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KNOW THY NEIGHBOUR
In 1989, Vivienne Binns conducted what has since become an archetypal community engagement project in Blacktown, New South Wales. Mothers Memories, Others Memories involved screen-printing workshops that encouraged local women to contribute compositions recording their experiences and histories. Reflecting on the project, Binns described one of her key difficulties had been convincing the women of Blacktown that their lives were interesting enough to warrant their participation. Once convinced, however, the women would unpack complex narratives of loss, fulfillment, migration, transformation and endurance.7 Binns’ recollection describes an enduring idea in Australia, embodied too often in art: cultural cringe insists that stories and ideas of value must come from, or be validated by, somewhere more ‘sophisticated’ – somewhere else.8 IAS has long countered these tired notions of centre–periphery, highlighting both the global relevance and strange specificity of the rich and rare regional west. The focus of Know Thy Neighbour on the inner-city as a site of multifaceted regional specificity, articulated by its own populace, offers further challenge to those either/ors.
IAS has long countered these tired notions of centre– periphery, highlighting both the global relevance and strange specificity of the rich and rare regional west.
In the two years since the Know Thy Neighbour projects were initiated, the political landscape, locally and globally, has shifted remarkably. As I write, protestors attempt to cease, or at worst case witness, the Barnett government’s destruction of a significant ecological and Noongar heritage site, Beeliar Wetlands. They have been on site, daily, for roughly three months. A state election looms. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has, in this last week, used Twitter to publically undermine a deal struck between Australia and the former US administration to resettle more than 1000 refugees that our country has detained offshore for, in many cases, upwards of three years. The luxury of global artistic nomadism becomes more – or at least more visibly – compromised and contrasted by a developing, inward-turning nationalism in the West. The local, the global, the tragic and absurd and urgent and trivial can no longer be clearly defined. Johnston and Lee have found that embedded in what might be dismissed as banal local dramas – dog-park politics or council parking disputes – are lessons on how we treat each other, how we live together, what we value. McCabe, Carter and Pedler know that what we presume to be local is contingent on a network of economic interests that have little to do with personal or community wellbeing. Kronemyer, Bianco and Phillip’s projects remind those who have the privilege of forgetting that the urban landscape was once a populated wetland, that our waterways tell stories of dispossession and willful neglect, that our rose gardens and falsely green lawns are evidence of our denial. The wide, messy world starts in our kitchens and lounge rooms, spills out over our doorsteps. There has never been a better time to ask what remedies can art truly offer. GEMMA WESTON, FEBRUARY 2017