Episode 2 of VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art in Naarm/Melbourne, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and ACE in June 2022. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Arlie Alizzi, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices. A group of attendants including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program.
This is the second episode of VERS, which includes a recording of the curatorial introduction, a reading by Dominic Guerrera and the first half of the conversation which addresses the themes of re/organising, fugitivity and kinships. It took place on 18 June 2022.
This episode has a strong language warning and includes discussion about mental health.
Credits
This project was commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art and presented on site and in association with Samstag Museum of Art and ACE. It has been supported by the City of Adelaide. VERS graphics by Hana Shimada. VERS performances curated by Frances Barrett. Audio setup, technical support and recording by Mosaic Audio Visual. Podcast editing and production by Tilly Balding, Solstice Podcasting. This podcast is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art and Samstag Museum of Art.
Transcript
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Arlie Alizzi, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Kahn and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices.
A group of attendants, including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program from the MUMA website, the link to which is in the episode description.
This audio series is structured in three parts. This is the second episode of VERS, which includes a recording of the curatorial introduction, a reading by Dominic Guerrera, the first half of the conversation, which addresses the themes of re/organising, fugitivity and kinships. My name is Frances Barrett, and please enjoy.
[Short music clip]
Melissa Ratliff: So over about a two-year period, we held conversations on what a symposium around queer curating could be. Then COVID hit, which stretched out these conversations out of time and space. These conversations addressed ideas around versatility, performativity, visibility and adaptability. So from there, the notion of versatility and therefore ‘VERS’ emerged. So together, we devised this format of a round table conversational event, a durational event, or a performative event. So this format itself is, in a sense, our queer curatorial framework: something that is not effectively talking about queer curating, but is an effort to do it. So today we’re making transparent our working methods and inviting you to contribute and extend our conversation around queer modalities. And also after the experiences of isolation during the pandemic, there just seemed an importance to bringing people together physically in a space, not just in conversation, but for connections to be made.
Archie Barry: Hi, everyone. I’m Archie Barry, and now I’m going to read out our curatorial statement, which was collectively written by the Curatorial Advisory Panel, just to ground us in what we’re talking about and why we are here. Versatility implies an ability to adapt or be adapted to different functions or activities. Its roots in language are versatilis or versare, which hold meanings of turning and movement, revolving, bending or swinging physically, being engaged, being able to turn to something with ease, freely. Versatility is also a sexual capacity. A lover, whose sexual role or mode is not predetermined, but dependent on the relational dynamics of the encounter, top, bottom, and otherwise. To be versatile or vers is to sign on to an agile, responsive and creative process. VERS emerged from our conversations about curatorial practices. Becoming and being vers, being able to turn, switch, shift, are capacities that we associate with non-centered ways of knowing this world.
If we focus on this notion and how and why people in the arts are already vers, do we find new capacities for surviving and growing pleasure in our work? Is being vers a neoliberal or a fugitive mode? How do queer, trans, non-binary, indigenous gendered makers and organisers come together beyond the purview of mere resilience and the roles assigned by dominant regimes of value?
For this program, arts workers, artists and curators have been invited to a conversation that attends to the topics of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising, over the course of one afternoon. Performances and presentations taking place before and during the event contribute to these topics in ways that are not restricted to language. The rolling, round table conversation is intended to reflect on becoming and being vers through the lived experience of the invited attendants, of all of us, whose work and practices reveal a plethora of modes of exchange.
So this afternoon we are inviting rigorous conversation and debate, speculation and questioning as ways to unpack these ideas and the conditions we find ourselves in. So please, in this process, be conscious of listening to each other, giving space for each other, and respecting points of difference. A vers is only vers for others. We invite everyone to come and go freely throughout the event.
Frances Barrett: And so there are five days that are… oh [laughs] five days. There are five themes that are going to structure the day, and these are ‘re/organising’, and how we’ve defined that or approached that is developing the conditions for doing things differently where we replace, redistribute, queer the systems that govern cultural production. ‘Fugitivity’, a mode that is not strictly oppositional but seeks a different position. What are our various modes of flight, opting out, shadowing or escape? ‘Kinships’, building relational infrastructures of support, care and intimacy. How can we initiate new ecologies and non-extractive connections? ‘Embodiment’, foregrounding embodied experience as a mode of knowledge production. What are the lived realities of being in a body? And the final theme is ‘Pleasures’, finding joy in what we do within ourselves and with each other. And you’ll see, in the printed program, there are a list of questions that are attributed to each of the themes. And these questions are not a list of talking points that we’ll address today, but instead are propositions that map the panel’s shared conversation.
Melissa: So just a bit more to the speakers today and what they’ve been invited to do here. We’ve invited speakers here in this circle to attend to each theme. Therefore, they are the attendants today who will participate in a responsive conversation that addresses the themes that Frances just read out. Everyone has the discretion to contribute as much or as little to each theme as they wish, and has been invited to consider the set of questions that you’re all privy to in this program. They’ll be considering those in relation to their practices or a specific project.
So people have not been asked to prepare a presentation, nothing formal, but to respond in dialogue with everyone to each of the themes. So throughout the... Sorry, jumping ahead of myself. We would now like to invite each of these so-called at attendants, people, humans with us in this circle to introduce their names and let us know, if important, how each of you would like to be addressed and your pronouns, if that’s important to you, and which of the themes today speak to you and your practice. Can I start with you, Troy-Anthony?
Troy-Anthony Baylis: Microphone. Okay. So, Troy-Anthony Baylis. I guess probably like a lot of us, we could work across this entire universe of topics. I suppose my main interests today I think are probably going to be embodiment and fugitivity, with perhaps a little bit of re/organising.
Melissa: Thank you. Liz?
Liz Martin: Hello, my name is Liz Martin. Gosh, they’re all pretty interesting and I’m equally interested and perplexed at the same time. So I would be looking at pleasures, fugitivity and re/organising.
Debris Facility: Hi, I’m Debris facility, a representative of Debris Facility Pty Ltd. I use they/them, all, or no pronouns. I think we’re most invested in fugitivity, re/organising, maybe embodiment, disembodiment. Thanks.
Simona Castricum: I’m Simona Castricum. She/her, and I will have a crack at pleasures, fugitivity and embodiment.
Archie: Oh. I’ve already said my name. I’ll say it again. Archie Barry, my pronouns are they and them, and I will be convening the fugitivity panel and holding back on piping up at all other times.
Neika Lehman: Can everyone he… yeah. You can hear me through the mask. Okay. All right. I’ve never done that before. That’s weird. My name’s Neika Lehman, and I need the visual prompt. Which piece of paper is it? Ah, yes. I think they’re all very relevant, but I don’t have any particular one. Should I speak over here? Yeah. Okay. [Laughs] Yeah, I’ll just be on an angle. That’s fine. Yeah, maybe there’ll be more to say later, but there’s no particular area that’s really significant.
Emma Webb: Hello, I’m Emma Webb. I am interested in re/organising in particular, but also fugitivity and kinships.
Frances: My name’s Frances and I will be facilitating the theme of re/organising and embodiment.
V Barratt: Hi, I’m V, like that. And my pronouns are they/them. I think embodiment, kinships and maybe pleasures. Yeah.
Kyra Kum-Sing: Hi, I’m Kyra Kum-Sing. I guess I’ll probably talk to re/organising I guess.
Nikki Sullivan: I’m Nikki Sullivan, she/her. I don’t know, I’m just going to go with whatever happens.
Angela Bailey: Ange Bailey, she/her. I’ll probably talk a bit to re/organising, fugitivity, which I’ve only just… sort of rolling off the tongue, and a bit of kinship, I think.
Melissa: Thanks, Ange.
Verónica Tello: That’s me?
Melissa: Yeah, keep going.
Verónica: I’m Verónica and I’m interested in everything, but re/organising, embodiment and kinship, probably, mostly.
