Category Archives: interview

Julie Poitras Santos, flight Paths (2018)

four people walking down a street on a hill

“In Flight Paths participants were invited to walk together, considering significant moments of departure. Whether actual or metaphorical, departure – with its twin, arrival – asks us to give up something in order to find the new, but we aren’t always ready to go. Beginning our walk at the Kulturcentrum in Ronneby, we walked through the narrow streets of the oldest part of the city, making our way to the town square. In the square participants traded stories about departure and leaving.

(photo: Simone Aersoe) Created for the Kulturcentrum, Ronneby, Sweden in partnership with the AIR Blekinge.”

Credit: “Flight Paths.” Juliepoitrassantos.com, juliepoitrassantos.com/section/519153-flight%20paths.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2023.

Sarah Rodigari, This Must Be the Place (2020)

man leaning on table with cowboy hat

‘This Must be the Place’ (2020), Keith, Ravensthorpe, Western Australia

“(Work in Development)
International Art Space, Spaced Residency, 2020

This Must be the Place, connected a series of utopian visions as defined by the communities situated in Hopetown/ Ravensthorpe in remote Western Australia. Sarah’s project considered the idea of utopia as a matter of perspective, a continuous disappearing horizon between the present and the future. Conducted through a series of walking interviews Rodigari looked to address how rural utopian ideals of sustainability (social, economic, cultural, historical, environmental) inform the making of place. In light of climate change and within our history of colonial-settler Australia.

At the end of her six weeks, Sarah presented a humorous, poetic and insightful performance script, ‘Hearsay’ back to the community based on the interviews and conversations she’d undertaken. The performance connected past narratives with speculative futures against present realities of mining, farming, drought and flood. Presented: Spaced 4 Residency, Rural Utopias, International Art Space, Perth, 2020.
Link to Spaced Project Page
This is a work is in development.

Doucmentation excerpt
https://vimeo.com/469583631” (credit)

Sarah Rodigari is currently working with the community of Ravensthorpe. This work forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.

Sarah Rodigari is an artist whose practice addresses the social and political potential of art. Her work is site responsive, employing, durational live action, improvisation, and dialogical methodologies to produce text-based performance and installations.

Here, Sarah shares an update from Ravensthorpe.

I come from a big city and apparently live in the most densely populated suburb in Australia. I have spent most of my life in homes without a backyard. Modern living is accessible and convenient. There is a lot of choice – I wonder if because of this I spend a lot of time making unnecessary decisions, like which yoghurt to buy – everything is small, efficient, manageable and perhaps easily disposable. I don’t own a car, I walk everywhere. It has taken a while to slow down and let go of the accumulated habit of creating order and immediacy that I packed with me. I haven’t let go, or necessarily slowed down, I’ve just noticed that with distance, comes time. I think I’ve taken up more space, literally, hopefully not metaphorically.

The ute is the biggest vehicle I’ve ever driven, I was a little reticent to drive it at first, but now that I’ve been driving all over the shire meeting locals and conducting interviews about what makes an ideal word, I’m in love.  I have learnt to 4WD which, city speaking, is just to say that I found a button to press. In a big car, under an endless sky on an open road. Like the generic protagonist in every Hollywood road movie, I get the feeling that out here there are no rules, everything is possible, and anything goes.

The utopia protagonist is no one, no gender, identity, history, ancestors, likes, dislikes,

They come from nowhere and bring nothing with them. (Bernadette Mayer, Utopia)

There’s nothing that can’t be done everyone’s giving it a go. If enough of you band together, you can make it happen, like the heavy haulage route, the herbarium and the swimming pool in Ravey or the community garden and the Mens Shed in Hopey.

When I ask about what might constitute an ideal world most people pragmatically suggest that they’re already here. I try to argue that utopia can’t exist in the present, it’s about striving for a future that we’re yet to realise – like a four-day work week or a universal minimum wage. This is hard to argue with people who have moved to a pretty and quiet beachside town on the edge of nowhere specifically to retire. This is the utopia they’ve been aiming for.

