Jack Ky Tan's Refusals

Jack Ky Tan

Earlier this year we invited artist Jack Ky Tan, to participate in disorganising. Our initial proposal for Jack was an interview as part of roundtable discussions with international organisations and artists. However, Jack refused, and instead proposed a different and perhaps more meaningful process; the creation of an artwork that would tease out the contours of the quasi-institution we had speculatively imagined back in November 2020. Jack planned and held a series of workshops with the three organisations involved in disorganising; one with the Directors and one with Board members of Liquid Architecture, Bus Projects, and West Space. disorganising Producer, Lana, and Editor, Xen (Hằng) Nhà, also sat in on these conversations. The final workshop was supposed to bring all Directors and Board members of the three organisations together to figure out how a quasi-institution could structurally look like considering the existing resources. 

However, due to impending grant deadlines and under lockdown conditions in Narrm, many of the attendees were unable to make the scheduled meeting time. Lana spoke with Jack, who is currently based in Galloway, Southwest Scotland, and after deliberations, Jack decided to go ahead with the meeting, regardless of who would show up. A Zoom session was recorded in lieu of what would have been the time for a 2-hour workshop with the Directors and Board members, a retracted letter was read aloud, some participants showed up late, apologies were made, clarity was sought, bumpy discussions unfolded, and a challenge was put forth towards the Directors and Boards of West Space, Bus Projects and Liquid Architecture.  

Jack Ky Tan's retracted letter

The following is a letter written by Jack Ky Tan addressed to 'Dee', short for 'Disorganising'. The letter was intended to be read out at the final meeting with the Directors and Trustees in the evaluation process that we comissioned Jack for. When this meeting was cancelled we decided to proceed with the planned meeting and to read out his letter for the record, even though Jack no longer felt that much of the sentiments were true.

Dear Dee,

How are you?

I was so excited about meeting you these last 3 weeks and reflecting on all the stuff you have done in the past 6 months. But I am not sure I have met you yet. Actually, I am not really sure if you even exist. You aren’t some kind of catfish are you Dee? I see traces of you, evidence that you might have been there. But is this circumstantial evidence?

I think you aren’t quite born yet perhaps. So am I writing to a future you that I don’t know and cannot conceive of? Perhaps this is a message in a bottle. A hope for what you might become. Or even a cry for help. My cry for help. Maybe I am speaking to a primordial soup, a mess, out of which new life will emerge. Are you an evolution of what we, the global arts community, needs to and must become?

Or perhaps I am speaking to a dead person, to someone who was born in the civil rights struggles of ‘68, the punk resistance of ‘76, the anti-war protests of 2001. Or maybe you are older yet and come from Gandhi’s nonviolent disobedience in the 20s, or is it that you have suffragette DNA from 1903? Are you a memory, or an apparition that haunts us, a ‘hauntology’ as Derrida might put it? And if you are, what are you trying to say from beyond the grave?

We are currently in the 7th month of the lunar calendar which lasts from 8 Aug to 7 Sep. This is the month-long Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. Just over a week ago on 22 Aug was the halfway point of the 7th month, when Daoist and Buddhist communities across East and Southeast Asia mark and celebrate this festival. I think it is interesting how East and Southeast Asian cultures sometimes celebrate the middle of things rather than the beginning, almost as if to say: let’s start in the middle rather than 'at the very beginning, which is not always necessarily a good way to start'(sung). It tells me that this could be a worldview that values process as much as the plans or targets at the start, or the outcomes or impact at the end.

Dee, what other cosmologies could or should inform who you are, who you were or will become? How can these cosmologies inform your thinking, governance and operations and not just your curatorial programming? What can you set in motion today that will cascade into your future and that will revise your interpretation of your past?

But still you evade me, the way that a tryptic painting evades me. Are you one thing split into three frames? Are you three separate individual things but arranged side by side. And in what way side by side: right up next to each other, far apart, overlapping? And why? Are you the sum of your parts, or greater than, or less than or some other algorithm altogether?

Perhaps like the Christian godhead you are Three in One, and One in Three. Or like the Three Musketeers: all for one and one for all. Or are you like the Hindhu three-faced God, the Trimurti, comprising Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer? Good cop, bad cop, ambivalent cop?

I have the tendency to be overly epic as you can see. So maybe you are simply a milk stool. Three legs are best sometimes because it means you can be stable on uneven ground.

I really don’t know.

