Roman Berry will be bringing his solo performance work Not Very Berry to Waterside for Adhocracy 2023. We caught up with him to discuss memories, creativity, and much more.

Firstly, tell us about Not Very Berry – what’s the core concept of the project and how did you conceive it?

The idea for Not Very Berry was conceived as a response to have more diverse narratives, that platforms the intersection of culture, identity, and personal growth. The concept emerged from the desire to shed light on my personal challenges, my journey of self-discovery, growing up and living in Australia, especially coming out as a Filipino gay man, in Adelaide. I got very excited when the expression of interest from Vitalstatistix on Adhocracy was posted, as I have been sitting on this idea since the middle of the pandemic, and this initiative prompted me to take action.

Part of the process will be retracing personal odyssey, capturing struggle and triumphs, walking down memory lane through images, and focusing on pivotal moments, to ignite a spark towards a narrative, structure, and form towards my first ever solo ‘hybrid’ performance.

This project very specifically utilises a Filipino folk dance called ‘Tinikling’ as part of its process. What led to your fascination with this practice, and how have you adapted it for the work?

I’m fascinated of the rhythmic and vibrant movements of TINIKLING. This is a traditional Filipino folk dance, that uses two bamboo poles tapping and beating on the ground, with dancers stepping in, hopping, jumping and turning in between them, as they dance gracefully. It requires enormous concentration to do the movement. These movements are integral to the development of Not Very Berry. I’m utilising them as tools, powerful metaphors, symbolising the challenges of life, weaving through complexities of identity, acceptance, and cultural integration. Through this lens, Tinikling dance becomes an important backdrop to the story of self-discovery, steering a fusion of cultures, while finding oneself amidst the diaspora.

You refer to the work as ‘semi-autobiographical’. What is the intersection between fiction and biography here?

I’ve coined it ‘semi-autobiographical’ because, in a way, Not Very Berry is a work that is inspired by real-life experiences. Part of the challenge of the development is to find ways to introduce and merge fictional elements. The intersection between fiction and biography lies in the fact that, while the core themes, emotions, and some events in the story might draw from my own life and experiences, there’s also room for creative imagination and narrative exploration. And that’s why I’m so thankful for programs like Vitalstatistix’s Adhocracy, because it champions creatives, theatre makers and artists to experiment, to make mistakes, to test and collaborate. The semi-autobiographical approach of the work helps me to navigate the delicate balance between personal authenticity and creative storytelling. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction and letting the creative process to grow.

Where does Not Very Berry go after Adhocracy?

Having had a few days of researching, collecting images, anecdotes from friends and family, I am hoping to get Not Very Berry developed further by engaging the Filipino Australian community more. From the process so far, I have had a lot of further provocation to explore within the context of balancing cultural stigmas and biases, of being part of the LGBTQI family, within the Filipino Australian community. Hoping to also have other creatives and collaborators to further craft a narrative, structure and form, as mentioned earlier, towards the first ever solo ‘hybrid’ performance. Hoping to then take to festivals, independent theatres ands regional theatres.

Anything else audiences should know?

In the intimate presentation and sharing of my discoveries and findings from the development, I would really appreciate people’s feedback on the process. There will also be a chance to participate and try the Tinikling Dance.

Find out more about Not Very Berry at the Adhocracy Website.

Before Solomon Frank appears at Adhocracy 2023 to expand our definitions of musical genre, we sat down to talk all things The MacroPlastic Workout.

First of all, tell us about The MacroPlastic Workout – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

We’ve been inspired by the horror and farce of the everyday, entanglements between human and more-than-human. A hermit crab using a plastic doll head as a shell, drifting marine plastics as new ecological habitats for microbial communities, newly discovered bacteria that can digest plastic, microplastics as an unavoidable component of 21st century human diets; how can we see ourselves as integrated into this new petrochemical plastic ecology and more specifically, how will we maintain ‘good health’ and ‘wellbeing’ in bodies and worlds riddled with invasive plastic? We also have various references from across nature and culture: sage grouse males’ inflatable chest sacs, frigate birds’ bright red balloon sacs underneath their beaks, Jacques Tati, John Cage on 1950s TV and cormorants. We also have a shared love of workout videos that developed when we were living together in Sydney lockdown. Having Chris Hemsworth lead us through “feel the fire lower body crunch” and that structure of repeated obtuse and difficult actions has heavily informed the structure of the show.

This piece utilises ‘inflatable-percussive-wearable musical instruments’, which is a wonderful phrase. How did you come to this particular mode of constructable instrumentation? 

The time at Adhocracy will be spent figuring out this exact question. We have Rachael Guinness on board to design prototype these costumes that integrate into the installation of balloons and tubes we’ve created.

You’ve stated an intent to create ‘aesthetic and genre dissonance’ in this piece. How are you hoping that this will manifest?

Drawing on expanded forms of clarinet and percussion practice, we’ve established an elaborate plastic gymnasium activated using sound and movement. Our muses are cheap mass-produced plastic clarinets and percussion instruments, household objects recontextualised as instruments (tubes, balloons, latex condoms and nylon). We are experimenting with a refined junk aesthetic to create electroacoustic audio components that integrate into our acoustic practice and allow for compelling new forms of genre dissonance. For example, diegetic sound art suddenly transforms into campy gay pop and pounding techno.

Anything else audiences should know?

The show straddles the fine line between sacred and silly. You might laugh or you might cry.

Find out more about The MacroPlastic Workout at the Adhocracy Website.

