited workforce.

I would like to see more opportunities for artists to become politicised and organised around labour and class, because right now the arts is dominated by, and upholding, overwhelmingly bourgeois cultural values to our great collective detriment.

I would like to see more opportunities for rigorous training and development for younger artists, in particular, outside of institutional frameworks. I owe my own practice to the training and mentorship I received at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. The Impact Ensemble was an incredible and totally accessible program. I would love to see it returned to its former glory. I would love to see more initiatives like it. I would like to see them abundantly funded.

I would like to see more de-colonial pedagogy. I would like to see a decentralisation of power outside of major institutions. I would like to see more and more and more Indigenous led organisations and more Indigenous people in positions of power within the arts. I would like to see how this would change the landscape for the better. I would like to imagine a future where Indigenous artists and people are running our own show, and the real depth, complexity, diversity and strength of our contributions as innovators, artists and leaders was give then value it deserves.

MW: I have obviously greatly benefitted from my relationship with Vitalstatistix and programs such as Adhocracy that champion experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and the importance of diverse audiences for works in various stages of development. As a former co-director of an Artist Run Initiative (ARI), I also champion artists who create opportunities that bridge gaps for other artists.

I highly support initiatives that nurture artists in their early stages of practice and those that interrogate artistic processes. It’s okay to have a good cry or two during this process!

I defer to an earlier question about artistic community with regard to what excites me about Australian arts. I just think that within the independent scene there is an overwhelming amount of support between peers and it is these relationships that allow us to keep kicking goals (shameless sports reference) as artists struggling in a pretty grim environment right now, all the while managing to sustain important, relevant and exciting conversations surrounding topics of substance that continue to matter.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists Chris Scherer and Larissa McGowan who are both developing solo dance works through a partnership between Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency (PADA).

Chris is a South Australian-born cross-disciplinary artist and performer currently working between Berlin and Australia. Larissa is a SA-based choreographer and dancer, who has worked and toured widely with Australia Dance Theatre and now works independently.

Vitals: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Larissa McGowan: I am a contemporary dancer and choreographer and I love challenging myself to find new body pathways. I am always working to develop movement that I haven’t explored before. This is always going to be a challenge as the body wants to develop and learn your natural body pathways. I find it difficult yet exhilarating to challenge it.

My artistic practice is always made more interesting by using a collaborative process. I work closely with a director and a dramaturg to challenge my ideas and to develop a stronger overall concept or vision.

Dance is a visual and ephemeral world that allows us to feel things through our body. I love being able to evoke a feeling for an audience through the emotive qualities dance can offer.

Chris Scherer: My artistic practise is always jumping around and is super specific to what I’m working on/with. My story is basically this: I danced as a kid and then quit when I became more interested in theatre as a teenager. I went to acting school at AC Arts and then, once I had graduated, decided to go through the dance program to get in touch with my body again.

The goal at the time was to do more experimental theatre, not to become a dancer… and then it kinda just happened. I was really into making films and devising work and then I moved to Europe. It was only when I was there [in Europe] that I realised I had a pretty flexible skill set.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a traditional artistic form, like dancey-dance or a classical play (which I’m starting to think could be kind of fun) but it does make it hard to articulate a clear practice. I just do what I do, I don’t think I can be any more articulate than that. Whatever I feel like the work needs, I give it a go. What do they say? Jack of all trades, master of none?

V: You are each developing solo works about iconic artists who inspire your own artistic practice. Chris, your work Duncan responds to the philosophies of dance pioneer Isodora Duncan; Larissa, your work Cher explores the persona and characters of this singer, actress, icon, and ultimate pop chameleon. Could you tell us about these women and why you are investigating them?

LM: As a woman, I am constantly drawn to those iconic female figures that have somehow paved a way for empowering us. I love how Cher has been able to move with the times. She has remained relevant by doing this and has repeatedly reinvented herself through various personas. She is able to transform by breaking convention and challenging the system while remaining a constant in a male dominanated entertainment industry. She has qualities that rings true for me as an artist and help me question my ideas, work and presence within my industry.

CS: I have been researching Isadora for quite some years now. In 2014 I made a dance work with AC Arts students called Izzy D, which was actually shown as a double bill alongside Larissa’s work.

I find Isadora to be such an incredible woman. The more I read about her, the more she inspires me. Isadora was really such a radical and pivotal artistic figure in history. Her work is hugely significant for many reasons, but to me, I am continually impressed by her commitment to, and belief in, her work. She really had a dream for dance.