We agreed that isolation meant being far enough away for everything else to be conveniently accessible. But that didn’t mean not being globally connected. You can’t just ‘tune out’ to the weather, the coronavirus or the price of wool etc. It’s easy for me to arrive here with ecological assumptions about primary industry. Through my conversations, for many people farming and mining aren’t outrightly bad or wrong, the complexity of these industries and their relationship to land are lived with and negotiated daily. Does a simpler lifestyle allow more emotional and pragmatic space to address the ebb and flow of life, to embrace the paradox of a mine and farm next to a world heritage park and say, ‘yes and’?

As I step in closer to the community, simpler might mean less variety at the supermarket or choice on tinder but negotiating a co-existence with their environment and each other has a degree of attention and care creating a co-dependence that is very hard simply shut down.

This Must be the Place

It seems unusual to not want to be or strive for an ‘elsewhere’. Most of the people I have spoken to here in the Ravensthorpe shire consider here the place to be. I’ve been told on several occasions not to tell anyone just how great it is here: two small towns that are 200ks from the nearest service centre.  Right next to a UNESCO listed national park with endemic flora and fauna which have survived an ice age. Numerous empty, pristine, soft powder sand beaches against multiple shades of blue ocean. Fish that that practically jump onto the jetty for you. People here live well into their 90s.  The farmers have read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. There are multiple social clubs, a historical society and a community resource centre that is also a library, tourist office and eco shop. The staff know your name and calmly help with all your administrative, recreational or retirement needs. “Romance novels, it looks like you’ve already read them all, we’ll have to order some new ones in.”

It also has an aging population, with limited medical facilities. Education is also limited; most children have to leave at the end of primary school for secondary boarding schools. It is also prone to droughts, bushfires, flooding, shark sighting. Fruit and vegetables are relatively expensive and not super tasty (I hear cities are given priority when it comes to quality). The internet is patchy, put people seem to get on just fine without it. The limited water that is available is hard to drink.

On Friday February 14, at the Merlot club, the woman next to me asked if I’d like ice in my wine. “It’s rain-water ice” she said. I turned and asked why the water wasn’t from the tap she said, “no one drinks the water here, it’s terrible.” Colin to my left echoed “the water’s terrible”. It’s bore water and they’re scraping the bottom here. How can Utopia be a place with no water?

For nearly three years now. Ravensthope has carted its water from Hopetoun. BHP put in 42 bores and we’re now having to be careful which bores are mixed together to keep it below a salt level. We’re talking 40 years to refill, if we got normal rain and we’re not getting normal rains. (excerpt from Hearsay script)

With each new mine there is the potential for infrastructural support.  When BHP came, they supported new bitumen roads, water bores, schools, police stations, local sport associations and business. They also built an entire new suburb and offered employment opportunities for some locals. (The government loves this, I guess it means there’s less for them to do).  Alongside this local housing prices rose, some people sold, others could no longer afford to pay rent and left. Many, along with their new jobs took out mortgages, which, when the mine closed after seven months of operation, left them struggling to repay their loans and unable to sell.

FQM, the Nickle mine that is about to re-open, likes to employ locals, they don’t practice fly in fly out or drive in drive out. They encourage their employees to live in local towns and to get involved in the community as much as possible, they’re not BHP, they can’t afford to ‘throw money around, after all they’re a business. The price of Nickle is set to rise again due to the increase in manufacturing electric batteries for cars.  They are bringing about 400 new staff to the area, that’s the same amount as the current population of Ravensthorpe.

There can be a divide between locals, farmers and miners. It’s not just that they keep different hours, one miner pointed out, small towns embrace the mines and the money but resent the influx in population and the change it can also bring to the quite nature of the town. Hopetoun was the most inclusive community she’d lived in so far.

Over the course of my residency I interviewed 20 people about isolation, belonging, home and utopia. Each interview lasted about two hours, some went for longer, working with five of these interviews I wrote a lyric poem and performed this back to the community over coffee, cake and sandwiches at the community resource centre. I have included and excerpt of the Hearsay script above.