Then there is this thing called ‘The Disorganising Project’. From where I am sitting halfway across the world, I don’t think this project is necessarily you. It seems separate from you somehow. Is it your drag persona perhaps or an alter ego? Is it your Sunday best, or is it your secret indulgence? 

So it is hard for me to evaluate the project because, as I have said, I can’t quite see you as I can only see your trace. Therefore I don’t quite know what to make of this project that created you, or arose from you, or is it co-emerging with you? From what I have learned over the last few weeks, it was a reaction (knee-jerk? allergic? survival?). You came together, organised, seized an opportunity, hired people, created a programme, began conversations. 

Indeed, as it says on the website, the project is “an open and expanding conversation that looks to experiment with divergent ways of organising and creating”. But looking to experiment is not the same as experimenting. It isn’t even strictly looking AT the experiment but is a statement of desire, of expressing a possible intention to experiment. So when will the experiment start? When will there be a considered and (dis)coordinated response or a push back to the conditions that brought you here?

In the short 3 weeks that I have known you, hoped to know you, I have already started to love you. Too much information I know. But I am not being sentimental here because I am not in love with you, nor do I necessarily like you, which I do. I simply love you because I see that you are courageous, resilient, original, hurting, traumatised, talented, limited, fascinating, reflexive, and your heart’s in the right place. I am inspired by what you are doing right now even if I think there is much more to do. The trace of you and this project seem to me to be your reaction, response, reply to the condition of late capitalism, to austerity, to designed public shock, to general uncare. You are not sweeping it under the carpet, and you are at least stopping to look at the thing, the spill, the crack, the turd, the pile, the mess. To look is to become aware which is the first step in survivability.

But speaking within love, I am going to ask you what happened to, and what should happen with, your originating purpose of the Disorganising Project, the words of which I want to echo back to you from last November:

“What would it mean, at a moment of precarity, to become institutionally inseparable? What conventions, protocols, legacies and habits separate one organisation from another, and to what end? How, as independent organisations, might we refuse to compete with each other for resources, and the attention of audiences, artists, stakeholders? Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are disorganising. This methodology is not a pathway to merger, but an experimental exercise in cooperative practice beyond previous models of partnership, grounded in principles of solidarity and interdependence. We are informed, here, by our shared context and ambitions as neighbours at Collingwood Yards, on unceded Aboriginal land. Disorganising means, wherever possible, shifting knowledge, resources and opportunities from existing organisational silos into the common spaces that present conditions demand.”

This was a rallying cry to me and for me. A statement that is absolutely on point in an age of rampant global neoliberalism and climate crisis. It is a plea to put things into action, into praxis. So,

Please don’t give it up. 

Please share draft strategic plans with each other. 

Please sit on each other’s boards. 

Please co-budget and co-programme. 

Please deputise for each other in staff roles. 

Please co-write governance policies. 

Please experiment with models of incorporation.

Please cede yourself, your operations, to aboriginal laws and governance and cosmologies.

Please carry on.

Sincerely, your friend,

Jack Ky Tan

Remarks from the Final Cancelled Workshop

Here are some of the moments we’d like to highlight from the recorded 2-hour Zoom call with Jack Ky Tan.

Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Interview with Murnong Mammas and Company Drinks

Food Art Research Network x School of Instituting Otherwise

Food Art Research Network and School of Instituting Otherwise have been collaborating for disorganising to explore diverse economies that care for people, earth and gut biomes.

As part of this research Madeleine and Meenakshi have been interviewing friends and colleagues in different contexts that are creating long term artist-led infrastructures that can address environmental and economic urgencies. Here they've interviewed Ira Barker (Barkinji and Gunditjmara) from Murnong Mammas and Kathrin Böhm from Company Drinks.

Murnong Mammas conversation with Ira Barker (Barkinji and Gunditjmara)

Lemon Myrtle seems to be a good start for a lot of people and people think, oh, lemon, I'll use it in the same way.  But in reality, it's really different. It's got a really nice vanillary kind of light flavor. And I know that it's a good entry point for people to be able to use it as a replacement and think about it in relation to food that they're familiar with. But in reality, it's not like lemons. It's like Lemon Myrtle. These things have such interesting flavors that we're just simply not used to.

Read the full transcript here.

Company Drinks conversation with Kathrin Böhm

This little bit of independence as an organization, it's actually very valuable to us...where we can also maybe make irrational decisions or... we don't have a master plan and see through a kind of social enterprise plan for the next five years...