Ahead of her appearance at Adhocracy 2023, Isobel Marmion dropped past to have quiet conversations about her project Streetlights and Long Nights.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renowned annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 1-3. Full details, including program, HERE.

Firstly, tell us about Streetlights and Long Nights – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

In the lead up to our final presentation for 2022 – Sightings, a new performance and portrait of place – creator, director, and choreographer Gabrielle Nankivell dropped past to talk about heat on the road, points in time, and Grandma’s shortbread…

Firstly, tell us about Sightings. I know that much is unknown right now, but what should audiences expect?

Sightings is a strange and lovely project. It’s an evolving map that charts the travel of getting to know a place – on foot, through debris, in conversation and across all the messiness of witnessing and composing reality-based fiction. As a performance it’s something like a cabinet of curiosities, a backyard cinema, and a collective ritual rolled into one. Audiences should expect an invitation to explore – to wander, look, touch, read, sit, try, make, watch…

Weirdly, it contains all the things I use to make dance performances, but which don’t usually end up in the performance. I guess I’m usually more associated with epically physical contemporary dance outcomes – I’ve performed in plenty of work like this and most of the commissions I receive are with intensely virtuosic contemporary dance companies – Sightings sits a long way outside of this world.

You’ve been developing this piece for several years now – what has changed along the way? What’s been surprising about the process?

Figuring out how to work on this project has been quite a process, we’ve tried lots of approaches that have totally failed! Finding the right medium/s-language/s with which to manifest it has also been a story of trial and error. One of the things I realised changed along the way was that we were creating the blueprint for a site-specific performance making model rather than making a standalone performance – i.e.: the performance can’t exist without the residency. This was a huge surprise for me as prior to that I had mostly used the opportunity of residencies as seeding grounds for future works and as a time to take stock of where my practice was at.

Learning a lot more about time has been a surprising side-effect of the Sightings process, especially since I come from the very labour/time intensive world of choreography. In a residency situation it’s tricky to balance the lead-time required to implement an encounter or adventure with the time required to actually fulfil it. Some ideas require a lot of comms, and therefore time, to secure access to a site and/or people. Because we are working with people, individual personalities, ways, routines, and relationship with time need to be respected – this can be a bit of an intangible thing until you are in it. Some mediums are more labour intensive – working with analogue film for example, processing and conversion time has to be considered and then there’s time for editing… It’s been an invigorating experience to work in a paradox – intensely planned and organised but also meandering and offering time to the abyss.

What does it mean to be bringing this piece specifically to Yerta Bulti-Port Adelaide? What do you hope to discover about the Port?

Yerta Bulti-Port Adelaide holds a lot of mystery for me. It’s absorbing and reflective at the same time, like heat on the road or fog on the river, mirage-like perhaps. The yarns, myths, and tales – held and told by earth, walls, people – make it dusty and shifty and full of life. I feel like it’s a natural environment for tuning and receiving. If we do that well, hopefully the performance will reflect a very real-feeling fiction or imprint of place.

We hope to discover the Port exactly as it reveals itself in this particular point of time.

The work utilises both mixed-media and crowd-sourced stories/locations – how do you and your team wind that all together into a performance piece? What should people do if they want to get involved?

Collectively our occupation is some kind of imagination fabrication, we’re all quite into getting our hands dirty, figuring out how things work and general tinkering. Any chance to try something we’re not particularly familiar with is exciting, therefore it’s pretty easy for us to get on board with the eclectic range of enthusiasts we meet along the way. These encounters tend to generate a variety of material – found or made objects, photos, videos, written material, physical skills.

 

Sightings is a process of following – guided by what we’re offered and what we find, rather than just something we impose. The ‘enthusiast’ spirit really seems to suit the project, it allows for a different kind of finesse in the content we are producing – one where warmth, care and effort are perhaps privileged over glossy, high-end noise. Think the difference between a handmade photo album and a ‘For You’ memory compilation made by your phone, or Grandma’s shortbread versus Arnott’s Shortbread Creams… I think it’s a project where you really feel the alchemy of the people and the place involved.

If people want to get involved they can provide us with some breadcrumbs via the ‘Participate’ link on the Sightings website, https://sightings.cargo.site

Anything else audiences should know?

The Sightings team are artists who work across dance, sound, writing and visual design. We spend a lot of time making live performances but are equally invested in developing research projects where we can learn more about the places and people we meet through the itinerant nature of our work. We welcome reflections on the performance so if any audience members feel inclined to leave us a handwritten note, have a chat or drop us an email following the season – we would love to hear from them.

BOOK TICKETS

CONTRIBUTE TO SIGHTINGS

Daley Rangi stopped by to wax poetic with us on all things I Don’t Owe You. This is the resultant dialogue.

 Firstly, tell us about ‘I Don’t Owe You’ – what’s the project all about and what inspired it?

To preface, I struggle to talk about my work, so please take the following with a grain of salt, or your preferred mineral compound. This work feels like just one of many access points to a vital, ongoing conversation about bodily integrity. Everything I explore has been explored before, by many ancestors and kin. But while it still needs to be said, I’ll say it. Nothing inspires this bodywork better than being harassed, threatened, and attacked for having facial hair whilst dressing or appearing otherwise ‘feminine’, breeding a discomforting feeling of owing, of debt, of extraction.

Perhaps the work may act as a gentle reminder that gender is still an endless game of survival for many, an intangible paradox of joy and rage, violence and freedom. Perhaps the work is about the semiotics and rituals of gender, and perhaps the signed systems and labour that comes with it. Perhaps it turns the lens of ‘gender’ away from the colonial, in search of something more beautiful, more human, more ancient. Perhaps, despite the violent overtones, it’s a work about care, connection, and community. I’m not interested in hyper-individualism. That’s not the answer.