Melissa: Thank you. I think we’ve been through everyone that’s here just now. Thank you, everybody. So throughout the day, myself, Archie and Frances will be facilitating the conversation. As I mentioned, there’s an opportunity at the end of each half for responses. So more like a minute or two of comments, things that have occurred to you, things you’d like to express, reflecting on what you’ve been listening to. Today there will also be a series of performances presented here and at ACE that will be imbricated in this conversational format. These are by Dominic Guerrera, a reading, shortly, Archie Barry, Sione Teumohenga and Harriet Fraser-Barbour.
These also respond to the five themes of the event, but they do sit outside of the conversational format and extend the notions of vocality, language and embodiment. So Archie’s performance, Dilated Mind, will include audio recordings of a sexual experience - to note.
Archie: So just a few notes on being here for audience and for people who are speaking, our attendants. Please feel free throughout the afternoon just to enter and exit as you please, make yourself comfortable. There’s drinks and food, which is available in the foyer throughout the event from 1:30 until 3:30. And complimentary coffee from Angelo who runs the coffee cart, also in the foyer. So importantly, we are going to, well, we are recording today’s event, and that will be for a forthcoming podcast. We’ve also got two photographers here, Tom and Sia, who are documenting across today. Please let myself, Frances or Mel know at the end if you would prefer not to have documentation of yourself recorded, shared, after the event.
And of course, we’ve got Auslan interpretation today from Heather Loades and Debbie Rankin, Rankine, sorry, from The Deaf Butterfly Effect. So the best sight lines for Debbie and Heather are just sitting here to my right, so we can make space here if we have anyone else in attendance who needs sight lines.
Lastly, please make sure that you pay a visit upstairs to Daniel Jaber, who’s doing an endurance performance today entitled Rot, which is upstairs in Gallery Two. And Daniel will be performing until 5:00 PM so that’s an endurance work.
Now, finally, it brings me great pleasure to introduce Dominic Guerrera, who will be reading now.
[Applause]
Dominic Guerrera: The title of this poem is, ‘This Poem is Called Truth Telling’, and I dedicate it to all the queer Aboriginal community organisers.
24 hour news cycle, livestream, CCT footage, of Aboriginal appearance, most wanted, handcuffed and dragged in front of cameras by the cops. Nightly news, first story, straight from the top.
Newspaper articles, pictures, taken outside of court. They document every step to back up the report that the Black criminal is alive and well. Don’t switch the channel, this is not to be missed.
Your suburbs are at risk from the Black thugs. Your home is at risk from the Black thieves. Your family is at risk from the Black deviates. Your culture is at risk of Blackness. Your country is at risk of Black rage.
Solution is to incarcerate to obliterate. Nothing unusual, nothing weird, but funny how the footage of Black deaths in custody always seems to disappear. They’re just white men doing their job, in a system designed to kill Black mob. Like I said, they’re just white men doing their job. They are not monsters. They are just humans, capable of doing monstrous things.
We are forced to spend days in hospitals, in funeral homes and in detention, in prisons, in cop cars, in all the institutions.
In our homes, electronically chained to system we did not volunteer to, yield to, nor did we consent to. Lies are not fiction. They are real. And they continue to hide the real criminals.
Marketable culture. Soft paint dot paintings printed on mugs, notebooks, cushions, curtains, homewares, dresses for inner city white women to wear as they cycle to the election booth to vote for The Greens. We’ve progressed, to capitalism. Our culture being repurposed to make whites feel comfortable. Made in China, sold in Kmart, from slave labour to being followed around in the store. Just to remind you, you ain’t the type of Black they want to adore. They select the ones they want to recognise, placing them in non-threatening poses, in non-threatening clothes, giving non-threatening opinions. Placid Black women, tamed, beautified, stripped of strength and ready to assimilate. Watch these whites take the bait.
Inside the pages of Marie Claire, page after page, exotic transformation, like savage, to citizen, to constitutional recognition. Our Aboriginality is being turned into the pages of the colony. Recognise our strength, recognise our sovereignty.
Here’s my statement from the heart: get the fuck off my country. Give me back my land and stop stealing my children, my future. In the empty space where your heart used to be, try to hold yourself accountable for the crimes you pretend you don’t see. White games, white laws, white man’s audacity. Don’t stare me down, don’t hold me in your disdain, because nothing that we can say or do will make you change, because I speak Black hurt, Black blood, Black people’s rage. Thank you.
[Applause]
Frances: Thank you, Dominic. And I hope that truth telling imbues the rest of the conversation.
So we might begin with re/organising as a theme and perhaps to lead with this theme, I might start with the question, what does it take to move beyond our assigned roles into a plethora of modes of exchange that are dignifying and realising who we have always wanted to be?
Debris: I’m up for diving in. Let’s get rolling. I think this notion of roles also is kind of interesting to unpack. We understand role as a professionalised role, right? So our role within an arts ecology is hemmed into our job description, how we understand our job description as our ontology as such. I mean, how we understand our place within these kinds of structures. And I think some of the pissy things around re/organising is how we can reorganise without it turning into a neoliberal think tank. How arts workers can evade the capitalist trap of us being the test subjects for other modes of capitalist extraction. I think stretching out of our role, what are we stretching into? What’s the pressure to overperform, to take on more, from, I guess, lots of other structures. So it’s complicated, but I think it’s a really interesting launching point for us to understand our role within this. I’m also interested in other kinds of roles that people could interpret, like the interpersonal or affective role that we might have with our practice.
Frances: How do you maybe see then re/organising extending beyond the professional, beyond the role, in terms of labour?
Debris: It seems incredibly complex of how we re/organise our relationship to our practice, or dare we say, our community of practice too. What we’re able to give and receive from this, to have not necessarily an extractive relationship, but also be able to take things from what’s around us that are on offer. How we can give back in meaningful kinds of ways, which evade these kinds of capture.
Nikki: I’m interested in… what you were saying there really made me think about, what are the pathways in a sense that are already given to us as possibilities to move outside our roles? In many ways, those pathways just do lead us to become people who are burnt out because we’re going to work harder and harder and harder to achieve something else. But what are the constraints on the possibility of developing other ways of living those roles and being those roles? And I think those constraints are both organisational, but they’re also the constraints that are within us as part of our own dispositions. Not natural dispositions, but dispositions that we’ve developed through processes of professionalisation. So what can we do and maintain a sense of ourself as professionals, as makers, whatever it is our sense of self is?
Emma: I kind of feel like we have to really also look at political economy and go back to… we’re kind of imbued in our industry or a sector that’s absolutely captivated by this idea of productivity and that the show must go on and growth, you know all of those. It’s very much part of the art sector. And I think that’s what - we really need to challenge those kind of big ideas to then be able to make changes in how we’re working and how we’re valued. The kind of conversation around the value of labour and work, I think is a really massive thing to be having at the moment. And it’s probably one of the things that the pandemic has actually enabled, is to have that conversation. Because I think we get captured by… We need to talk about post growth, but also this whole idea of continuing to have to innovate new ways of being artists and curators and being in the world. It’s like, well actually, that whole idea around innovation is extremely, I think it’s extremely problematic. I think we have to go back to old ways or older ways, I guess, of thinking about labour and work, rather than trying to always strive for innovation.
Frances: What’s the issue with innovation?
Emma: I think innovation is just very tied to the ideas of productivity. And that innovation under capitalism is basically working harder to make more in a faster, speedier, more profitable way. And it’s actually harder and harder to separate the notion of innovation from that. And it’s very individualised. It’s not to say that we can’t be exploratory and experimental and utopian in the ways that we organise our workplaces and our communities and we should be, but I just think a lot of those innovation and even utopianism has been really, really captured by the right and even more so under the pandemic.