Read the full transcript here.

The Disorganised Manifesto

Nina M Gibbes

The Disorganised Manifesto was a project I developed as part of disorganising, a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, West Space, Bus Projects and a slew of contributors. disorganising sought to look at divergent ways of working, creating and collaborating outside of the hierarchical structures that are abundant in art and academic institutions. My offering was part design research, part workshop and part artwork. It eludes a clear or ‘organised’ definition because there were numerous interdependent parts.

It began with a workshop, in which collaborators and members of the ARIs were invited to consider the manifesto as a mode of criticism, and an opportunity to enter into a conversation about shared visions, values and desires for the future of these organisations and their extended communities. We discussed at length what it means to write a manifesto, the different parts of our lives we wanted to devote more time to, what we’d like to spend less time on, and what a desired future for ourselves and the community might encompass. 

While these conversations took place, each participant was assigned letters, numerals and punctuation marks to design in any way they liked. These characters formed a communal typeface, which was developed into a working font. It made sense to allow the community to have an equal role in designing the typeface that would become the vessel through which to communicate our shared ideas. The conversations that took place during the workshop were then designed and transcribed onto a series of bright yellow flags, which in turn formed The Disorganised Manifesto: an artwork to remind the community of our time together.

You can download the Disorganised Community Font. Everyone is free to use it and experiment with the different letterforms.

Nina's flags for disorganising will be previewing at our forthcoming Workbook Launch on Tuesday 14 December 2021, 6-8pm, at Collingwood Yards. RSVP here.

The Crisis of 'Decolonising' the Arts

Maddee Clark

Note: Parts of this piece are published in an essay I contributed to a book titled Art Writing in Crisis (2021), edited by Brad Haylock and Megan Patty for Sternberg Press. The title was originally something else but was revised to include ‘crisis’ during 2020 in response to the content that was being produced by the contributors. After working in the arts, I’ve become curious about these kinds of theatrical and doom-laden questions about the arts being in crisis. 

Crisis: When ‘the funding’ disappears, will the art world still exist?

Crisis: How can we make (a living from) art when participation makes us complicit? 

Crisis: How do we decolonise our arts practices?

I started working as an editor of un Magazine in 2018 with my best friend, Trawlwoolway poet and artist Neika Lehman. (un Magazine is a print and web-based arts writing publication which is independent and based in Narrm.) Neika and I were the first Blak editors of the magazine, for a one year post, and we came to the editorial with a shared desire to interrogate how our local arts community used the word ‘decolonisation’ and the broader aestheticisation of anti-racism and decolonisation in curatorship and art. At the time of editing, we also both worked for a university and were always trying to understand, together, what it meant to theorise decolonisation in that place as Blak writers often teaching non-Indigenous people — and what it meant to theorise decolonisation at all. The art world presented us with a way to explore that question further. Decolonisation as metaphor was a complicated idea in the art world, which makes everything into performatives and metaphor, into symbol — even practice, even activism, even praxis. 

Our mood board for the first issue of the magazine included two memes from our favourite Indigenous Instagram accounts. The first uses the moment when Regina George, played by Rachel McAdams in the film Mean Girls (2004), calls Cady Heron pretty. When Cady responds with a ‘thanks,’ Regina George quickly moves to interrogate her: ‘So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?’ In this version, ‘pretty’ is replaced by ‘decolonised’. So you agree? You think you’re really decolonised? The second meme, which we published alongside our article, was shared by many of our Instagram mutuals on Invasion Day 2018. The image is a popular template referring to moral panic campaigns about teen sexting, asking instead: ‘Is your child texting about decolonisation?’ Taking the place of the original texts here — ‘So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?’ and ‘Is your child texting about sex’ — decolonisation is produced as, alternately, a kind of unforgiveable vanity, or a secretive, alarmist moral crisis. It is also, through the meme format, brought into conversation with the familiar types of visual and cultural rhetoric that make up the social media world.