On my last morning, I sit on the beach drinking coffee. I’m not ready to go back to the city.

I watch one of my favourite local dogs, a failed sheep-trial dog now much-loved domestic pet, herding waves.  It’s little like striving for utopia. He’s making an excellent job of this impossible task. The poet Trisha Low suggests that to desire utopia is to desire emptiness: as a place, it is unattainable. Such a place is never truly possible to bring into being. Thomas More knew and suggested this when he coined the term back in 1516, it literally means no-place. Low suggests that maybe Utopia is not about striving for a future place but is about the impetus behind it “imaging life beyond what we know is possible… striving to create new ways to exist in the world in relation to one another” (Low 2019: 30).

Against the backdrop of what increasing feels like a global apocalypse, the shire is also on the precipice of social, ecological and economic change. It is by no means an ideal world, but I have experienced a care and intimacy amongst the community that hold moments of a utopian gaze that as left me longing for more.

-Sarah Rodigari” (credit)

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

people walking at night

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

“It was back in 2013, when ACVic, the local arts center of Vic, hos- ted the project Deriva Mussol (its literal translation would be “owl drift”), led by artists Jordi Lafon and Eva Marichalar with the collaboration of the Aula de Teatre (a theater group) of the University of Vic [Barcelona, Spain]. They wanted to collectively create a theatrical proposal that would take place in the streets of Vic. Besides this desire, the only thing they knew is that they wan- ted to open the process of creation to everyone, so that everyone who wanted could participate in it. In order to do so, they invited people to go deriving at night with them through the streets of Vic to wherever the walking would take them. Even though a feeling of awkwardness may awaken to some people when hearing or reading the word “derive” (I would not say it is a really “common” word), in fact, the instructions were so simple that they could be reduced to two key- words: night, walk. Nothing else. The invitation was communicated by ACVic. Everyone was invited. By doing this, they had set up a common ground for secret encounters to happen. At least once per week, different peoples, of different ages, coming from many backgrounds and with different interests walked together without any other expectation than simply this: walking together.

There was nothing that could go wrong. The possibility of doing something wrongly did not exist. Even the common civil laws and social rules of political correctness where almost forgotten thanks to the fact of walking by night guided by curiosity, spontaneity and a playful attitude. Streets were empty; no one was watching. They did 12 derives. Some people went just once and it was okay. Some people participated in all of them and it was also okay. In any case, as Marichalar wrote, a stable group of 10 people was progressively constituted (2013, p. 29). Each deriving session was complemented by another session, called “Parlem” (“let’s talk”) dedicated to talking about the experience.

people talking around a table

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

All the members of the group met around a table and shared whatever they wanted to with the others; photos, videos, drawings, maps, thoughts,whatever. After the 12 sessions they had an idea for a theatrical proposal that took finally place and that was presented to the public as a street art performance. From my point of view, the fact that this performance was useful to communicate and share the project with more people is something secondary, if we compare it to the importance that it had for the group of walkers and talkers as a self-representation. In other words, it was a representation of, precisely, themselves as a group; a kind of family.” [credit]

Lisa Myers, and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week (2013)


Lisa Myers, ‘and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week’, made for MAP Spring 2013, 6’44” (animation with assistance from animator Rafaela Kino). This work pays homage to an on-foot journey her grandfather undertook to flee Shingwauk Residential School in Ontario. Myers herself once did an 11-day walk tracing the route of her grandfather’s journey.

“When he was a boy, artist Lisa Myers’s Anishinaabe grandfather walked some 250 kilometres along Northern Ontario railroad tracks for one reason: to escape Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie.

Myers recorded her grandfather’s account of this journey during a conversation with him in the 1990s—and she listened it to it many times before she made the decision, in 2009, to walk the route he’d described alongside her cousin Shelley Essaunce and her nephew Gabriel.