Neika: I can probably speak to that from a collective perspective. I’m a member of this mob, which is a First Nations art collective based in Naarm in Melbourne. And before the pandemic, we basically got in the habit of only accepting invitations to do things with a kind of explicit understanding that there might not be an outcome. Because for us, it’s not so much about being interested in offering something outwards to the broader arts ecology who are desperate for First Nations voices, but more about how we can find meaningful development as artists. And that has a lot to do with us working as a collective. And the question of why is innovation bad? I was thinking that’s interesting because I don’t know, I don’t think we have ever used the word innovation, but at different times, depending on what’s going on now that, I mean, we’re still in a pandemic, but I’m not sure if the kind of invitations we’re getting, people understand that outcomes might not be possible, so they’ve softened the outcome a little bit where they’re like, ‘And then there’s going to be an amazing dinner at the end’. And it’s like, but that’s still something that we have to go to and turn up at and la, la, la. So it’s interesting how it’s like, within a collective sense, what does professional development or meaningful growth as an artist mean, and how can you continue to advocate for that when an arts ecology is changing around you, I guess, as well. And maybe there is a bit more of an understanding more generally, the outcomes can be frustrating, to always be expected to have an outcome. So I guess the question is, sometimes just how can you just be supported to be an artist and essentially be left alone? [Laughs]
Verónica: Can I ask, and what has been the response from institutions who are very outcome focused, for a number of reasons? In part, going back to what you were saying, Debris, that’s their core operations and budgets are attached to outcomes. So, I guess, I’m seeing the refusal of outcomes as a way of asking institutions to reorganise while maintaining your… You are insisting on what you need. So yeah.
Neika: Yeah. I think that probably one of the most organic things that happened was an invitation from Arts House that… The invitation preceded - it was before COVID happened. Pretty quickly they realised that whatever we were going to do wasn’t possible anymore. So they were happy to commit to us, to supporting us having weekly, oh sorry, fortnightly online meetings. And basically, because of the extent of the knowledge and ideas and stuff that we were generating through having this commitment to talking, we decided to produce a book, which we did. And it’s called Black Wattle and you can get it through Incendium Radical Library [chuckles]. I don’t even know. Anyway, so that was something we ended up doing an outcome just because it felt right. So sometimes that’s not really being, even having this really intense kind of language of refusal or something like that, it’s more just about, can you please, when we’re speaking to the institution, how do you think this will benefit us, and what is there for us to think about that ourselves as well? And then, and then we might come back with what we think is possible as an outcome as well. It’s not always a blatant refusal, but kind of trusting the artist’s intuition and how to respond to any kind of invitation. Rather than… cause I think there is a real desire in a sense to reorganise visions. Visions of difference can be really like taxonomical; it’s like, okay, we’ve got the black artists, we’ve got the queer artists, we’ve got the black queer artists, we’ve got - yeah. I think being able to have just a bit… being trusted by curators and institutions and stuff to know that you can produce something without having to be… boxed in isn’t really the right word, but categorised as part of that invitation. I don’t know if that answers the question.
Nikki: It seems to me as though there’s such a huge gulf between what institutions want and what you’re talking about as of collective art practice, that how do you ever even create a conversation there? Yeah, it feels like we’re talking worlds apart here, and, by and large, I think organisations want to tick boxes. They want to say ‘Yes, okay, we’ve had this many First Nations exhibitions, this many queer exhibitions’, whatever, and there’s a whole kind of discourse of inclusion there that they can use that sort of gives them traction to be seen to be doing what they should be doing, but really actually not having any real commitment to that. How do you build real commitment within organisations whose values really just don’t align with that?
Troy-Anthony: I think in a way it really is, at least for me - and I’m probably in a sense reflecting on the sort of intrapersonal, I suppose, because we kind of navigate the reorganising ourselves all the time, some of us more than others, but I think it is really about being at the table. Because if we’re not actually at the table, you can’t actually make, you just don’t have a voice at all. And maybe it’s about how we can navigate to make change at the table. And I know it’s very hard and taxing, but I suppose I asked those questions of myself doing a PhD. I mean, why would I get permission from an institution that’s already prescribed and subscribed, prescribed and taken my knowledge, why would I then ask their permission to be acknowledged for my authentic self? So there’s that, but also it’s… I kind of think it’s… it is that sort of pull that – so about what to do with that house. So Audrey Lorde obviously speaks about the master’s house and how to bring down the master’s house and I kind of realised that, for some people to just smash the master’s house, you are leaving people with nowhere to go and it can kind of compound those issues.
So I don’t know, it’s about kind of a form of trickery and using the language of the master back to the master to change it around subtly. And I guess we kind of do that in queer ways a lot. That’s a lovely intersection and kind of advantage of being so bloody mixed up as we can rely on all of those complex parts of society that we can relate to make change. But, and just one more thing, and I’m going for a long time here, is I also think of the idea of permaculture. So something used in gardening that kind of incorporates the pests and the parasites to make things strong again. And for me, then, I can even take on colonisation and all the good, the bad, the ugly and the damn filthy to reorganise that in a way to make things beautiful and stronger because we’ve inherited all of this. So yeah, that’s kind of how I see all reorganising. And I know that’s probably more intrapersonally, but I think there can be some adaptations to organisations as well.
Simona: Yeah, I think sometimes it’s putting the institution through the hall of mirrors. And for me, it was like when I started my PhD, it was like really, I guess, I jumped out of professional practice so that I could interrogate the practices that I was part of. And that was music and it was architecture, and the question was, how is architecture transphobic? And I was always getting that question and I’m kind of like, well, architecture delineates space, it delineates bodies and it actually upholds this sort of administrative transphobia and this administrative violence. And I guess that’s this question that I ask of all of these institutions, that we’re kind of part of, and in a way, it’s kind of like - in order to bring about the radical futures that we want to see, we have to engage in really radical practice. And it’s sort of like unpacking the dystopia and then imagining I guess the utopia, and similarly in that… Angela Davis sort of talks about imagining our way into radical futures, and also Esteban Muñoz talks about imagining our way out of the quagmire, you know, dreaming our own futures out of the quagmire that we live in, that find ourselves in. So it’s those imaginations of these utopias, these speculations that we make through our work, that as a three year old, in order to imagine my 47 year old trans life, it’s like, well I did that, we all did that, and that’s the nugget that we take away.
Frances: Liz, did you have?
Liz: Yeah, I think - and this is probably my own bias and enthusiasm for the space - but I think that disability and access can be a really powerful thought in this area, in terms of creating new spaces or new relationships or different times – like working within crip time. And it’s a wonderful way to engage with organisations who are keen to work in this space. And I think now that there’s an understanding of the basics of things, like Auslan interpreting and captioning and wheelchair access, we can now move into some of the more trickier, unusual spaces. And it’s a powerful space to work because there is no one size fits all and it’s really bringing back in a sense of humanity into conversations of creativity or space or connection. It’s recognising each of us and in that space, that allows a real benefit for everyone, really. If we can get that right, which we haven’t yet, but we will.
Debris: No, but I think it’s really what you’re pointing to, that it’s not going to be right or it is going to be experimental. We are going to have to stretch out and fuck up a lot of the time. And I think reorganising a lot of what we talk about in terms of evaluation, it needs to be more than metrics. I feel like the kind of grant acquittal is no way near any real kind of evaluation that I think if we are trying to stretch out into new ways of thinking, we need to invite critical reflection on what we’re doing with these kind of communities and be more, yeah, agile, dare I say. I think this notion of if we are going to invest in experimentation, I think that’s got to actually have a counterpoint of reflection and integrating what you’ve done after any kind of event.
Frances: Simona, I’m quite interested in what you’re talking about in terms of radical actions and being radical and maybe extending or elaborating on what that is.