One of the articles from the first issue we edited, by Kate Leah Rendell, notes the influence of the most destructive and socially irresponsible companies on facilitating community arts in Australia. She uses these as examples of how the art world can perform decolonial intent while also existing fully within, and dependent upon, colonial modes of production (money-by-products from the destructive extractive industry). She writes on the participation of resource industries in generating Indigenous arts in the Northern Territory in relation to her own work at the time, the ‘wielding of local power that ensures questions of “ethics” remain precarious and each individual is in some way connected or implicated’:

One of the prompting questions for this edition of un Magazine was: ‘How do we develop practices that bring us into encounters with place?’ With [Jacky] Green’s work in mind, I would extend this to ask, when brought into these encounters with place, how do we ensure we do not look away from the implications? Green’s work Yee-haw, Money Trucks (2017) depicts six figures each riding a large yellow mining truck cutting across Country. In the accompanying text he writes: ‘Just like the cowboys scream Yee-haw at the rodeo I imagine the miners riding their trucks across our country screaming, “Yee-haw, I’m rich, fuck you!”’ It is a clear and uncompromising indictment of the colonising greed explicit in the continued expansion of the McArthur River Mine in Borroloola. Yet, faced with this work I was also left wondering about the rest of us — perhaps not as euphoric as the miners on their trucks yet nevertheless implicated as beneficiaries of the material consequences of the mine.¹

Kate’s words encapsulated how the physicality of colonialism, which the arts depend on, goes hand in hand with disingenuous expressions of decoloniality and performances of awareness. Knowing better and not being racist is a form of capital you can buy and sell in the hyper-intellectualised and globally conscious art world — something one achieves through the consumption of diverse arts, culture, and education.  

The art world appropriation of Blak aesthetics, lifeways, and languages without proper engagement with Blak people included, for Neika and I, the use of decolonisation as a visual rhetoric and a theoretical signifier. Arts organisations and institutions would utilise decolonisation as a buzzword without interrogating their own deeply held values or developing sincere relationships with First Nations people. It was clear to Neika and I, when we took on the editing position at un Magazine in early 2018, that the sign of decolonisation was being used by the local arts scene as modelling anti-colonial virtue without properly interrogating the origins of colonial wealth, or the material conditions of the art world itself. Our discussion of this in un Magazine 12.1 wasn’t intended as criticism of any one person, or even of a wholly articulated art movement — and it wasn’t even solely confined to art. We saw traces of a particular discourse on decolonisation everywhere, on social media, in fashion, and in the academy. We also did not exempt ourselves from the critique, even though we were positioned to be lashing out at the white art world. Partially, the magazine was intended to prompt us to probe into our own intellectual, artistic, and writing practices. We reflected on our own habits of using the term. We became obsessed with the tendency for our white artist friends to adorn themselves with decolonial and anti-racist branding: stickers, t-shirts, tote bags, hashtags. One tote bag designed for sale as merch accompanying Queensland First Nations artist Tracey Moffatt’s show at the 2017 Venice Biennale featured the phrases ‘Indigenous Rights’ and ‘Refugee Rights’ in block lettering on alternate sides, so wearers could rotate the bag depending on their moods. We would get a thrill whenever we would see a white person wearing it at the book fair, at ACCA, at the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A white friend bragged about how they were singled out by ticket inspectors on the train while wearing a DECOLONISE NOW t-shirt, producing the experience of public racialisation as a badge of honour that can be purchased. An exhibition in early 2018 at Plimsoll Gallery in Hobart by a white curator claimed to be generating a ‘decolonial geographic’, which was presented through a critique of landscape painting. No Indigenous nations, decolonial movements, or even individual thinkers from Australia were referred to. 

These examples presented, to us, an image of decolonial theory in the art world as profoundly depoliticised, disconnected, and surface level. It was a scenario that felt increasingly close to branding. Alex Wilson from the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba, Canada, has expressed similar sentiments, writing that ‘it feels like the term has become a catchphrase. I see decolonization stickers on people’s computers and there’s an irony in that — a sign that our movement has been branded’. She writes on the tendency for younger Indigenous people to overlook land-based solutions in favour of surface-level cultural expressions, noting: 

I avoid using it [decolonisation] because I do not think we (or our struggles) should be defined by colonization. I am Nehinuw (Cree) and our people, like all Indigenous peoples or people of any culture, have a worldview that, over time, has not changed in some aspects and has changed significantly in other aspects … If we describe ourselves as ‘decolonizers’, it implies that colonization is what defines us, but my people were Cree before the colonizers arrived. While we have been impacted by colonization, our Cree identity and worldview have survived and have persisted. I rarely use the term decolonization because it gives colonization power. It also assumes that we do not change as Indigenous people, and we have always been changing … What’s visible is far less important or substantial than the 90% of the iceberg that is beneath the surface of the water … Many Indigenous people recognize that decolonization requires repairing that damage and restoring the relationships between our visible and material culture and the deep knowledge, value systems, philosophies, cosmologies and other invisible aspects of our cultures. I do not think you can do that without land-based knowledge. ²

