site responsive cultural production
As part of Makeshift Publics, with Arts House, I curated and facilitated a 3 day workshop focused on thinking about projects that centre place as a form of pedagogy and build collective platforms for creative response.
The workshop was a sharing of some of the projects I’d come into relationship with and worked with during my 3 year Unlocking Capacity grant, with a group of 14 artists who have similar interests, and came together through my prompt and writing below:
Site Responsive Cultural Production is a workshop surveying and engaging with a range of artistic structures and cultural projects that centre relationships to place.
While art can bring us closer to understanding connection, it can also often echo and rehearse environmental separation by moving ideas into particular walled off locations, removing them from their context. This can create abstractions and distractions, moving our attention away from the realities of the reciprocal relationships that create meaning and sustain our lives. In this workshop we will be looking into how we can do this otherwise.
How can we move away from the prevailing worldview in art that land is a background or an environment to be shut away from? And how could this move shift objectified understandings of land that create the conditions for it to be extracted from?
In this three-day workshop, curator/producer Lana Nguyen will speak to the artists, thinkers and organisers behind three projects that bring environments to the fore – Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster from The Quarry on Gadubanud Country, Alex Wisser and Peter Swain from Cementa on Wiradjuri Country and Eugene Howard and Zena Cumpston from In Place on Wurundjeri Country.
Together, we will aim to track what methodologies and structures make this type of practice possible, the capacity of site-responsive work as a form of climate response, how it can grow, and how this can open different perspectives and possibilities for the worlds we hope to create.