Simona: Well, a lot of people ask me how is, what’s music got to do with architecture, and how can you practice architecture through music? And it’s just sort of like, well, I don’t know. I just think that there, I feel like I can articulate more about queerness and architecture in a five minute pop song than I can through a 60,000 word academic essay. I mean, I found out more about queer life in the outer suburbs and all that sort of stuff through Bronski Beat than I would’ve through reading a book at the age of seven, so that changed my life, as much as the opening two minutes of Blade Runner changed my life.
So I’m interested in how those forms of communication can really sort of reach out, I think, to people who otherwise just wouldn’t be exposed to these ideas. And I mean, I saw Blade Runner when I was seven and I heard Bronski Beat when I was nine. So it’s just like that set me up for this sort of idea of where I might be. But they were about, as far as I was concerned, they were about architecture, that was about sexuality, that was about gender, and it was done through… So I guess it’s these very radical, I guess, departures from traditional practice that enable very… ideas to be disseminated to a great deal of people.
Frances: I’m also interested in, Neika, what you were talking about in terms of collectivity and then thinking about institutions asking, but within that there’s a whole scale of organising, and I’m interested in, I guess, artist run initiatives and the histories of those. And Kyra, I think being part of Boomalli for a long time, maybe a reflection on reorganising in terms of histories of artist run initiatives and organising.
Kyra: Firstly, I really don’t like talking on mics so I’m a bit nervous. I always let that out because I’ve never been a good speaker. But personally, I want to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this Country, as a Malera Bandjalan and Mitakoodi woman it’s important to do that, recognise the Traditional Owners on the land which I’m visiting right now, of the Kaurna people. In terms of reorganising, for us at Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Cooperative, we’ve been going for about 35 years as of this year. So it’s been quite a bit… 35 years ago I was probably four. So yeah, I wasn’t there since then. But I did grow up around there and when it first started, it was around the urban space of trying to bring up artists who were trying to make it in the art sector as well as telling their stories.
And I think there before, Dom is it, truth telling? It’s a very important part, especially when you’re talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues within Australia. In terms of reorganising, when I look at some of the stuff that we’ve done over the many years, I think we’ve probably challenged a lot of those thoughts and processes, especially when it comes to institutions. I just feel like when you’ve read that poem before, it just makes you realise how much you really do not - you sort of… you know that that happens, but you know, you also keep going because that’s the sort of stuff that’s happened to our people. And so in saying that, when I do a lot of the stuff at Boomalli with our group, it’s about bringing all those different perspectives in.
So those artists and also when you’re in those negotiations with those people, you actually got to bring on that belief system upon yourself too. So we’re very… I sort of follow that self-determination notice. So Aboriginal self-determination, we do our affairs for ourself, and by ourself. It’s very important that we maintain who we are and Australia needs to understand that this is not their country. So in saying that, we need to do the truth telling and recognise those that have been here in the past and have walked this land for many years.
There are many ways of being able to do that. And if we do fair talks and negotiations, it’s great. But a lot of those negotiations before have never been great for Aboriginal people. And I could probably talk about that a whole lot, but I don’t want to talk too much. But overall, it’s never been an easy thing to be in any sort of art space. But I guess at why we do it at Boomalli and look after New South Wales Aboriginal language groups, it’s because it’s needed and it’s vital and it’s that continuation of who we are as people.
Frances: Thank you. Dominic, I’m wondering if you wanted to respond to what Kara was saying, or?
Dominic: Well, I think if we go back to the seventies and to think about Aboriginal community controlled health, which is the sector that I worked in, it was about our mob creating things for ourselves. And literally the South Australian Aboriginal Health Service, which is now Nunkuwarrin Yunti, started because Aunty Gladys Elphick paid a doctor to get in a car and go and visit Aboriginal families who were afraid to take their kids to hospitals and doctors because they were afraid they were going to get removed, so that’s grassroots. And she did that on her own back. So I’ve done a lot of organising of arts events and stuff without funding or done it with minimal funding, like $500 from a health service. So you can achieve things, but there… you do have to have, you have to work out a relationship sometimes with the institutions if you want to expand, to bigger, reach larger audiences. And then you have the question of where your money comes from. I know a lot of institutions get flack for taking money from private donors, mining companies, but I see no difference between them and governments because the whole Aboriginal community controlled health sector is funded by government and they’ve done more violence to us than any other institution, and continue to do violence. So it’s - as Aboriginal people, to be sovereign, to be self-determined, but we’re still forced to engage in, with institutions that are being violent towards us. And that’s another layer. And also as queer people too, those institutions have not been polite to queer people. So it’s a tough place to navigate.
V: Can I just quickly say, it’s really hard to want to take a seat at the table, honestly. I really loved what you were saying, Liz, because I think a lot of the stuff around disability and access has actually gone beyond the performative. It’s beginning to go beyond the performative, thankfully, to a lot of labour of arts workers, not the institutions per se, but the arts workers have taken it beyond the performative. I think when you… it’s really hard to want to take a seat at the table when box ticking exposes itself. You are a box that is ticked, and you can see how you are implicated in that institutional structure. You know you are not being acted upon, with, through, in any way beyond a performative act. And so the labour that is involved in reorganising or challenging or, I mean, I just want to exit frankly. I just want to, and I’m not quite sure what that achieves, but I just feel like it’s really hard to want to take a seat at the table when the box ticking is so obvious.
Troy-Anthony: Can I just add to that seat at the table thing? And I know you’re not suggesting this, but I’m saying it’s absolutely challenging and it ain’t easy and I’m not on the same tables as I was sitting at before by the way and it wasn’t a comfortable seat. In fact, it was really traumatic as well. And people burn out as I’m sure some people here who have worked in Aboriginal controlled organisations… I’ve worked in health and disability and the arts before as well and it can burn you out. Because you’re at a place where there’s so much deficit and you’re constantly this small person.
But I suppose by putting it that way, it’s also enabled me to, I guess understand this, at least for me to understand the structures that kind of control us in a way and have, not, a bit of, yeah... Because I also, as part of that even I’ve chaired some organisations too, and that can be a really difficult role because you have to keep secrets and community all want to know what’s going on and you can’t because you have an obligation to under the law in terms of who you, you’re supposed to be protecting and their workers’ rights. So it’s really complex and it’s really challenging and it really hurts. Yeah. So I must say it’s quite a relief at the moment to be an independent artist and I get to choose what I will do and what I won’t do. And yeah, absolutely hats off for people who are still in the struggle in that particular environment because it’s bloody hard and I appreciate it.
Frances: And we might move to the next theme, which is fugitivity and chaired by Archie Barry.
Archie: So I will reread the two sentence description of what fugitivity might mean. Fugitivity might be a mode that is not strictly oppositional but seeks a different position. What are our various modes of flight, opting out, shadowing, or escape? So to begin, inviting some responses to that definition and especially inviting in contrary definitions potentially, we might start with the question: why would someone choose to be less recognisable or less legible? And on the back of that, who actually has the choice to be invisible? Who benefits from being invisible and who suffers from being invisible? So there are some contradictions at play just to open up this conversation now.
Debris: Maybe, rolling off the back of some of the themes from Simona, and V, and Dominic, I mean this form of administrative violence, which is kind of enacted on legible subjects, I think to evade being legible means you can evade these kinds of capture, which I think, yeah - capture and extraction of the self of your labour. Through my own work and practice I’ve really invested in the parasite as a form which can exist between a host body and not. I feel it’s a way to maintain oblique or adjacent relationships to these institutions of power to survive and maybe to destabilise them or, you know, render visible what some of the kind of cracks or flows of power within them are. Also, maybe, opacity’s fun? To not like… to have some kind of mask is a kind of pleasure to step out of yourself into something else, is some other kind of joyful ego death, I think, which is - that’s led some of my investment in this.
Archie: So it comes to mind, for me, there might be a plethora of ways that people choose to show up in less legible forms. And you’ve just described maybe a parasitic intervention or the pleasure of an ego death, but of course for every creative practitioner there’s a different modality. So I’m also interested in bringing the conversation into what other ways that you practice being less legible or less visible, throwing that out.