Decolonisation as a descriptor for Wilson functions as a form of entrapment, positioning Indigenous practice through its resistance to colonialism rather than as a form of autonomous life. She understands the current ways that decolonial theory is utilised to be overly attentive to colonialism as the primary, generative force which Indigenous people have a relationship to, locating Indigenous nations continually in the position of struggle and leaving little room for other readings. She notes that her own reasoning for not using the term, though it is useful and valuable as a descriptor for action, is because it defines Indigenous lives and practices primarily through their relationship to colonialism.

The production of the un Magazine issue on decolonisation drove more offers of partnership on projects with decolonial themes our way. Months after our first edition was published, Neika and I were at an exhibition opening where a white curator who was head of an artist run initiative at the time approached us to demand that we both join her organisation’s board. She told us she wanted to decolonise it. We were silent. She hugged us, and we left. Later, we received a request from her to attend an event she was running. This event proposed that we would be seated in a circle, on the floor, to ‘decolonise’ the space by complicating the usual expectations of panel discussion. 

These ‘decolonial moments’ continued. They coincided with a few other moments of crisis and serious conversations about funding and the sustainability of arts practice in an increasingly neoliberal and competitive funding climate — ‘In our time of crisis …’.

For as long as I’ve been involved in the white art world, it’s been in varying forms of crisis. In response, it attempts to collectivise, to establish different forms of self-sustaining ‘ecologies’ that mimic and perform community. This emerges in smaller scale actions, like the curator who wanted us to sit on the floor to construct a sense of non-hierarchical discussion. It emerges in the sporadic attempts of graduate students from elite universities to create so-called alternative economies in an attempt to subvert capitalist influence on art and culture. Stay in Narrm long enough and you’ll be confronted with one of them offering their art works as a gift in exchange for other kinds of labour. Sometimes, a community arts space or artist run initiative will experiment with allowing themselves to be deconstructed, as happened in the 2019 temporary occupation of West Space by this mob. The occupation prompted Andy Butler to comment: ‘We’re at an interesting time when the sorts of artistic institutions that have driven people to collectivise are now scrambling to work with them.’ ³

Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane shares with me her belief that Gough Whitlam established the Australia Council for the Arts (AusCo) in order to fund Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country (1975). I’m still sitting with this piece of information. The Herbert work is considered one of the ‘great Australian novels’, but its representations of Aboriginal people are loaded with paternalistic colonial baggage. Still, it is regarded by white readers as a sympathetic and even critical text by a white man who has been described as a ‘champion’ of Aboriginal people. Having never engaged with it before, I’m suddenly fascinated by the role of the Council as an enabler of a work that still holds a reputation as a critical, even radical, piece.

Months later, I hear one of AusCo’s more recent employees describe the Council’s role as sustaining an arts ‘ecology’, and it all feels connected. The thought occurs to me that in performances of crisis, precarity, and collectivising, artists enact the very behaviours that the funding bodies and institutions hope we will, rather than meaningfully re-imagining the arts as an egalitarian and economically radical community. In this context, settler performances of decolonisation can be seen as a natural extension of the flow of capital through the arts ecology that funding bodies generate and encourage. 

I realise that on some level I still, quietly, believe that funding kills creativity. That suffering and discomfort are necessary to do good work. That now, settler artists are able to make their great artworks about the state of precarity and angst that they’re kept in, and that maybe this isn’t so bad, because it gives their work some sense of meaning. 

Neika shares a story with me, of being on a farm in rural Lutriwita, and a conservative Blak man telling them that art grants money is just ‘the dole but for city people’. We laugh. We go to class and Neika puts up on the slideshow for our students an image of the French West Indian philosopher Frantz Fanon. A quote attributed to him is scrawled across it in brush script: ‘Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.’ Our students take photos. 

By Signalling Nothing I Remain Opaque

Cher Tan

The light of the future casts the shadows of tomorrow.

And what would you rather I talk about at the beginning, if not this transparency whose aim was to reduce us? Because, if l don't begin there, you will see me consumed with the sullen jabber of childish refusal, convulsive and powerless. This is where l start.