She was a social and political radical. She practiced free love, advocated for women’s rights and was a living symbol of revolt and revolution. She was an educator and an intellectual.

V: How are you each exploring these women through the art works you are creating? What is your approach?

LM: I feel like Cher is more of a totem for the overall theme of the work. The work is forming ideas around reinvention and changing with the times. The work can explore all of these things and play with gender roles; power and dominance; popular culture and identity.

I think this will be a work that shows transformation and power but also over-the-top entertainment. And with the range of stimulus to work from it will be a crazy experience – I am particularly excited to play with auto-tuning.

CS: I’m using the work of Isadora Duncan as an artistic score. I’m looking at her contributions to art; her influence on other artists of the time and her work as an educator. I’m trying to capture her radical, intellectual and political qualities. And I am really trying to honour her ideology, and working method, while generating something suited to a contemporary context in my own artistic voice.

I’ve been inspired by Isadora, but in Duncan I have tried to use an expanded choreography that questions what her work could have been now.

Isadora encouraged her pupils to have a sense of authorship – so I have taken plenty!

V: You have both spent time working and training in South Australia; what do you think is particular about being here as an artist?

LM: I think SA has an excellent range of artists from many fields and this allows for a more collaborative way of working. For a close-knit community it really thrives on developing ideas and finding unique ways to put art out there.

SA is the festival state but this also happens all year round on different scales and I believe people here are keen to see work of any level.

CS: I love the sense of community in South Australia. I have always felt really supported by peers and people working within the industry. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Adelaide is smaller (than say Berlin) and a lot of artists have come through the same institutions here. I think it generates a warmth and long-term relationships within the industry. Well this is my experience – to be honest I don’t know what people say behind my back! 😉

V: What are some current key influences (ideas, collaborators, other artists, other forms or experiences) on your practice? What excites you about dance globally at the moment?

LM: I have recently been interested in popular culture themes to help an audience understand, or be more engaged in, the abstract world of contemporary dance. Movies, music, video games – anything that connects us to our own reality or has become a part of our everyday life – I am able to combine these themes with an abstract style of movement.

I am also still fascinated by the human body and how it moves. So I guess I will always come back to making movement that tests how far the body can actually go.

CS: Over the last few years I have been ping-ponging between a theatre context and a visual art context in the work I’ve had as a performer. Although there is a vast difference in what I do, and how I do it, I have to remind myself that my body doesn’t really morph that radically. Working in this way has been a major influence in the type of work I am making with Duncan. I have this diverse performative history, and now I am just selecting what to pull out. I can’t deny that working with colleagues, and for employers, has really helped shape the work I am making. Their influence is too strong to ignore.

What excites me about dance at the moment is that it is super open. It can be anything.

V: Your creative development with Vitals/PADA will end with a public showing of your work-in-development. What are the benefits of putting work in front of an audience while you are in the process of making it? How does it contribute to your process?

LM: It is always a blessing to test ideas on an audience. I feel a work is only finished, or fully put together, once it has been observed. Art is about connecting and I can only develop my ideas further after constructive feedback.

CS: For this process specifically, having a work-in-progress showing for the public really shifted the way I approached the development with Vitals/PADA. I have spent many months working on Duncan, but I was really caught in my head. I was working through it conceptually, doing a lot of research – diving deeper and deeper in an attempt to build what I hope is a strong ideology – but once I got to the studio I knew I had to apply it.

This really was a major step and was super hard. I don’t know if I would have made this step if I didn’t have the push of having to show something. Of course I have been in this position before, but with this project specifically it was a major challenge. When you are working alone, sometimes a strong push ‘like now I really have to do it’ is what you need.

V: You have both worked with larger institutions, as well as having your own independent practice. What is the value of working with smaller organisations like PADA and Vitals –what do you get out of a relationship with an organisation?

LM: It is extremely necessary to work with smaller organisations. I feel like the work is strengthened even more by the people curating them.

The close relationships between independent artist and smaller organisations often means working much more closely together on a project, the artist’s vision, and the overall outcome. I also like seeing my work performed in places and spaces I wouldn’t normally use. Smaller organisations are truly amazing at finding a way to make art happen.

CS: I love working between larger and smaller institutions. Firstly the type of audiences you reach are very different. You only have to look around at the audience within different sized organisations/venues to realise that.

Generally speaking, I have found that when working with smaller organisations (such as Vitals/ PADA) the artistic community is more concentrated in these venues. This is always nice, especially in terms of constructive feedback and for a sense of community and support. The support from within the organisation is also important in facilitating the project to the final stages, rather than just programing finished works. Additionally, working closely with people within smaller institutions has helped me clarify and refine my ideas.