Nikki: I think that’s a really, I mean, it’s an interesting question because really legibility is not just about whether you decide how legible you’re going to be. I mean, you can practice somewhere in a way that you think is sort of… I don’t know, where you were doing various things to not out yourself as whatever it is you’re doing subversively. But the effectiveness of that is largely beyond your control. How whatever institution you are kind of infiltrating, interprets you, will have all sorts of impacts on your capacity to move within and to do work within that space. So I mean, I was interested in Troy-Anthony’s notion of the trickster, which I think in lots of ways, lots of us sort of deploy to varying degrees for certain amounts of time within certain spaces. But what goes with that often is a whole lot of privilege. I mean, in a way you have to have a whole lot of privilege to get into this space to be able to play.
But privilege isn’t just privilege at the same time that you are often an outsider and that’s an effect of… or being an outsider, it’s about not being privileged. You know what I mean? They’re really complex, these questions. I think it’s very easy to talk about things like infiltration and to make it sound like it’s much more possible and much more radical. The reality of it is that these acts are, they can be devastating to a self. And, in a way, if we are lucky enough to be able to move in and out off spaces where we can do this and then go back to our communities to sort get our strength back, then we’re very lucky to be able to do that. But I’m not sure how doable that is for a whole lot of people in a whole lot of spaces.
Archie: For me, that brings to mind the potential for fugitivity to be a place of resilience, building laterally, beyond the disciplining context of an institution. And I wonder if that brings up any thoughts just to turn that concept around again.
Nikki: Yeah, I was really interested in what you were saying about community practice. And in a way, community practice can create fugitive spaces that are nourishing and energy building and capacity building. So yeah, it does depend on what it is that we are thinking of as fugitivity and where you practice that and what it might look like in any given situation.
Angela: I think also just thinking about that in terms of queer space and queer spaces and that we are actually also now creating our own, or in a sense, institutional queer space. If I think about places in Melbourne, the Victorian Pride Centre, which has been open a couple of years now, which intends to be a place where communities and organisations of the LGBTIQ+ community can interact with each other.
It was built as a place pre-COVID, so there’s these gigantic big spaces where we’re all supposed to meet, but what we’ve found post-COVID is that we’re not sort of ready to do that. We need those smaller spaces, those less visible spaces. And I think back through, if you look historically how we created, queer people created, clubs and bars as safe places, but we also had the lens that violence can come to those places when we leave those places, when we come to those places. And so, there’s stories through history of lookouts and people on lookouts for people that would come to places to violate the people in them. And so, it’s interesting to look at that idea of what are we creating ourselves now in terms of what we need in terms of safety, but also places to stretch ourselves. And I’m often asked about resilience with queer communities and I think also what I like to talk about as well is complacency and how we sort of balance those two in terms of looking forward.
Melissa: Could you say a bit more on complacency and what the danger is in that that you were recognising? I didn’t quite…
Angela: Well, I think I often get asked about it in relation to the Australian Queer Archives, and we have exhibitions of material that… at the moment we’re showing an exhibition called Printed Protest, which is 100 plus posters and placards and banners from the archive that show the range of campaigns from the sixties through to today. And there’s always often that conversation around, well, you know, marriage equality meant that you’ve moved to a place where everyone should be happy. And then you just look at the next lot of posters and placards on trans visibility rights. And it’s like, well that’s why, that’s where we’re at. That’s where that complacency has sat for some of the queer community and not really actioning what needs to happen for the communities within our own community. So, I think that’s what I talk about when I talk about complacency and it’s always shifting and changing in that you’ve… there’s always someone coming in to talk about it in a different way. And you only have to look at different countries in the world, the US at the moment, in terms of some of their retro… what’s going on there. So, that’s what I mean when I talk about complacency.
Simona: Yeah, just to pick up on that point. I think there’s three, I guess, guiding principles that I bring back and it’s this idea of safety, belonging and permanence. And when I talk about permanence, I talk about to what extent other rights that we’ve won are going to be ongoing, going to be continuing, and particularly within trans rights. That’s like, the first thing that people are trying to wind back at the moment. What we’ve won under one regime, had the government not changed, there were four pieces of legislation that were going to completely change the lives of trans and gender diverse people. So we’re lucky that didn’t happen, but that still could happen, right? So, that safety and belonging is something that we build within our communities, but that sense of permanence with our rights is this, we’re relying on the majority of voters in order to bestow to us…
And to get back to, I guess the original question and this idea of visibility, it’s like, Bhenji Ra, I remember on Trans Day of Visibility tweeted, what’s the point of visibility without protection? So yes, it’s those rights that give us protection, but it’s also, like with being visible, it’s either you’re a symbol or a target. None of those things are really humanising positions to be in. So it’s like, when you are doing something like advocacy and the critical mass is just so low and there’s so few people that are capable of doing the heavy lifting. And yeah, it’s burnt me out, that’s for sure. I’d much rather write pop songs because a TERF can’t touch a pop song in the way that a TERF could touch a 60,000 word essay, right?
Archie: Perhaps on that note, where are the places that we get nourishment to continue the, for better or worse, burden of creating our own protection, between ourselves? Where is the nourishment? How do we... Where’s the fuel, maybe? Yeah. Where do we go to? Yeah.
Neika: The dog park with all the other gays. [Laughs] That’s my safe space, and I’m allowed to yell there, yell at het couples and their horrible dogs.
V: I think that fugitivity is simultaneously a very banal practice, just about survival, not just in terms of visibility but also in terms of just basically keeping body and soul together and a roof over the head. As an artist who has always chosen to not actually, despite a performance two days ago, practice in institutions as a rule - you know I perform in cardboard box down the end of a lane way or in warehouse spaces, or in artist-run spaces and so on. And never really have pursued this idea of a solo career. And therefore, income is sporadic. And also, I have to not get income because if I get income then - because I live in a housing co-op, which is actually one thing that really does keep body and soul together - if I get income, then my rent increases, so I don’t want to get income. So then, I have to really make sure I don’t get a really big artist fee, and if I do get a really big artist fee, then I really should actually give it away.
Fugitive practice is just one about learning to lie across a lifetime, and that’s super super important to me, and I’m really happy to teach other people how to lie in order simply to survive. And then at some point fugitivity is thrust upon you as, for example, an elder queer, non-binary artist, you do really fall off the... You have to do a shit-ton of labour to be visible so you do get the work. And then, if you do get the work, you have to lie about getting them. I think there’s a lot of complicated relationships there around fugitivity and survival and wanting to opt into the institution so you can continue working in order that you don’t suffer ego death every day, because that’s a bit annihilating, and so on. I just feel like there’s a shit-ton of contradictions, complications, embracing fugitivity, but also as you said, it can be devastating and so on.
Troy-Anthony: Just in terms of drag and fugit… that new word to me, yes. That in a way, as it is for many people, but I think drag for me - initially I was doing drag in the - I’m 46 - and I was doing drag in the eighties at school, and I did a Patrice, Pauline and Mary performance for, Hey Hey It’s Saturday even on television. So yeah, I’ve got a long history of drag. But I realised that certainly for me back then, that drag actually was about this kind of escapism, which is oddly ironic because it’s really putting yourself out there, but somehow that disguise, if you like, because, quite the disguise, darling, really kind of enabled this sort of - I don’t know if it was maybe moments of mobility, but certainly more so it did build this inner strength, I guess.
And when I started doing drag outside of that, so as an adolescent, once I’d left school, I was doing, I did Tina Turner songs mostly. And it’s interesting when I reflect back now that there were moments of joy and almost an out of body experience, which is completely hyperactive. And yeah, it’s interesting because I look at, I’ve been digging up old pictures lately, and I’ve realised that you can see the way that I would hurl myself around and be blood and bone everywhere, literally, like blood and bleeding, and bitumen isn’t very forgiving. And yeah, that it’s actually a space for dealing with violence and trauma, and like, in that diva worship, what Tina Turner had been through, I kind of embodied that. So I don’t quite know how that’s necessarily fugitivity, but yeah, it’s that - those weird spaces.