The piece is described as being ‘endurance-based’ – what does this mean for an audience, and how does it evoke the overarching themes?

To be utterly transparent, I’m still working that out. I feel a sense of endurance just existing, many days of the week, as do many of my kin, as do many humans, probably. I think endurance works, which most often involve the body, are, or should be, less about the ‘shock’ factor of what the artist might be doing, and more about the chance to slow down and examine ourselves and each other, maybe change or adapt our collective behaviours towards the kind. We each have a body we can share, or show, or use to shock, I’m more interested in what lies beneath the skin.

Humans are instinctively born to engage with other beings, I suppose I’m just providing a framework for some deeper engagement. An ideas trampoline, impossible futures made possible by action. Sure, yeah, I wanna push people off a fence. Choose a side, either side, but just feel something, do something, anything. It’s less about making audiences uncomfortable, but rather about using my own body and stories and battles as the archaeological site to dig up some truths that relate to everybody.

As this is a long form piece, what will you be presenting at Adhocracy, and how will it differ from the final form?

It definitely won’t be anything extended at Adhocracy, rather a testing ground, an experiment. After reading this, grab a writing tool, and throw down a few sentences starting with ‘I don’t owe you…’. The ‘you’ can be whoever you want, maybe even yourself. It’s quite freeing to exercise the release from expectation and embrace boundaries. For example, “I don’t owe you, the audience, a carefully-crafted, well-executed showing of a curious new live performance work at Adhocracy”, but I’ll do my damned best to share one with you. Side by side my projects wax and wane in what they’re responding to, and what forms they crave, but there’s a soft thread you can pull on. Resistance, and resilience, and how complex these two things are and continue to be.

Where does ‘I Don’t Owe You’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

It would be pleasant if I knew. Maybe one day we’ll all sit together and watch the sun rise on a better world, and maybe a word or two I once wrote (or a 24-hour endurance bodywork I once performed) is warm dust on that morning breeze.

Anything else audiences should know?

Don’t be afraid. Come say hi. Pluck a beard hair or two. Share the labour.

We sat down with artist Catherine Ryan to discuss The Two Body Problem.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.

Firstly, tell us about ‘The Two Body Problem’ – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

‘The Two Body Problem’ is an experimental performance lecture that I have just begun to develop. The core concept is a simple speculative question: what if we had not one, but two bodies? What if every human consciousness had a spare body that it could use, instead of always being tied to the same one? How would this change the decisions we made? Would we take care of both our bodies and spend equal amounts of time in each one, or would we just spend time in the ‘good’ body and leave the other one at home? And what is a ‘good’ body, anyway?

As for what inspired it, in the most literal sense, like many artists, I have a huge document in my phone’s Notes app, full of half-baked ideas and questions that have popped into my head. One day, I was scrolling back through this vast collection of musings when I came across this question about what it would be like if we had two bodies. I don’t even remember when I wrote it. Was it something that I scrawled while I was out late one night, perhaps? I’ll never know. But it seemed compelling, even in the harsh, more critical light of day, so I started to draw more connections from it. 

I have a background in European philosophy, so it occurred to me that there are swathes of thinkers who have considered the potential duality of the body. Early Christian theological disputes about whether God and Jesus were different bodies or not. Mediaeval political theology about the two bodies of the King. Cartesian accounts of dualism – the idea that the mind is separate from the body. And more recently, discussions within Queer theory about whether or not we can speak of there being a body, prior to its existence in language, or considerations within disability studies about the difference between impairment (which is in some sense ‘inherent’) and disability (which is socially derived).

And importantly for me, not only have philosophers and theorists written about multiplicity of the body – pop singers have sung about it.

The phrase ‘experimental performance lecture’ is a fascinating one – how does this differ from the more traditional concept of a lecture and how are you subverting the academic?

The performance lecture, as a type of performance, has a history that goes back several decades, to 1960s conceptual practice, which emphasised process over finished product. Early notable practitioners of the mode include Robert Morris and Andrea Fraser. Central to this type of work is its existence between the frames of performance and academic address. Performance lectures explore the gaps and tensions between theatrical performance and academic and pedagogical contexts. They often play with authority – the authority of the figure standing in front of you as “the expert”, presenting indisputable facts about the world.

In my performance lectures to date, this playfulness has often manifested in my choice to use cheesy, well-known pop songs as entrance points into the consideration of political or philosophical questions. My techniques have also included the interruption of authoritative textual address by singing, dancing and humorous over-analysis of pop music.

You’ve identified some intriguing pop music artefacts that you’ll be utilising – what inspired their selection?

One of the ways that I often work when making performance lectures is to select a small group of pop songs – usually songs that I like myself – and then use them as unusual ways of entering into questions of a philosophical or political nature.

One of the first tracks that inspired this project was SOPHIE’s Immaterial Girl. It’s a stunning track (and it’s awful that SOPHIE’s untimely death means that we won’t get more of her incredible work). Against a hyperactive synth riff, a chipmunky voice sings about whether she would exist and be gendered without all these things that she enumerates:

 

“Without my legs or my hair

Without my genes or my blood

With no name and with no type of story

Where do I live?

Tell me, where do I exist?”

 

What a question! She seems to be asking whether gender can be considered as this radically abstract thing that doesn’t need a body at all.