Myers and the Essaunces took 11 days to walk the 250-kilometre journey.

“After this walk,” Myers writes in a 2016 Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition essay titled “Rails and Ties,” “I began thinking about how to locate myself within my grandfather’s story, and about how I wanted to convey its different iterations. One thing that struck me was that he survived by eating blueberries growing along the tracks. He said, ‘and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week.’”

The latter quotation from her grandfather became the title for a video installation by Myers—one related to trauma, food, walking and survival—that was on view at Artcite in Windsor this spring as part of the exhibition “Walks of Survivance.”

“Instead of always repeating his story, [walking] was a way of finding myself in that story,” Myers told curator Maya Wilson-Sanchez a few years ago. And by walking, Myers also told Wilson-Sanchez, she was “able to bring the places in the story to life.”

“When I recall walking across the railway bridge over the Mississauga River north of Lake Huron,” Myers writes in “Rails and Ties,” “I think about my fear of the elevation, and how gusts of wind unsteadied my steps. Finding my footing meant looking down and seeing the river rushing 50 feet below the railway ties of that century-old steel bridge. The Mississagi River flows into Lake Huron, the railway crosses the river, and from my grandfather’s account of his journey this was the first place (after leaving school) where he heard his language and saw Anishinaabe people cooking and sharing food down by the river. They welcomed him, and fed him.”

During her walk in her grandfather’s footsteps, Myers also heard stories of other youth who had escaped the way he had. Ultimately, her works on this theme—which include both abstract and map-like prints made with blueberry pigments, as well as documentation of wooden spoons stained with blueberries she has shared with others, also speak to a complex intertwining of group and individual journeys, of landscapes that are real and imagined.

“The spoons represent sharing, sustenance and the gathering of people,” Myers writes. “When I line these spoons up side by side, the reddish-blue marks continue from one utensil to the next, recalling an imaginary topography or horizon line created by the trace of berry consumption.”

In this sense, walking and artmaking become different ways of tracing and “straining” an experience.

“Straining to survive, or even to be accepted, means the less digestible parts of stories need to be retained, traced, remembered and told,” Myers writes.

Of course, Myers is not alone in thinking about walking as a mode of Indigenous resistance and survival.

“There’s the water walk that is happening, and which is not directly art-related,” Myers said in a phone interview. “But I think Indigenous artists are wanting to also acknowledge that these forms of activism are happening. There was walking from a community in Nunavut, [Idle No More] walking to Ottawa to make a point.”

“Walking to safety is a really important narrative in talking about survival, and surpassing survival to freedom,” says “Walks of Survivance” curator Srimoyee Mitra.” [credit]


Lisa Myers, ‘Blueberry Spoons’, 2010, video, 7’37”

Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Homeless Vehicle” (1988)

[credit]

Wodiczko carried out a sequence of interviews with the New York’s homeless, learning about how they function by day and night in order to survive and protect their belongings. He was especially interested in those who collected glass, metal, and plastic for resale. Based on that, he designed the multi-functional Homeless Vehicle (1988-89) which reflected their real working and living conditions.

This vehicle is not a solution of the homeless crisis. It is an emergency tool for people who have no options, and an intellectual tool, as it articulates the complex situation of the homeless. It doesn’t represent them as garbage-collecting bums, but as people who use a device intended for specific purposes – which should not exist in a civilised world. This vehicle has a life-saving and didactic function, it finds a form for that which no one wants so know and see – the artist continues.

In this device, its user can wash, cook, rest, and sleep. He or she is able to safely store the collected bottles and cans. The inhabitant is also protected – the vehicle is visible enough to be safe from being smashed by, e.g. a reversing dustcart.

Such vehicle in the street provokes different questions. What is this part used for? How many of such vehicles are to be produced? Or: who are you? How did you become homeless? Then, that person is not only the demonstrator of the vehicle, but also a citizen of the city who has become homeless. That person works day and night, contributing to protecting the environment. He or she helps the city and should be paid for that – Wodiczko explains.