Debris: Well, to me it points to the fugitive being, it’s an action. You’re directly running from something. And also it touches upon, yeah, criminality. When was it actually illegal for quote unquote men to wear quote unquote women’s clothing too?
Troy-Anthony: In Queensland, which is where I was from.
Debris: Yeah, so I think we can point to the kind of legal structures that we’re in, or legal and administrative structures, and that there is a need to evade them or break them. And I think that’s one of the driving forces for this kind of modality, which is appealing too. Yeah, the government, the state, the whole structure is broken, so we might as well find ways to break it with pleasure.
V: I can really relate to what you’re saying, and to that, Debris, having lived under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime in the 1980s, and running artist-run spaces in condemned buildings that were going to be knocked down by the Dean Brothers wrecking ball at 3:00 AM in the morning. So yeah, I’m there.
Angela: I was also there.
V: Yeah, you were there too.
Angela: But just in relation to, because I picked up on what you’re saying there in terms of criminality, and if you think about also the traces in history of queer life, some of the earliest records that exist exist within the public records office of various state institutions, and they are stories of trauma and violence.
Even though we see them as the earliest part of some of the queer lives lived, there’s still an amazing amount of trauma there. I was looking through something the other day of… entrapment was a huge thing, betrayal. And that still exists, particularly in beat culture and cruising as well, but not so much now. But still, you look at the Tasty raids in Melbourne, you look at police violence. But 1860, a man gets entrapped by a lover he’d met the night before. He gets a death sentence, it gets pardoned to 15, 16 years in Pentridge, four years in irons. And he spends the next 11 years of his sentence writing letter after letter after letter explaining his innocence and the ridiculousness of such a conviction. And you can almost look at that life and what he tries to do in terms of upturning his conviction as an early form of activism in terms of this dedicated letter writing. At the end of each letter he says, ‘Your humble servant’. It’s like, oh my God. So, it’s fascinating to look back at those stories, but still they come from a real place of trauma.
Dominic: Can I push back a little? The first documentation of queerness on this continent is actually in Aboriginal communities and it’s documented in body and in language. And there are terms that were used for same sex attracted or gender diverse people, and they are actually stories of belonging. So like, there’s actually a history that predates the violent history that is one of belonging and loving. And so, it’s time for that circle to come back.
Angela: Yeah, absolutely, because those laws and the colonisation and those laws all came to Australia. Definitely. Yeah.
Neika: Yeah. I think that’s really important to acknowledge and it’s thinking about the huge amount that is left out of the early colonial records, especially when it comes to queerness and Aboriginal cultures. It also depends where - who was writing that record and where. In the Tasmanian context, where I come from, the genocide that was attempted then was happening way before there was even anthropologists strutting around the island. That kind of anthropological perversion, which is where you might get the slightest colonial record of queer expression, even if it’s misunderstood and miscoded, that’s just totally absent from somewhere further south, like in Tasmania. But yeah, I found this idea of fugitivity before I read about it really confusing because I was taking it literally, like a fugitive. And it’s like, well, my people were fugitives on their own country and they were on an island, they couldn’t escape, they didn’t want to escape anyways. They wanted to stay where they were on their Country.
And also, as a creative writer, I’m really interested in colonial archives as well as - you know, if archives are basically just places of knowledge, then Country is its own kind of archive. The body is an archive, blah, blah. But looking at these early colonial records of my own family, they’re always going to be deficit discourse. There’s nothing pleasurable inside those descriptions and letters and legal cases and whatever else. And yet, I’ve just been so drawn to that space as a creative, and actually this kind of fugitivity that maybe I’m practicing now is how to kind of smuggle out of what’s left unwritten from my people’s time. The pleasures and the intimacies that were happening. We had just as many seconds in the day as anybody else to have banal thoughts where you might fantasise about someone. So, for me now it’s like, how do you... Yeah, I love that word smuggling out. It’s like, how do you smuggle things out of these traumatic archives and trust your ancestral lines to know that there were people like you, but speaking a different language, looking different, who still had these desires and these thoughts and love and were loved? That’s kind of the new thing for me.
Dominic: Can I just - I want to acknowledge James Tylor, who’s going to get spooked out with it, but he found - I’m not going to say the words - but he found two words. I’ve got them in my phone. I always pull them out with other Kaurna people, but, two words. And in the old Kaurna dictionary, and one of them said, I can’t remember the word, but it says dislike of women, chaste, or, yeah, C-H-A-S-T-E. And I was like, okay. [Laughs] And the other one is unmarried woman, but it wasn’t... there was something about… But anyways, you have to go into not just the diction... There’s so much to unpack in which you are saying, who recorded that? What was the language they used? And then, what was the story in which they captured it? So you have to go into the linguist’s document, their diaries and stuff, and start to break that down in order to unpack it.
But then, brotherboys and sistergirls, particularly the sistergirls up in NT, they have a thing called New Culture, which is about expanding culture to be more inclusive of sistergirls and brotherboys in community. Whether that’s bringing them into men and women’s business or creating new business for them to exist in. And the Tiwi Islands do that beautifully. I know a brotherboy over in New South Wales that happened where they created a special men’s business ceremony for him. Even though there’s this digging in the archives, it doesn’t mean that our culture has to remain stagnant pre-invasion, that it can actually continue to evolve and incorporate new things.
V: Can I just point to the work of Natalie Harkin and the Unbound Collective here, and just about working with the archives and reweaving them into new stories.
James Tylor: Yeah. Sorry, just to follow on from Dominic. Yeah. So, the mission was literally just on the other side of the river, and the church is Trinity Church, where the kids were taken. And then you know, because they’re missionaries, they sense the language in a certain way. So, finding those queer histories and that are not so clear. But I think because I grew up with the word moolagoo, for someone who’s gay in Nunga language, and so, you kind of know that those words are present in language, that go back thousands of years. And so, one of them that I came across, which is probably the way the missionaries were explaining it, and that was, ngangki-wadli, not fond of females, was the expression. So that would be related to, obviously, a gay man. There’s also a similar one, which is, miyu-ti(na), being without man or husband, and that refers to a woman. So, ngangki is the word for woman, miyu is the word for man, or miyurna for people more generally. But yeah, so it’s troving that archive is like, really tricky. But I am going to put back to Dominic just briefly, if you feel comfortable about talking about Moolagoo Mob, which is... you know?
Dominic: Yeah, so moolagoo means cat, and it’s a west coast term... west coast of South Australia, not Western Australia, so like Ceduna way, and it’s made its way into the Nunga vernacular. But yeah, the Moolagoo Mob then was a group that was created by Kim Wanganeen, Raymond Zada and Violet Buckskin, who also created the spinoff Black Lemons. But even in this, we... And moolagoo has a contentious history, so it can be used as a derogative term as well as a term of reclaiming, like queer. But in these words that we find, we still can’t just use them. We have to take them to the language, Kaurna language group, and talk with our Elders about them. We can’t just reach into our histories and just pull things out as we like. We still live in a collective culture. And so collectively we need to reclaim that, not just as Aboriginal, queer people. So it’s a process, and I haven’t had the time yet, but I’m going to bring it to the group. [Laughs]
Troy-Anthony: And also, I think in the eighties it was Moolgoo mob, and it changed to Moolagoo , and I’m not sure if that was a typo that got carried along or whatever. But I guess language was written down by anthropologists and…
Dominic: It’s like Nunga, Nyunga, and you just, the words. Yeah.
Troy-Anthony: Yeah. I also really...
Neika: Neika?
Troy-Anthony: Neika. I’m sorry.