I then started thinking about how there are all these songs about the materiality of the body. There’s Beyoncé’s 2006 track Get Me Bodied, for instance. This song opens with Beyoncé dramatically intoning “9… 4… 8… 1… B-Day!”. These numbers are the date that Beyonce was born – the 4th of September 1981, her birthday, or B-Day. In the context of the song, this is the day that Beyonce got a body, or got bodied. Does this mean that, prior to 1981, Beyoncé existed in some form, without a body? Was there an eternal, incorporeal form of Beyoncé floating through the universe before this? How tied is Beyoncé to her body?

These are the sorts of questions that inspire me. Also, these are excellent songs, and it’s fun to think with them.

Where does ‘The Two Body Problem’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

Somewhere, I hope! This is a first stage development so the piece will need more work after this before it’s performable and tourable.

Anything else audiences should know?

I’d love for them to come along to some of the workshops I’ll be running over the Adhocracy weekend. As part of the development in Adhocracy, I’m planning on running some casual discussions about the opening philosophical provocations of the project. These will be small group discussions where we can think together about questions like: Can you imagine having two bodies? What would you do if they were very different bodies? Would you change how you lived? I’d love to consider some of these questions with new groups of people.

Photo by Pier Carthew

Vitalstatistix Artist in Residence, writer Jennifer Mills, has written a response to YES, the new performance work by acclaimed feminist theatre makers THE RABBLE. Rather than attempt to describe or translate the experience of this extraordinary production, Mills has chosen to assemble a collage poem, a formal response to the work’s invitation to participate in, and widen, its inquiry.

YES is on at Waterside until June 26. Book tickets HERE.

 

After YES: a collage

1. Why search? What is there to search for?

2. It is a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.

3. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.

4. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public nature is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. Understood in pedagogical terms, the performance renders social laws explicit.

5. What’s love got to do with it?

6. Despite the fact that controllers use many of the techniques deployed in other capture crimes and with similar effect, the main elements of coercive control set it apart from all other forms of oppression. Its particularity lies in its aim – to usurp and master a partner’s subjectivity – in its scope of its deployment, its individualised and personal dimensions, and its focus on imposing sex stereotypes in everyday life. The result is a condition of unfreedom (what is experienced as entrapment) that is “gendered” in its construction, delivery, and consequence.

7. Responses, responses, responses. Reviews, reports, inquiries.

8. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

9. Another inquiry is not going to do it, just get a shovel and start digging.

10. I think the politicisation of natural disasters is very unfortunate.

11. Tasmania is the only jurisdiction in Australia to have made coercive controlling behaviours an offence.

12. Do you really want to hurt me?

13. The Prime Minister of Australia publicly apologised to me through the media, while privately his team actively discredited and undermined my loved ones. I tuned into Question Time to see my former bosses, people that I had dedicated my life to, deny and downplay my lived experience.

14. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!

15. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.

16. Coercion entails the use of force or threats to compel or dispel a particular response… coercion can have long-term physical, behavioural or psychological consequences… Control may be implemented through specific acts of prohibition or coercion… but its link to dependence and/or obedience is usually more distal than coercion and so harder to detect.

17. Feeling unsafe? If you, or another adult or child, are in immediate danger call 000.

18. Literature is the question minus the answer.

19. My loved one died in the fires FAQ

20. The rainfall, the extreme weather. We are going to have more flooding and it’s going to be unpredictable and it’s going to be more severe and so as someone who loves Lismore deeply and wants to live here into the future I’m asking for leadership, I’m asking for real and sincere commitment to withdraw support from fossil fuel projects which are driving climate change and making it uninhabitable for us to live here.

21. We were denied funerals by pandemic conditions themselves created by the extension of capital to all corners and all habitats of the world, and without the brief socially-sanctioned ritual, we were expected simply not to grieve at all. The expectation once again that grief is just another form of work we do, and, without the performance, we must continue, unaffected.

22. Where the bloody hell are you?

23. No, I don’t really want to shake your hand.

24. If we had no appetite, we would be free from coercion, but because we are from the start given over to what is outside us, submitting to the terms which give form to our existence, we are in this respect – and irreversibly – vulnerable.

25. Do you want to try my milkshake?

26. I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room.

27. And what can one do?

28. As many trauma survivors will tell you, it’s often the lack of an adequate response in the aftermath of a traumatic event, rather than the experience itself, that causes the most psychological damage.

29. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

30. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

31. You don’t have to participate in this trivial, superficial continuation of mindless abuse culture just for the sake of civility.

32. We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this.

—

Sources

1. Paula (Ingrid Bergman), Gaslight, 1944

2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books 1988

3. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984

4. Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 1988

5. Tina Turner, 1984

6. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007

7. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022

8. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Hogarth Press 1930

9. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022

10. PM Scott Morrison, March 2022

11. Tasmanian government website

12. Culture Club, 1982

13. Brittany Higgins, address to the Women’s March, May 2021

14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard 1899

15. Judith Butler, interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum, 1992

16. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007

17. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety website

18. Attributed to Roland Barthes

19. Title of a page from the NSW coronial inquest into the 2019-20 fires, in which 26 lives were lost

20. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022

21. Sarah Jaffe, ‘Nothing and Everything: Mourning Against Work,’ Salvage, 2022

22. Australian tourism slogan; Australian climate strike placard

23. RFS volunteer in Cobargo when approached by the Prime Minister

24. Judith Butler, ‘Bodies and Power Revisited,’ Radical Philosophy, 2002

25. Australian government consent education video, withdrawn in 2021

26. PM Scott Morrison, December 2019

27. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard, 1899

28. Joelle Gergis, ‘The Great Unravelling,’ Fire Flood Plague, ed. Sophie Cunningham, Vintage 2020

29. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984

30. Ursula K LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books 1969

31. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022

32. Greta Thunberg, address to the United Nations, September 2019

With residencies at Vitalstatistix in April and May, two projects now in development address questions of labour and pleasure, embodiment, sex work, and online/IRL interactions.