On a practical level, the types of support I have received from Vitals and PADA would not have been possible from larger institutions. Whether the programs are there or not, I am still developing my practice and my career is still evolving. But in saying this, I think working within larger institutions and for ‘larger’ names has also given me experiences that have made opportunities available in smaller institutions. Somehow for me, this has gone hand in hand.

V: How do you feel about the role of artists and art in the current conservative global climate?

LM: Hmm, I have personally found it very challenging to make work and develop ideas with the funding opportunities currently available. I would like to know that my work has a way to be seen and toured after developments or small performance outcomes. I always feel sad knowing that a work only has a certain life span due to lack of money or assistance for independent artists.

I also feel like dance has become so commercialised that contemporary art is becoming a style that people just don’t go and see because they think they don’t understand it. I hope people can become more informed about art and the positive impact it can have on a healthy mind, and creativity and a wider view of the world. It can teach us to be open and question our own feelings and opinions about the world.

CS: We gotta keep going!

But, really, it is one of my motivations for making Duncan. Given the dominant ideology of our times: neoliberalism, I’m interested in addressing notions of individual freedom, democratic artistic space and the lineage of revolutionary trailblazers.

V: What’s up next for you, after us?

LM: I have a second stage development of a work called Owning the Moment. The work looks at our needs and desires to acquire things. It allows the audience to bid and remove parts of the work from the show; allowing them to change the viewed performance for the entire audience. I’m making it in collaboration with Sandpit – we are currently exploring how this acquisition can be made possible with technology.

CS: I have some really nice gigs coming up – I can’t talk super specifically about them as they have not been publically announced – but I have work in Bulgaria, Russia and Switzerland taking me through to the end of the year. After that, who knows?

There are also shows in Berlin with Schaubühne, where I am a guest artist, and I have a few new projects up my sleeve. I plan on getting stuck into my own work between travels as I try to keep up with making while working for others.

You gotta mix it up!

Vitalstatistix spoke with Melbourne-based artist Lz Dunn, whose work Aeon features as this year’s Adhocracy residency project, and South Australian artist and creative producer Alysha Herrmann who will be participating in the Aeon residency.

V: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Alysha Herrmann: My artistic practice is a shifting mess of questions. I currently describe myself as a parent, writer, theatre-maker and cultural organiser.

I make things. I help others make things.

I am interested in projects that explore connection and vulnerability.

I am interested in projects that are cross disciplinary and are in conversation with non-arts experiences (like theatre + farming). I am interested in collaboration and experimenting and exploring and not knowing.

My independent works in 2016 have been intimate (for between 1 and 8 audience members at a time) and have delved into soundscapes/audio and installation rather than traditional ‘plays’. I am interested in theatre-making that blurs the lines between roles and focuses instead on what collaborators bring to the table and making something that wasn’t there before.

I am interested in projects that are in direct conversation with audience – that might be literally through live text message conversations, or by here and now subject matter or by ancillary experiences (like feasts and dress- ups pre or post show) – especially audiences who have felt left out or intimidated by theatre/art spaces/worlds. Regional communities and young people have my heart. I like urban discoveries and old people too.

I have stepped in and out of many roles – performer, director, producer, writer, co-designer, dramaturg – some roles fit more comfortably than others, some roles come more easily than others, some roles I have fumbled my way through.

Being in the room and on the floor making things is one of my favourite things. I like to say yes.

Lz Dunn: I’ve realised that what I continue to be interested in is creating experiences and spaces for people to move through. I get excited by quite large concepts and look for ways to craft a time and space that invites people to consider ideas through an experience of doing something somewhere rather than watching something happen. I’m reading a book at the moment, which compares Western and Chinese philosophies of time and processes of change, where I came across a phrase I really like. Rather than trying to create ‘being’ by insisting on precision and distinction, it speaks of a need to ‘advocate the outline’. I think this might be what I try to do.

Walking seems to recur as a form and birds as a theme. The possibilities of queerness are key too. In process, collaboration is really important for me. I have some key collaborators that I work with regularly (most of them are working on Aeon) and I really love the way things diverge and explode when I’m working with other brains and bodies.

There’s a generosity and reciprocity in collaboration that is really energising. I really think I get as much out of artistically leading a project as I do out of working to support and share someone else’s initial vision because I get to go places I wouldn’t have otherwise taken myself.