Neika: No, that’s okay.
Troy-Anthony: My PhD is actually around Aboriginality and queerness. So as part of that, I spent years going through as much archival evidence as I possibly could find. And ended up... I found in some Aboriginal communities, there was some language there, some was clearer than others. And some of it, it’s like, well is that homosexual or is it homocultural? So I kind of basically, in a sense dismissed it all. And in a way, the viewpoint you seem to be possessing is that no matter what, you know in your spirit, in you somewhere, that there has been you before, and you’re just always and forever embodying what’s always been, always will be. And for me, I got that. That seems so obvious, but that absolute realisation that this place actually is created for you through that idea. So yeah, I just wanted to, yes, reiterate what you said because I absolutely relate and draw strength from that as well.
Archie: Thank you also much for the riches that we have just been privy to, and the way that we’ve been speaking about fugitivity now as really like a mode that has been introduced and becomes necessary in a colonial state. I wish we could talk longer, but it’s time now to turn over to this theme of kinship, which Melissa is facilitating now.
Melissa: Thanks, Archie. I think we, in a sense, were also speaking about kinships and 60,000 to 80,000 years in this place. And I did want to mention one of Mary Graham’s two axioms, Mary Graham being a Kombumerri person and academic who said, ‘You are not alone in the world’ in a very important essay called ‘Some Thoughts About the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews’. I was just going to acknowledge that the conversation here and the questions around kinships go in one direction, which is a little bit around our relational infrastructures of support, which might also be thought about as chosen families. But there’s also profound histories of place and kinship here that we may or may not be able to go through in depth or may not want to or cannot. It’s definitely not my place. But the first question here on this list that I’ll launch into - as well as mentioning that people here can feel free to debate and introduce provocations into what we’ve said here about this definition of building relational infrastructures of support, care and intimacy.
So what is kinship when not biological? Some of you have mentioned when we introduced ourselves that you might like to speak to this topic. V?
V: Yeah. Well, obviously relational, but yeah. I guess I have been using a term which is sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a term that comes from... I’m not actually sure when this person developed the term, but I think it was in the 1980s or something, maybe the 1990s. Sympoiesis, as opposed to autopoiesis, which is really about working with, making with, being with, in open systems of production. So these open systems of production being so very unstable, I guess, and in that sense, generative but allowing for intervention.
So they’re systems of production that invite crisis. And in that space of crisis, newness or healing can arise. And then at some point, maybe homeostasis comes back into play. But then, it’s always... It’s like an open mouth that’s always swallowing, always taking in new nutrients. And sometimes things might be a little bit poisonous, and you have to spit them out. Or you try to reject them, or the body adapts around that.
So why am I talking about sympoiesis right now? But I guess I use that as a model for... And I don’t really want to use the term kinship, but creating ecologies of relationship. So in a… so if I’m talking about the context of creative practice and collaboration, I think I’ve already said that collaboration is actually the work. It’s not just an add-on or like, ‘Yeah, let’s bring in a collaborator’. But you can’t function in any other way except in a sympoietic or a collaborative way because we are never, ever, ever making alone.
Now, I do understand that some people are very alone in the world. And while I don’t really exist in a space where I have a strong... Debris and I were talking about this morning. It’s like, okay, who’s going to look after me when I become unable to care for myself? I don’t have that kind of biological family connection. But I do have this incredibly rich and diverse ecology of relationships which are transgenerational, transcultural; they exist outside of any kind of institutional structures. And I still don’t know if any of those relationships, which are ones which, you know, someone’s going to be able to feed me when I can’t feed myself or whatever, but they’re very enriching and nourishing. And it’s a politics, it’s an ethics that crosses the lines of, say, professional art worker and just domestic practice or something like that. It’s broad-reaching, tentacular relationality and which is unstable. But, it’s how I need to find my place in the world. Yeah anyway, that’s kind of about all.
Melissa: I think you’re amazingly describing what I think a few people have brought up as, say friendship, your ecologies as being an infrastructure.
V: Yeah. So-
Melissa: I know there’s been exhibitions around that in the last two years I’ve seen as well. So it’s been a current that we’ve been talking about, and it’s nice to continue that today.
V: Yeah. I was just about to say something else, and I’ve totally forgotten what it was, but, yeah.
Melissa: Emma, did you-
Emma: Yeah. I feel like... Two things, I’m thinking about it in terms of what this means in terms of working in an organisation in a full-time role and a formal leadership role and the conversations we’ve been having about how to, kind of... and lots of organisations have been having around the country. And I think actually, mainly in the small part of the small to medium sector, just larger than artist-run initiatives but not maybe the big institutions, which I think is interesting in and of itself. But how to change leadership models in arts organisations - not just through formal governance but in terms of just the day-to-day practice of an organisation. And how work occurs, I think, is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. And it’s interesting, coming... But because my organisation, Vitalstatistix, is based in a union hall... Actually, it’s an ex-Communist hall, and so it’s played this place as well of - just thinking about the previous conversation - of a space for people outside of mainstream, in a sense, and also of… I’m thinking about the trade union and Communist party and Aboriginal community and Yerta Bulti’s work around... What’s the word I’m looking for? Resisting the consorting act and things like that. Those kind of acts of supporting resistance and what it actually takes to do that.
Maybe kinship is the wrong word, but those kind of structures of solidarity and enabling people to do... you know, to be very courageous, you know? I’m also thinking about, also from the previous conversation, this idea of fugitivity and just how that’s going to become more and more... You know, with climate and the climate emergency, we saw it on the east coast, that’s going into a lot of people’s lives that have never experienced that in really extraordinary ways. And I think it was so interesting to see the mutual aid that occurred in those communities and in Lismore. And obviously, you would know this really well from Lismore, but an observation that I thought it was really interesting that it was actually the Koori Mail mob and those other crew there that actually really led that in that community. And it was kind of interesting. Anyway I’ve gone off track, but I feel solidarity and mutual aid and what we can learn from those kind of practices, I think, is where it’s at in terms of thinking about new types of leadership models in the arts as well.
V: Yeah, I just remember that I was going to say, you were talking about friendship, and that’s a placeholder term for a lot of what potentially I was talking about. And yeah, I guess, much as I don’t want to go into ideas of formal structures and relationship slash relational kind of anarchy is where I would position myself in terms of not having hierarchies. Like those differences between what is a sibling, what is a lover, what is a friend, what is a, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I sometimes use that term, even though I feel a bit cringey about it.
Melissa: Noted.
Neika: I feel like the elephant in the room, for me at least, is mental health. Especially coming out on the other side of... It’s not the end of the pandemic. Anyway, wherever we are at the moment, I’m just like, this year in particular, within my queer families, within my Aboriginal families, it’s at this point now where I’m like, we’ve drawn on one another. We’re all extremely mentally unwell. How much more can we be... I don’t know. I’m just thinking about, it’s interesting to talk about the positive elements of kinship and chosen family and whatever. But it’s fucking hard as well, and it’s really messy. And it’s like… yeah, sometimes it feels very difficult to remain positive. And I just wanted to say that because it’s a reality for everyone, but I think especially for cities that have been really, really hard hit with the various responses and numbers of COVID.
Melissa: Well, there’s that thing where we like to talk about resource sharing and friendships and support in the arts as an essential infrastructure, and that’s how things get done - particularly those of us who don’t always rely on governmental funding structures, who can’t or choose not to do that. But also friendships or relational networks, is something that’s very convenient, isn’t it? And that’s what’s driven withdrawal of welfare and state and neoliberal ideology. So friendships… I think state and power would be very happy if we were all good friends and doing things together because there is a little bit of a withdrawal from or abnegation of responsibility for those bodies.