The Read is a collaboration between dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi and writer, sex worker and activist Tilly Lawless, investigating labour, desire, and bodies and their mechanics, drawing on Amrita’s interests in participatory research, intimate conversations and resilience.

Artists amira.h. and Monte Masi are collaborating on Goddess Ball’s Fun House, using text, performance and endurance to explore the online world of adult camming sites, the nature of work and play, and the true meaning of fun.

Jennifer Mills spoke with both these creative duos over Zoom about their works in progress, collaborative practices, friendship and trust, labour and time, adaptation, pleasure, and making meaningful work.

JM Starting with amira and Monte. Where did the idea spring from to work together?

Monte Masi amira’s and my relationship goes back a fair while, we both studied at the South Australian School of Art at around the same time, but this project is our first time directly collaborating. The first development was part of last year’s Adhocracy at Vitalstatistix and because of “the situation” (laughs), amira and I spent the Adhocracy weekend in 2021 working at a distance over Zoom.

This project really begins with you, amira, sharing an artist’s book – a piece of collected text that you had been amassing, which was text from camming sites’ chat rooms. amira eventually sent me a 2,000 page pdf of that which went by the same name, ‘Goddess Ball’s Fun House.’ And amira had mentioned sharing that text amongst a few people and inviting a response, so whoever had the honour of receiving the text might become obligated to create a response.

amira.h. The text was collected from October 2018 to 2020 sometime, but then I went back and got more, which I haven’t actually added to the ibook file I sent you… it’s not a pdf, it is specific because the pdf has lots of emojis and they don’t move but I wanted people to see what I was seeing on the sites, which is a lot of emojis, emoticons I call them, and they’re very different from other social media, very specific to these sites. So yep, it was a 2,000 or so page ibook.

JM That’s a weighty tome! Why did you start collecting this document?

a.h. Well, that’s what I do – I collect stuff, even at uni I would give people postcards and tell them to text me a response and then I created a book – I called it a book – of pages stuck on the wall, of people’s responses to me. That was in the hundreds, just text responses. I like collecting things.

JM It sounds like a very zine-influenced practice to me.

a.h. I do love zines, definitely.

MM You were going to curate an exhibition based on these responses.

a.h. That was Dominic Guerrera’s idea, he works at Country Arts, and he suggested we could show it at Nexus, but that just didn’t feel right. So then Monte asked me to be an assistant to a whole other project, and I was living on Kaurna land, in Adelaide, but now I’m not, so I had moved and Monte asked if I could still assist and I said I didn’t know, and then he said Vitals have this Adhocracy thing due tomorrow, let’s just quickly write up a proposal (laughs).

MM I saw us putting together the Adhocracy application as a continuation of your invitation to think of a response to that text. I thought we could create that response together.

JM I love that Adhocracy is a space that you can jump on at those moments. It sounds like this project has been through a few versions of itself, are you still taking a digital/online approach?

a.h. It is definitely morphing. Recently Monte said ‘I don’t want to have Zooms or livestreams in our work!’ We want it to be in real life, IRL.

JM There was a lot of excitement around the potential of online spaces but now there’s so much fatigue as well, people are really happy to be able to be physically with each other again.

a.h. It’s true. In my head I kind of see a live chat, you know, I definitely wouldn’t want to show any of the people on the websites, so I want to be able to zone in on the chat and have that accessible in the space, and that might be the only online component.

MM I am certainly cognisant of that snap-back to the way things were. It was great to have a lot of stuff over Zoom and suddenly people being quite invested in livestream, even for me as someone who thinks of themselves as able-bodied or reasonably mobile, it was a treat to be able to for example catch something in New York that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, let alone how it might have felt for someone who actually finds it incredibly difficult to get into a theatre or a performance space. But I think maybe it’s because the first time we really had a development for this work we had to do it over the screen, I just think a lot of the ideas and a lot of the forms that we’re imagining and dreaming of for this work are things that you do in front of other people.

JM Are you going to retain a participatory element of that, with people whose conversation you’re using as source material?

a.h. I have got some ideas, but Monte and I haven’t decided on anything concrete yet.

JM In terms of working out those kind of mechanisms or ideas, what’s your process as a collaboration?

a.h. We try to have Zoom meetings every 2-3 weeks. I text Monte all the time, probably annoyingly, if I get an idea I just send it to him, it’s very spontaneous for me and that’s what I like about it.

MM In some ways it has been fairly spontaneous but it’s also been quite discursive, in that sometimes we will have what is ostensibly a meeting which will end up with you, amira, telling me particular details of a particular period in your life or a particular kind of online web of intrigue, and going down a sort of rabbithole of different things, and trusting to do that while not knowing whether it really lives in the world of the work.

JM While we’re talking about these blurring boundaries I’m going to let Amrita and Tilly into the meeting. We’ve just been talking about collaboration and the way that art and life blend a little in the process. Amrita and Tilly were you friends before you started this project together?

Tilly Lawless We knew each other vaguely but we have definitely become closer through doing it.