As well as my collaborative projects I sometimes make videos that either capture field recordings or field performances and I’ve started a solo dance practice over the last two years that has been really fun. I’m presenting my first public performance at the end of this year, which is very exciting and pretty terrifying.

V: Lz, Aeon is part of a body of work you have made that takes birds as an inspiration and is informed by queer ecology. Can you tell us about your interest in these fields of inquiry?

L: Aeon evolved from an earlier project called Flyway (that I made with Lawrence [English] and Lara [Thoms]) where I was interested in linking migratory birds with how we experience ‘nature’ in urban environments and our acculturated perceptions of boundaries. I’m interested in birds both personally (yes, I do enjoy some bird watching) and culturally. Birds in cities, like pigeons, are often viewed as pests. Still we accept them as belonging there but not in the ‘natural world’ beyond. Queer culture is also something that has historically been naturalised in cities–seen as the deviant product of human culture, not nature.

Queer Ecology is about questioning dominant ideas of what is considered ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, by asking what powers influenced this way of thinking and who or what might be excluded or made invisible by that.

For me, birds have become this very visible, specific lens through which to meditate on interconnection, how we share space with humans and other species.

V: Alysha, you have previously participated in an Adhocracy residency project called Future Present with artist Rosie Dennis in 2014. Can you tell us your thoughts on the value of this annual residency opportunity for South Australian artists?

A: I’m still wrestling with the questions Future Present woke for me. That alone speaks to the value it had for me.

Fight this footprint/ with the fire in your fear/ the legacy in your belly/ we can begin this #futurepresent // #tinytwitterpoem 2014

I think that there are multiple points of value in the annual residency opportunity as a whole but the ones that most stand out to me are:

Engaging with the practice and project of another artist – and specifically an artist from elsewhere – is particularly useful to spark new ways of thinking and working. Although artists often collaborate, we also often work in isolation or often work in familiar teams with people we trust. We don’t always get to see inside the process and practice of artists who might work in very different (or quite similar) ways to us. Working with an interstate artist/team can also open up a doorway to other interstate artists/ideas/collaborations.
Meeting and working with other SA artists. Seeding friendships, future collaborations and networks of support. Stumbling upon those excellent local projects and people that you just aren’t aware of because your circle hasn’t organically found them by itself.
Attachment to and nurturing of a relationship with Vitalstatistix as an artistic organisation and a creative community. The sense that we are not alone in these big hungry questions we are wrestling with. The opportunity to have our work and our voices amplified by something bigger than our own networks.

Since Future Present, I’ve employed other artists from that residency on projects I’ve Creative Produced, become friends with others, continued to share information, ideas and support with all of the SA artists, continued to be inspired by Rosie Dennis and the work of UTP and Vitals. Future Present was only two weeks but it had a significant and ongoing impact on me and my practice.

I came away from Future Present asking why art? Is that the best use of your time, does it actually achieve your mission? Or would you be better off using your time as an activist, a social worker, a teacher, a farmer?

So far I’m still making art.

V: Aeon is a site-specific work, which invites audiences on a sound walk. You both have experience making works for sites, whether that is parks, city streets, lounge rooms or other locations outside of formal performance or gallery spaces. What are some important things to consider when making a site-specific work?

A: Why are you making site specific work? I think asking yourself that question first of all is pretty important. Because your reason might be about testing a way of working, or about who your audience is, or about something else entirely. All of which can, and probably should, shape how you might approach making whatever it is. Depending on the exact specificity (loungerooms vs a particular loungeroom) I think spending as much time in that space as you can before you start making the thing is good. I think thinking about what that site might mean to the people/creatures who already use it and how your use might interrupt or challenge their use is really important – especially if that use takes power away from those who already have less power than you – that doesn’t mean don’t use it, but I’m saying I think we need to have considered those impacts.

Considering the logistics is also important – like where will I go to the toilet, what happens if it rains, what’s our evacuation plan, who do I need permission from to work here, am I okay with things being stolen or vandalised (and how does that change the experience I intend?).

L: I tend to work from a kernel of an idea or question that expands slowly. So the interest is often conceptual and may not be reliant on a specific site but the idea itself is reliant on considering the specifics of sites. To make site-specific work you need to be interested in the realities of working outdoors, in public space or in non-traditional art venues; it’s unpredictable and lots of elements are out of your control. This needs to be central to the idea and the form so that you’re not feeling anxious about needing things to be a certain way for it to ‘work’. It will always be different and that’s what keeps it dynamic.

V: You are both parents to young children/babies. Has the experience of parenting changed your perspective on art making or sustainable arts practice?