Simona: I wanted to pick up on a couple of things that you said. Totally. Mental health and also desirability are these things that really facilitate relationships, and they’re two things that I struggle with immensely as someone who is neurodiverse and someone that is a trans woman in their middle age. I think there’s a lot to be said for trans women in their middle age and just how difficult navigating desirability and eroticism is and how much of a block that is for our capacity to actually build relationships in a way that other people in the queer and LGBTI community can.
I’m still struggling with being excluded from lesbian spaces in the nineties and the trauma of that. And also just being neurodiverse and having that inability to hold down relationships for a long time... Debris, I’ve known you for like 10 years, and you’re the longest person that I’ve known in my life, almost. And that we’re sitting here together and doing this is a miracle. It’s like, six months, and then someone gets over it. And so, cheers for being here.
V: I’m super interested in that nexus.
Simona: But I rely on my music in order to have relationships. And I hate that because people just see me as a musician. And I’m just like, I want people to see me as a person.
V: I’m really interested in that nexus of desirability and survival skills. People will maybe drop a loaf of bread outside your door if you’re fuckable. I know that sounds really weird, but I think there’s a real connection there between people wanting to care for you and people wanting to fuck you. And if you’re unfuckable, or if you’re undesirable in whatever metric, or whatever optics, maybe you won’t get a bag of vegetables outside your door when you’re in isolation. So I think there’s a real relationship there between all of those things. Being cared for.
Simona: In Victoria, it was like intimate partner… and I’m like, I don’t have an intimate partner. I live alone, and I am going crazy, staring at the ceiling and dealing with the fact that I don’t have an intimate partner. And that was a time, honestly. And so I felt like lockdown just really like compressed... like I knew that all my friends were all hanging out with each other, having great times with each other, under the circumstances. And I’m just like, will one of my chosen family actually invite me to their house? And it didn’t happen. And I was just like, okay, cool. Chosen family and the hierarchies that exist within those chosen families, I became acutely aware of it. And I’m still traumatised by that.
Liz: I did some homework. I don’t think we were supposed to do homework, but I did some homework because I’m a little bit daggy. I think there’s definitely room for us, in this queer space, to think about who we include and who we block out and how we can be... I was going to say inclusive, but that’s a terrifying word. But how we can invite and be more welcoming and connecting and more authentic in our relationships. So here’s a bunch of statistics for you. Wooo, go, Liz! All right.
Simona: Data.
Liz: So I guess you all know that, across Australia, generally 18% of people identify as being disabled. Within the LGBTQI community, and we have limited stats, so this is in that 14 to 21-year-old age bracket, instead of 18%, the statistic is 39%.
We know that people with a severe or moderate disability are less likely to agree that they feel part of the LGBTQI+ community. And we know that people with severe disability are more than three times less likely to feel accepted at events and venues.
We know that people with disability who are also LGBTQI report higher levels of psychological distress, are more likely to think about suicide and attempt suicide than people without disability, and have a overall lower self-rated health. We know that a lot of people end up passing or masking as being non-disabled to be able to feel kind of comfortable in the community. And I think I’m aware of my privilege in this space. And the fact that I’m so hot gets me to a lot of these events. It’s a joke, kinda. But I’m also aware that there are a lot of people with disability who are not in this room who would love to be in this room. And how can we open up and think about our responsibilities to each other and support each other and invite each other over for a meal during a fucking long lockdown?
Troy-Anthony: I just want to say it was 30 years ago, maybe a bit longer than that, half of us in this room would be probably classified as disabled in terms of homosexuality acts and... yeah, yeah.
Melissa: Yeah, inverts was your term, V.
V: Oh yeah. Yeah, just upcycled from the old DSM. And in an act of reclamation, such a weird term, invert. But yes, definitely I’ve been diagnosed as everything under the sun, I guess.
Troy-Anthony: Just want to say one thing, just going back to that idea of depression, anxiety and all those sorts of things, which I’m sure many of us, whether we’re talking about it or not, have experienced it. And maybe it’s partly because I’ve had a major midlife crisis, and things just suddenly turned or turned around on myself. But it’s that... Yeah, so one strategy that’s with me, and I have bad days, but I have close friends that I consider to be kind of kin in a way, or family, with, again, no kind of structure. But we kind of rip the shit out of each other in terms of every insulting trope we can possibly think of and just really let it fly. And we’ve kind of grown strength from that. Kind of like that idea of that the moth thing as well about keep that mouth open. And another thing about these kind of... It’s probably been how homophobia works and transphobia and all that. So these are real things that are real institutional and have real effect on people. But their power or the horrendousness of that is you don’t know where the internal and external begins and ends. And that’s why it’s horrific for people. Because sometimes if someone doesn’t call you and you’re upset, and you don’t know whether it’s because they don’t like you, or maybe they’re having a bad day themselves, or maybe they just kind of forgot. And those spaces are really bloody hard to navigate. And yeah, so I guess I’m lucky I’ve got a creative outlet that I can put that into, and I’ve learned how to absorb a certain amount of things and just let it fly.
And maybe, in a way, the pandemic helped me with that a little bit more, to just think, it’s okay, just let people beat to the sound of their own drum. You can’t change that. So again, might be a bit pie in the sky stuff, but those sorts of things work for me. And they do have a history as well within queer stuff, within humour, within theatre as well. So it’s not only Drag Race where they kind of shade each other. That has a history in theatre as well. I know a lot of actors that will go through that kind of role play to develop that sort of strength and capacities to be able to be someone else but also cope with the trauma of being somebody else or being themselves or playing a role.
Melissa: So what new structures do we need, so we’re not maybe leaning on each other and sometimes falling down when that person isn’t there, I suppose? And if there’s no immediate response to that, I was also wondering a bit, Liz, what you felt about what kinship looks like in disability through the circles that you’re in.
Liz: I discovered the disabled arts community maybe not that long ago, maybe eight years ago or something. And it was such a wonderful coming home kind of thing. It makes sense to me. It’s an opportunity to connect with other people who have similar experience or a radically different experience. And it takes many, many voices, together, to be able to talk about lived experience. That idea of expert doesn’t really cut it, I don’t think, when it comes to disability and access, because it’s so broad. So you must rely on each other. You must have conversations together and listen to each other in a really deep way.
And so I think that’s a really healthy space. And it’s a nice way of getting let off the hook too, because it’s like, I can’t be an expert. I’m just talking about me, but... And you are encouraged to bring up other voices and let other people through. And so relaxing your own ego, I think, to be an expert or something and sharing stories, sharing knowledge, it’s quite a different approach, I think.
Melissa: Thank you. Was there anything else anyone else wanted to contribute on the topic of kinships?
V: I think we can probably not close this circle without talking about the very on-brand notions of human and non-human relations, which we haven’t really talked about. But I guess I wanted to refer to something that Brian spoke about last night, which was, when someone said to him, who is he performing for, he said, ‘The public’. And when we say, ‘The public’, what are we referring to? There are so many publics. And Brian started referring to the people who were doing work of caring for the building, people who had janitorial duties. So for example, when we’re making a work, we also need to be in relationship to the people who turn the lights on and off, to the people who clean the toilets, to the atmosphere of the day, the quality of the light, the way that the food you ate last night is acting in your gut, particularly if you have IBS, and the tone of the people on the street, the feel of the rocks under your shoes, and so on.
I just think that the idea of collaboration is that far-reaching and that we cannot bring anything into being without any of those things. Any one of those things. If for example, the quality of the light was different, then I would be producing a different kind of work. Particularly in the area of if you are a person who’s neurodivergent, then things like texture, taste, whether you can eat or not eat, whether you can get up in the morning; all of those things are brought to bear upon whether you can actually bring a work into fruition, and then beyond that, whether you can actually function in the world.
Melissa: We are not discrete entities.
[Applause]
You’ve been listening to VERS, recorded at Samstag Museum of Art on the 17th of June. This audio document is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art and Samstag Museum of Art. Edited and produced by Tilly Balding in Tarntanya, Adelaide, in September 2022.
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