Amrita Hepi Tilly made a really good point today, that because this has been so delayed it’s been a nice way to get to know each other. If we had started 2.5 years ago when we were originally supposed to start, maybe it would have been harder. I feel like there was material generated in speaking to each other and getting to know each other.

We had this conversation about the kind of economy that the arts runs on, the economy of friendship, that obviously there is a camaraderie, and it’s one of the most beautiful things, but that it can also be really abusive in some ways.

JM Totally. It can manifest as exploitative labour practices very quickly.

TL There is a level of trust that has come with knowing each other for the last few years that makes me feel like I can trust what Amrita says in the room.

I think that if we’d started not knowing each other well that I would have been quite tentative, and I don’t feel that. I feel quite confident in voicing my opinion. I only see the friendship as positive. I understand that people can exploit friendships in order to get certain artistic things from people or to not pay people for their labour but I haven’t felt like that one bit.

AH I said to Tilly at the start that sometimes there can be a tyranny of structurelessness: we’re improvising, we’re trying things, the hierarchies are different, and in the room I am performing in it too, I’m in it with you. But I am the director. I will be making the work. And I think there is a nice trust that comes from knowing that is your responsibility.

JM It builds trust when there’s a bit of clarity around roles.

TL A director is the same role you would get when, as a writer, you have an editor editing your work. You have someone that has more power than you, you’ve agreed to them having a say over what you’re doing, and you trust them in the critiques that they’re going to give… I wouldn’t say yes to being directed by someone unless I respected that they could direct me well.

JM I wanted to ask all four of you a bit more about process as labour but also process as play, and where that sits for you as a collaboration and how you manage that balance?

MM Before, I used that word discursive, but in some ways what I mean is also playful, as playful as you can be in a chat over Zoom, where yes, you are in theory trying to advance a project but you are also trying to work out what are the possible boundaries for the project so that you are creating some sense of what is inside the world of the work before we get started with our residency at Vitalstatistix. For us it has up to this point been about play. And we’ve been talking a lot about fun anyway within the work – we have this title of Goddess Ball’s Fun House so there’s been fun stuff and fool stuff. We’re getting a piece of neon fabricated that says ‘FUN.’

AH The way that I like to work is fast and relaxed, but I spent a good part of my early dance career working in companies that didn’t feel that way – where everything felt serious and sombre and we needed to get it right. I think I thought for a long time that it really needed to be that way. I use this analogy of when I stopped using birth control, when I switched to another kind of birth control and because it didn’t hurt I wasn’t sure it was working, I wasn’t sure it was real. There’s an idea that if I’m not having some kind of epiphany or I’m not having a struggle… I mean it really doesn’t need to be that way.

JM There’s this ‘if you’re not suffering, you’re not making work’ mentality. I think a lot of us have absorbed this hyper-employment model as sole traders or practitioners where we do push ourselves and work really long hours.

MM And that’s the logic of the project in some ways anyway. It always wants to see a peak at the moment of presentation, it always wants you to go a bit beyond yourself to get something done.

TL My relationship to it is a bit different because I have my job that I do for money and I work really hard at it and then everything I do that is creative is fun.

AH But also I wouldn’t have asked you to come and do it just for fun and I won’t pay you!

TL Obviously the pay matters, but I don’t have the sense of, ‘is art only real if there’s suffering involved?’ because I have always enjoyed the things that I do creatively, whereas I often don’t enjoy my daily work.

AH The other thing is not just if there’s suffering involved, but is the labour real if there isn’t a moment of transformation? If it’s hard and if it looks like it’s easy, is it still labour? Or if it has a feeling of effortlessness is it really labour?

JM And there’s a crossover there with sex work as well, if it’s pleasurable is it still labour?

TL My relationship to fun has changed since the pandemic. Before the pandemic I would have thought what a drag to go leave my house for two weeks and do this thing and be in a studio all day and now it’s so much fun to be in another state, and to be in a big room with someone. I have turned from being a glass half empty person before the pandemic to glass half full. I am getting scraps of fun out of everything.

JM There’s a real element of joy in returning to working physically close to each other … is that infecting the work, that craving for physicality and being in space?

AH Yeah, absolutely. Over Zoom, we haven’t figured out how to manufacture improvisation in quite the same way. Real time allows for an ease of working. Number one, this is how I have always known how to make. Number two, I think it is really much more enjoyable. Even if it is hard to be away from home, doing this in another way or not together would just not be possible.

MM For me and amira, the first stage development for this work was at Adhocracy in 2021 but we had to do that over Zoom. So I was in the basement at the Waterside hall chatting to amira on screen. There were a couple of Adelaide-based projects that did have their creative teams with them and I was eyeing them off with a slight jealousy: ‘They’re all talking to each other without a delay!’ I think in a way the thought of being in a room together has driven some of the ideas about what we’re going to do in our upcoming couple of weeks.

JM That desire has to infect the work, especially as the work is already about desire. The desire for physical closeness is already in it.

a.h. It’s really exciting to be performing IRL. I’ve been doing online stuff from about 2016, I was just doing that ‘for fun’ because it was so novel, like Periscope – but being in a physical space, I am imagining how we can utilise smell and taste and touch…

JM Can I ask you about the idea of failure and mistakes in your work? Monte, you have spoken about misperformance as a strategy, and that really resonates with my experience of being genderqueer.

MM We have these scripts that we follow – you could think about it as a dramatic script but you might also think about it as a cultural script – and by not performing well or by failing to appear in the proper way, it might be generative. So by misperforming that script you might be able to generate something new. Which is connected to ideas in The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, and to writing by José Esteban Muñoz and other theorists.