A: I have an almost 13 year old and a 2 year old. I became a parent for the first time before I became an adult – and before I stumbled into the arts – and it was my first child who actually led me to art making. I became a participant in a community arts and cultural development theatre project that was a co-production between Riverland Youth Theatre and Vitalstatistix about teenage mothers (which I wrote about for the Griffith Review in 2014). It transformed my life and led me into this rabbit hole of art making.

Parenting my second child has been different in many ways, because I’ve grown and changed so much and my life and its circumstances have shifted so significantly. There are questions I asked myself this time around that weren’t even on my radar in the slightest the first time around. Questions about gender and language and clothing and parenting practices and lifestyle that with my first child I just did what everyone else was doing, I replicated what my own parents had done. With my second child I questioned everything. I think if anything my artistic practice changed my perspective on parenting more than the other way around.

Having said that –

My youngest was 5 weeks old when I participated in the Future Present residency with Vitals. I was still breastfeeding, so expressing milk throughout the first week while they were home with my partner and then they were with us in the room during the second week of the residency. That residency was exploring climate change through the focus of primary production. Everything about that experience, from the themes, to the reality of having baby in the room while ‘making’ honed and shifted my perspective in myriad ways. It still hasn’t settled. I’m still discovering and figuring out what that means. What I have to sacrifice, what I don’t have to sacrifice, how I make, what I make, when I make, who I make with, where I make.

My perspective as an artist is completely shaped by my role as a parent though, absolutely, and I try to always name that in my bios and introductions because it does inform me as ‘artist’.

L: I’m sure it has but I’m not even three months into it–still in the magical twilight zone– so I might need to get back to you on that in another 10 months! But basically I think all artists are thinking about the sustainability of their practice all the time and parenting is just one version of a big life change. If you decide having children is also important, and you get the opportunity to make that happen, then you’re just really lucky. A couple of years ago I had a chat with an artist who is also a parent to three kids and she had just taken a bookkeeping job. And she saw that work as part of her practice too. She’s a trained dancer but is really expansive about what she brings into her practice – she lets everything she does have a creative value that can feed into her making process. I think it’s a great way to move through the world.

Saying that, I’m always scheming towards setting up a utopic art commune where my family and my friends can all live in some permacultured, beachside paradise where awesome humans from the big wide world come to stay so we don’t all implode.

V: Lz, you are an associate artist with Melbourne-based experimental arts organisation Aphids. Your Aeon creative team also includes some long-term collaborators. How has your connection to a group of artists and collaborators informed your practice?

L: Yes! I feel so fortunate to work with the artists I do and they massively inform my practice. I’ve been working with Lara [Thoms] and Willoh [S. Weiland] as part of Aphids since 2010, and Lawrence [English] since 2011 through our project, Flyway. Collaborating is really important for me; it means ideas can develop in conversation with other brains and that I’m constantly opening up to new possibilities and processes.

I think maintaining collaborations does take a lot of effort and as Aphids, Willoh and Lara and I have invested a lot in our collaborative relationship and worked really hard to keep making art together. I have huge respect for their brains and their art. In every project we do we learn more about our process and how our specific skills and interests complement each other. We all initiate quite different kernels of ideas but share key approaches and aesthetics, which keeps a healthy tension alive.

I think my work with Lawrence draws on his interest in the act of listening, particularly in relation to field recording. His methodology for combining site-specific sound and musical elements really resonates with the ways I approach the performative experience of moving through and relating to space–it’s somewhere between a tangible, factual, very specific encounter and a sort of dreamscape of infinite possibilities. We use Flyway as a reference point in Aeon a lot. That shared understanding that crosses over projects is really valuable.

Also, working with other people is mostly more fun. Important.

V: Alysha, in 2015 you won the Australia Council’s Kirk Robson award which recognises young leadership in community arts and cultural development. What do you see as the future for CACD, socially engaged and community-based arts practice in Australia?

A: I feel like I’ve been asked this question before and I didn’t have a good answer the other time either. I think CACD, socially engaged and community-based arts practice is always shifting and redefining itself and will continue to do so into the future. I see more and more CACD and related practice creeping into mainstream artistic conversations nationally. I see a stronger recognition for the hunger communities and audiences have for experiences that have relevance to their lives and experiences. I see CACD and socially engaged practitioners continue to have a key role to play in advocacy at every level and they are more nationally organised and effective in doing so. I see CACD work pulling major institutions into the here and the now and the conversations we all keep avoiding.