JM There is also great potential for comedy in that.

MM Performing things in a totally committed but very wrong way is connected to what clowns do, and playing the fool.

a.h. I have always embraced failure. I mean, growing up as a queer Muslim woman, I thought I was going to kill myself by the time I was fifteen…

JM Society tells you that you don’t deserve to live.

a.h. Yes. I’m the eldest child out of four, I’m the one who is the fuckup – I don’t own my house, I am unmarried, I don’t have kids, to society I am a failure, so I have embraced that in lots of my work. I fuck up and you have to accept it. I have accepted that I don’t adhere to rules, even rules I set myself.

JM: When you’re discovering your creativity as a queer artist, it’s a huge lesson to know that that’s where the sparks are, in the fuckups and the failures and the not fitting right.

AH Definitely in that stuff. But also in the mundanity of the existence of the failure. We’ve been asking about assumptions. What do people assume about what it is that you’re doing at work? And what’s the reality? So one of the exercises we have is I ask Tilly, what do you think people assume about sex work, or about writing? And vice versa, around the labour of being a dancer. What a day of work is like, what the architecture looks like in the space, where you are, what you’re doing with your body, what happens? The things we think are mundane actually reveal something about the unconscious, about what the other is assuming about us.

JM And it absolutely reveals the structures under that work as well, physical structures and temporal structures and the embodiment of the labour that you’re doing – a lot of creative labour is quite invisible to the general public.

AH There are three zones, in the way I’ve been thinking. There’s the desire to do – the desire to act in both our labours. Then there’s the labour itself and what it’s worth or what its value is perceived to be. And then there are examples of other people in labour, or other objects that are desirable, that feed into this.

TL There is some assumed knowledge with the audience in that we assume they know that both dance and sex work are labour.

AH But then there’s what it’s worth, and what it looks like, and what happens before the event. What leads you into a performance, and what makes it good? How do you make something good? That is actually kind of nebulous.

JM With literature and dance, there’s a perception that they spring almost spontaneously from the body, that you don’t require external resources to make them.

AH Yes, ‘you can do it anywhere.’ I was talking to a friend who wrote a beautiful article and they said it really poured out of them, and I love that word pour. There is so much stored that is maybe conscious or unconscious or that maybe we just heard yesterday that makes its way into the room, the rehearsal room. You realise how much you know about something that you didn’t know you knew.

JM That deep archival knowledge that you have to draw on from longer practice is one of the great pleasures of getting older in a creative career. And also your networks grow and so your ability to draw on others’ knowledge grows.

AH You have a reference point and maybe you have watched work that you can then take into your own methodology, because there’s a tone of understanding, rather than just going: I need it to be good, and how the fuck do I get there.

As an emerging artist, what I didn’t know… maybe there was also nothing to lose.

MM In some ways I would agree. When I was an emerging artist you did feel like you were running on energy. I couldn’t even imagine what the possible consequences would be of failing, I was just doing stuff.

AH As you get better, you have a better understanding of your own aesthetic.

Now I am thinking about things more sustainably, like if I’m making this work maybe I want to be able to show it in a different context, not be [hammers hands] bang-bang-bang. The Read feels like it’s been ruminating for a while and I’d like for it to be able to take the time it needs to take and also have the chance to be in different formats and different contexts. I know a bit more about what I’m interested in in terms of subject and material.

TL I’ve found it really useful not to tie my identity to what I create. If it’s not good, it doesn’t matter too much. I’m still a person beyond what I created, my friends are still going to like me, I’m still going to have a great life. Not everything you do ends up being as you’ve imagined it before you do it. So I just try to not tie myself to those things too much. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t put in all your energy or all your hopes. But your life is full beyond what you created as an artist.

AH I worked with a dance theatre company called Marrugeku for a long time and it taught me to make from this reactionary place. In some ways I still do, something will niggle at me. Sometimes the politic of something overwhelms the poetic; it can suck out the fun. You think you have to perform the politic by which it is perceived.

This is not what Marrugeku does, they do it with a poetics that then infects the politics. With making now, it doesn’t feel as fraught with having to express the politics, because it is already there. And it can be fun.

TL I realised quite quickly that I don’t want it to be a professional career, I love writing and I will always write but I don’t want to pursue it as a career, it ruins my enjoyment of it. I like it too much to ruin that.

MM I have seen people do really weird things in order to try and find or keep that sense of pleasure or openness alive. With all sorts of artists, anyone who is able to derive some income from what they make, there is a recognition that once you start to have people really interested in what you’re doing or you’re creating opportunities that are being recognised by others, that there is a danger that what makes a thing fun and possible can be extinguished or leave you.

JM I think it’s also a really exciting thing that art does, finding these cracks where things that are work don’t feel like work. It’s possible to do that in every job – every job can and should have those moments of ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this, it’s so fun.’

AH I have a query around that because I don’t just make art for the good feeling. I am not necessarily interested in making people feel good or entertained. I guess it’s like the panic and stretch zones, still trying to find the way into being enjoyable but there is also the fiscal financial stuff that comes into it. Then there’s this other thing: a part of my revenue stream, if I’m honest, is using dance as a commercial tool. So there’s movement direction for advertisements, or myself as the subject modelling for things and talking about the fact that I’m a dancer. People ask ‘how could you do that?’

But are we only ever doing it for a good feeling or for our community? That’s part of it, but I do not believe for a second that that is the only reason we’re doing it.