I see regional practitioners that stop taking every else’s advice and start forging their own identities. I see less organisations and more organised individuals. I see organised individuals inserting themselves into the work of non-arts organisations as integral and valued players. I see less money. Less ‘opportunities’. I see ‘opportunity’. I see smaller scale and larger scale. I see echoes of 20 years ago and promises of 20 years from now. I see continued commitment and increasing need.

How do each of you feel about the future of the arts nationally? What kind of arts initiatives and arts organisations do you think are most critical at this time?

A: I keep looking back and thinking about all the amazing opportunities and pathways and connections that got me to where I am now – so many of them no longer exist. So I am angry and demoralised and worried about the future, especially for young and emerging artists. But I also think in the biggest picture, the longer ‘game’ and how sometimes old structures have to entirely collapse to make space for new foundations. So I feel both disillusioned and hopeful. There is both grief and excitement. The challenges and complexities of this moment in time feel like an invitation to tear down and replace the things that are broken, to question everything. I’m not saying that’s easy. It terrifies me and I question my ability and skill to even contribute to that, but it feels important and valuable and ‘right’.

I think arts initiatives and organisations that foster collaboration and questioning and are local in action but global in thought are critical at this time.

Initiatives that actively question who is in the room.

Initiatives that talk to the here and the now and the future maybes. Initiatives that invest in people, not product. Initiatives that explore the borders and the boundaries and all the blurriness. Initiatives that make people feel invited and welcomed AND manage to also be thought-provoking. Initiatives that build on and learn from the past and imagine new futures. Initiatives that give artists and audiences a framework and a space to ask questions.

Initiatives like Adhocracy are critical at this time.

Organisations that are willing to stick their neck out for everyone who hasn’t been invited to the table. Organisations willing to challenge themselves and their own history. Organisations willing to champion others, even when those others might be competitors. Organisations who foster connection, community, conversation and a willingness to not have all the answers. Organisations who share. Organisations who dream big and deliberately and act locally and intentionally.

Organisations like Vitalstatistix are critical at this time.

I consistently look to Vitalstatistix as a source of inspiration, provocation and reassurance. Adhocrary as a framework is totally something I want to see stolen and copied in as many locations as possible. I’m not even trying to suck up.

L: I feel really confused about a lot of the decisions that have been made. It can feel like a bit of a disaster.

There’s obviously a whole plethora of stuff to rant about on this topic but just to focus on a personal perspective, my practice has grown absolutely through the support of small to medium organisations. Every key opportunity I’ve had has been enabled by organisations that, like Vitals, value experimentation and give emerging and established artists support to test out new ideas and forms. They offer programs that encourage process as well as production. They provide residencies, laboratories, workshops, classes, development programs as well as presenting artist’s works. I think it’s this range of activity that builds artistic connections and conversations. It’s as valuable for emerging artists as it is for established ones because it’s the cross-pollination of practices that keeps the whole community dynamic. I moved to Melbourne six years ago not really knowing anyone and it’s through local organisations like Next Wave, Dance House, Arts House, Lucy Guerin Inc. and Aphids that I was able to make connections with my local peers and art heroes. And that’s because they intentionally offer accessible programs to engage artists at various stages of their practices and in various contexts. They’re not operating behind closed doors. They invest in creating connections.

I think this residency program at Vitals is a great example of this. That we can come and work with local artists and share ideas and processes and experiment and play and then share with audiences is really valuable. That applications are open to artists and thinkers across disciplines broadens the dialogue. That it’s quite difficult and uncertain and that there’s a real risk of failure is also important. It takes a lot of consideration and effort to bring a group like this together and we don’t really know what’s going to happen and it’s not a finished work and we need to find methods for many people to establish a connection with a process and an idea that’s already underway but certainly not finished! That’s where the interesting and exciting challenges are and organisations like Vitals take that on because they value artistic risk. We all really need that.

I guess the positive side to the whole arts-funding debacle has been the energy and action it’s provoked within the arts community. People have been spurred into action and into being really articulate and vocal about the importance of what they do within the arts community and what the arts do within the broader social structure. It’s also prompting us to scrutinise the existing ecology and have these conversations and be advocates for what we all do and carry placards that yell, ART MATTERS!

[cycloneslider id=”lz-dunn-and-alysha-herrmann”]

Vitalstatistix spoke with Paul Gazzola, Adhocracy co-curator and Artistic Director of OSCA – Open Space Contemporary Arts (South Australia); and Willoh S.Weiland, Artistic Director of Aphids (Victoria) and co-creator of Crawl Me Blood, a new work in development with Vitalstatistix.

V: Both of you lead small, under-resourced, experimental, artist-run organisations. It’s a tough environment at the moment. Tell us about your organisations and what makes you proud about how they work in the current context of Australian arts?

PG: In January of this year I began in my new role as Artistic Director of the South Australian-based organisation, OSCA – Open Space Contemporary Arts. OSCA is a platform and conduit for artists to extend their practice in a supportive and collegial environment; it’s the brainchild of Dario Vacirca who took the chance to re-establish KneeHIGH Puppeteers as a contemporary arts-based company. OSCA’s mission is to provide artists and non-artists with opportunities to dream, develop and create contemporary art works that explore new models of participation and practice in urban and regional contexts. OSCA explores contemporary notions of being Australian through community engagement, collaboration and exchange.

Three years and fifteen-plus projects into its new life, OSCA is finding its momentum as it defines its place within the local ecology of South Australia and the realm of artists and individuals that it collaborates with on a local, national and international scene.

WSW: Aphids is Melbourne-based company that has been making interdisciplinary art for twenty one years. I work with an incredible group of artists, including Artistic Associates Lz Dunn and Lara Thoms, who work as artists and managers of the Aphids supermassive program. What’s amazing about Aphids is its ethos of being artist-led, working collaboratively and working across disciplines, which has not changed across its long history.

V: Each of you have been part of Vitalstatistix’s national experimental arts hothouse, Adhocracy. Paul, you have co-curated Adhocracy with Emma and Jason for the past four years. Willoh, you have developed two works through Adhocracy’s residency program, where a national project undergoes creative development with a team of South Australian collaborating artists. What are your thoughts about the value of Adhocracy and the kind of opportunity it presents for artists?

PG: Adhocracy is a highly unique event in the experimental and interdisciplinary arts calendar of Australia. Its open call-out offers national and local artists space, time and technical support to develop and explore new ideas and formats of presentation across a diversity of sites, over four days within the Waterside Workers Hall – the home of Vitalstatistix.

As a former participating artist in 2012 and current co-curator since 2013, I have seen Adhocracy evolve as a highly engaging event that continues to open up new models of audience accessibility and participation within the SA contemporary arts scene as it focuses on stimulating and supporting emerging and experimental arts practice within Australia.

WSW: Yes, we have developed two works through the residency program, Forever Now and Crawl Me Blood, both of which have been incredible, fruitful opportunities that have had huge impacts on the way the projects have unfolded. The unique thing about Adhocracy for us has been working with local SA artists. This allows a different kind of experimentation to take place. In both residencies these artists have taken on a variety of roles becoming collaborators, writers, performers, researchers, audience members – allowing us to test the breadth of the idea in a much broader way than we would if it was just us in a room.

V: What advice would you give to artists interested in applying to Adhocracy this year?

PG: Make your application simple, clear and precise in what you want to do. Don’t get too lost in heavy concepts but make sure you think about how an intense residency can allow you to explore your ideas and further your project.

Also remember that to make work, means being able to speak about how you make work. Part of the curatorial focus of Adhocracy is to facilitate the public’s engagement across the event so you will be expected to present your work through a series of showings or talks.

WSW: DO IT. It’s an incredible chance to work on a project at the really vital stage of its development, the point when all the wild ideas coalesce into decisions! If you are interested in collaborative models for art-making and experimental practice then it’s an ideal place to learn.

V: Willoh, last year you won the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art; Paul, you also regularly work in a live art context. How do you describe what live art is?

PG: It’s always an interesting question to frame parameters for live art. I just made a new work for the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) called the FOLA GIFT SHOP by OSCA that precariously placed a commercial venture within a heavily subsidised arena. So live art, from my perspective, plays with form and experiments with possibilities. It centres on the moment of encounter in real time between the artist and the spectator. The slippages in its difficulty to be defined, is its liberty and its confusion. The aspect of liveness in its title reminds one of the immediacy of a practice that works within the experience of engaging directly with the public in action.

Overall, I actually prefer to leave the defining of the term as an open-ended one. Especially as its historical emergence, in the mid 1980’s in the UK, was exactly about trying to locate an expanded genre of work that didn’t fit the current categories and classifications of dance, theatre or performance. So maybe its better that a statement on what live art is goes out to the audience as their complicity in the form is paramount to its’ coming to be.

WSW: It’s like Kate Bush. It’s mysterious and weird and rarely seen. It’s for the people, by the people and it challenges the people to re-define how they view performance.

Actually I usually direct them to the incredible video by UK live art hero Joshua Sofaer.

V: How important is social practice and sense of politics to you? What makes art contemporary and/or radical?