JM Maybe the pleasure is not the end point. The pleasure is like a window into meaningful work. It’s a clue that the universe has left us that we can follow.

AH To purpose. We’ve been talking about that in our work, about identity and class, and the big example we’ve been talking about is the allegory of the turnspit dog. The turnspit dog would run on this wheel like a hamster wheel that would turn the meat and cook it. Then at the turn of the industrial revolution, with electricity, all of a sudden it didn’t have a purpose anymore, and it was then bred out.

Being in the Port, I think about work and art and labour, and striking. When workers talk about striking, they withdraw their labour, but for artists that doesn’t make sense – they’ll just find somebody else. And then that leads into thinking about the gig economy, and it’s all so soupy – personally finding the pleasure and purpose fits into something that’s a much bigger machination.

JM I feel like I’m haunted now by the ghost of my future redundancy.

AH There is that nebulous fear: a GPT-3 AI wrote this…

JM Oh absolutely. There are already AIs that could substitute for some of my freelance work quite easily.

AH I am so curious and suspicious about that dream that we’ll be overwhelmed by machines. The fear that we wouldn’t be able to work anymore if the machines take over. I think it’s almost a desire: ‘Oh no, don’t take the work away!’

a.h. Talking about labour, the start of Goddess Ball’s Fun House came about through my body being so injured that I couldn’t work. So I was a personal shopper for one of the huge supermarkets for nine months, and then ended up with carpal tunnel, hip bursitis, tendonitis… I couldn’t walk anymore. And a friend suggested to get into the camming world. I was living on my own, didn’t have a fridge for about six months, and I was on the dole.

I didn’t start this for pleasure. It was out of pain. Survival sex work.

Andy Kaufman is a big influence on this work. Andy only does something if it’s fun, if it’s not fun he stops doing it. But if you delve into his online world at the moment, it’s not fun at all.

The root word of fun is actually fool. Monte and I have done a lot of research about the Fool card in tarot, which is the zero. Not the start and not the end, but a liminal card. I feel like I have been on a Fool’s journey with these online lives that I have lived. I’ve played the fool and I’ve been made fun of. Fun isn’t always pleasurable.

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The Read showings: 5 & 6 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE

Goddess Ball’s Fun House showings: 19 & 20 MAY at 7pm  – BOOK HERE

Photo credit: Emma Luker for Replay Creative (@replaycreative on Instagram)

We had a tiny chat about tiny revolutions with pvi collective’s Kelli Mccluskey and Annalee Ladiges. tiny revolutions is on 19-23 May. Book HERE.

Vitals: Tell us a little (pardon the pun) about tiny revolutions. Where did the idea come from?

Kelli: It came from this growing sense that there were too many epic things going wrong in the world and the overwhelming scale of it all could be paralysing. so I guess we asked ourselves, could we make a work that took on the major global challenges and create actions that were perhaps bite-sized but packed a punch in the public realm?

Vitals: tiny revolutions is broken down into THINK and DO. Can you talk us through the process? 

Kelli: During THINK we (pvi, some local artists we are working with and you, the audience) gather together as rebels. Set the timer for 60 mins. Take on one submission and hash out what we know about it. We drink vodka. We end up with one tiny revolution to take out into public space.

[note from vitals: members of the public submitted concerns over the last couple of months. those concerns will be used during THINK]

Annalee: THINK can be a misleading term for this stage. While the session is a combined think tank made up of the audience, pvi, and local artists, this stage could also be described as “conspiring”, “colluding” , “strategising”, and “planning”. There’s discussion, debate, exchange of knowledge and ideas, and then talk about tactics – what will the revolution be? How can we carry it out? Whoever decides to contribute has input, and then a consensus is reached on what the tiny revolution will be.

Kelli: And in DO we lawyer up. Arm ourselves with our ten tiny revolutions and hit the streets.

Annalee: DO is where artists along with pvi carry out the plan (mission?) and execute the tiny revolution. This is usually in public, on public property, and in public spaces. The tiny revolutions are designed to be playful, not criminal, and provide creative disruptions in the public’s day to day. This part isn’t a “show” where an audience is invited to join. pvi get legal advice and take on any potential risk performing the tiny revolution, but their actions are guided by the results of the “think” phase where the audience did contribute to the “mission structure”.

Vitals: And of course- the tiny revolutions are documented, and we’ll put them online so that the co-conspirators, or the audience, can see what happens. Now, we don’t want you to give TOO much away, but can you give us a flavour of what we can expect from the upcoming think tank/revolutionary meeting?

Kelli: A bit of Russian flavour [and not just the vodka], an invitation to sit and listen or raise your voice to contribute, and the sheer terror/pleasure of talking out loud about things that matter right now and creating an idea together.

Vitals: We don’t like to play favourites, but do you have any personal highlights out of the previous actions in other cities?

Kelli: My personal favourite was the do week in Boorloo [Perth] on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja where the tiny revolutions taskforce snuck in to parliament house in with a handful of fake ID badges for ministries that our audience wished existed; the department for the end of the patriarchy, the ministry for indigenous land rights management, the ministry for young peoples rights to protest climate inaction, the ministry for renewable energy. They all made their way through security to be deposited quietly in the upper and lower houses.

Vitals: Any final message for the audience?

KellI: It is soooo much fun and really fires you up!

Annalee: Come along and see for yourself. There’s no pressure to participate or speak out if you’re not comfortable. You’re welcome to just witness and experience.

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

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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:

• marrickvilleschoolofeconomics
• averybeautifullaundromat

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