PG: My interest is to how art practice offers a space for new ideas and viewpoints that challenge the normative notions of society and the way things are. Hence, the interweaving of a social dimension is fundamental in the work I create. And by default, its politics lie in how I negotiate processes when working with others. This means I aim to work from a strong ethical position that is conscious of the relationships that develop and unfold over time.

That being said, I don’t believe art is always about the provision of a democratic space and this may be where notions of art being contemporary or radical are of use to discuss. If I address what I normally see associated with these terms, I am usually reading a promo line.

WSW: I think making art is radical in itself. To choose to be an artist is by its nature to live on the outside and I think this applies across form from landscape painters to contemporary art makers like ourselves. The political necessity of art is something that has always driven me, I think the ability of a society to celebrate and support its artists – and voices that are often outside mainstream opinion- speaks to the heart of democracy and our capacity to value and encourage debate.

V: Tell us about a project you are working on in 2016?

PG: Currently, OSCA is working on a number of Associate Artist projects including a new work from Dario Vacirca called 2Beaches: Future Island Nation, a collaboration with four Aboriginal women artists, the Bound/Unbound Collective, plus the ongoing commissioning program PROJECTS OF THE EVERYDAY, which asks: what does it means to be living on the edge of the city and at the start of the suburbia? This year’s South Australian artists – Mona Khizam, Ben Leslie and Laura Wills – have been invited to actively engage with a local community in the making of new work that investigates and celebrates ‘the ordinary’

I am also in the process of developing two new projects in regional Australia. The first, Collectors/Collections, is in collaboration with artist Nadia Cusimano and the community of local collectors in Waikerie. It focuses on the preservation and presentation of their collection of super 8 films that form an integral part of the historical memory of the town and the river. And secondly, I’m working on a new work for Cementa 17 that explores the relationship between art, economics and life.

WSW: We just finished our major work for this year, Howl, a parade of controversial artworks, which premiered at the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in Melbourne. In August I’m moving to the wilds of Finland for three months where I am premiering a new work commissioned from the ANTI Festival live art prize.

V: You both have strong associate relationships with Vitalstatistix. What value does these types of long-term relationships between artists and organisations hold?

PG: Long-term relationships with institutions and organisations generate possibilities. They offer a healthy and supportive environment to develop projects and initiatives through the ongoing understanding of each other’s interests and evolving agendas. They also become a facet in how one can survive and maintain an arts practice.

Vitalstatistix’s history of working with a pool of liked minded makers and presenters clearly shows how it understands the way community is formed and maintained. That it also holds a unique space in Australia as a feminist organisation with a continuing tradition of supporting women artists is key to its ongoing importance. Vitalstatistix’s ability to champion and generate a space for the diversity of voices and ideas that challenge the mainstream and experiment with changing the world is as the name says ‘vital’.

WSW: I think this current environment demands that everyone, from major organisations to independent artists, be vocal advocates for the value of interdependence. We shouldn’t be silo’ing ourselves but seeing the obvious lineages between independent practice and bigger companies. However because organisations have more infrastructure, they need to be the ones to reach out, to create structures that will support this idea, like Vitals does so well. Basically all organisations should take a leaf out of Vitals book, make a program small or large that does something to support independent art making.

V: How are you feeling about the future of Australian arts?

PG: Whilst I do have great concerns about the dwindling economies of the various local and national funding bodies, I am never too worried about the future of Australian arts practice. One can never underestimate the power of individuals to produce and create works of great importance and nourishment for the cultural life of our nation at any time or under any condition. So whilst successive governments continue to financially decimate the frameworks that offer and support diversity, artists will always continue to make things happen where it seems impossible.

WSW: About the art itself I feel privileged to be working in a community of people who are so visionary, who are making world-class work, who are literally at the forefront of creative experimentation in the whole universe. A few days out from the dreaded Australian Council decision for small-to-medium organisations, I feel distressed, as what I know is that the manifest unfairness that we saw exhibited in the politically motivated and insanely managed decision-making of the Abbott government in the last year, will on May 9th have an incredibly harmful impact on artists and organisations. No one is going to win. It’s everyone’s responsibility to take action towards the arts not being in this position again. End rant.

[cycloneslider id=”paul-gazzola-and-willoh-s-weiland”]

tiny revolutions – a tiny conversation

Rebecca Conroy

SJ Norman and Meg Wilson

Larissa McGowan and Chris Scherer

Lz Dunn and Alysha Herrmann

Paul Gazzola and Willoh S.Weiland