Where to begin? It seems that by even beginning to write this it is bound to fail. How do you capture the spirit of subversion? How does one manage a critique of critical engagement? ___ _____ __ ____ ______ ___ ___ ____ __ _____ ___ ___ _____ ________ __ ____ Did cynicism kill the idealist or did the idealist kill cynicism? Others who’ve lived longer may tell you a different thing. It arises from a similar thread, this grief of our houses being broken into, but maybe the problem is that the houses weren’t even ours in the first place. We made them visible and some saw potential gain. And it’s just decades upon decades building up now.

In The Freezer Door, a book on gentrification, belonging and (queer) desire, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes: 

Remembering when the goal was to make popular culture irrelevant, so we could create something else. Remembering when the goal was creating unpopular culture. I’m pretty sure this is a parody of a construction site — the only problem is they’re constructing a real building. The cult of responsibility, and the culture of irresponsibility — are these the same thing?¹

I look around me and see entrepreneurs: we DIY-ed our way into subsistence. Doesn’t matter if it’s through being a DJ, a jeweller, a magazine editor, a musician, a podcaster, a comics artist, a photographer, a designer, a curator. The list goes on. The fact is that some of us yeeted our way into existence: some with money, some with other forms of privilege, some with a luckless grit, some through a combo of the lot. This is what Byung-Chul Han points out in Psychopolitics: ‘Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her [their] own enterprise.’ ²  _ ____ ___ _ ____ ____ __ _ ______ ____ _ _____ ____ We flung our ideas into the networked abyss for shits and giggles, and the system that we hated actually loved us so much. They saw edge and novelty and lives fully lived.  ____ __ ____ __ __ ____ ______ _______ But what else could we have done in this cruel world — we would either be wastoids or houseless or dead. This is not hyperbole.

_ ____ ______ ___ ___ _ ______ ____ ____ ____ __________ __ _____ __ ______ __ __ ___

Mostly because I’ve been hiding behind the scrim of subculture since I found it. That sense of belonging that’s utterly unparalleled, and where nation-states don’t count. Let your freak flag fly. But do you see what I mean? By doing this I’m already pre-empting failure — by claiming authenticity or maxi-autonomy is to hurtle this argument to the ground, its weight crushed by its premise. Let me rephrase it: engaging in the act of accusation is to open you up to social inquiry. _ __ ___ _____ __ __ ________

We’ve made this mistake before! To romanticise the oneness of alterity is to deny that there are differences. Sycamore again: ‘When anything becomes homogeneous, there’s a problem. When anything becomes so homogeneous that people don’t even think about it, that’s worse.’³ Difference is to discord is to conflict is to uneasy resolution. Or so one would hope. It’s strange; I have spent half of my life in a social realm I know to be profoundly self-contradictory. There’s a certain claim to uniqueness, but most also prefer to be regarded as a monolith; it’s where we find our homes — whether to engage in art or activism or care or camaraderie or all of the above. Perhaps this is the loophole neoliberal forces found in order to worm their way in, but here’s the contradiction again: were we ever that autonomous? Did we ever completely drop out? Of course not. That’s why I’m writing this now.

In what I regard as a companion text to The Freezer Door, Sarah Schulman in The Gentrification of the Mind observes:

… they admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation and truth-telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious manoeuvring of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticised, personalised and not about power.⁴

Some agents let their freak flag fly until they got absorbed. It’s nice to feel like you’re changing the world; it’s nice to feel like you’re the cool kid; it’s nice to feel like people are finally taking you seriously.  ____ __ _______ ____ ___ ______ Is it nice? Maybe for a little while. Then I think to myself: I’ve gone and aired our dirty laundry again. And for the sake of what? Perhaps this is due to the absence of a relationship with a mother. I just want to be seen, to be held, to be wondered upon. _ ___ ___ _ _____ _____ __ __ ________

Quit the vague shit.  ____ ____ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ______ ____ ________ ____ ___ _______ ____ ______ __ _________ _______ ___ _____ ________ ____ __ _______ ______ ___ _____ _ ___ ___ ___________ __ _______ ___ _____ _____ __ _________ ___ __ _____ _______ _ ___ __ ____ __ ____ ___ __ __ ___ ____ ______ ______ __ ___ _____ _______ _____ ______ ____ __ ____ ____ ___ ____ __ _______ What a funny fucking world. I can lament about gentrification and accelerationism and equally be a victim AND a perpetrator. It’s just that the feedback loop — mind you, laundered through the didacticism of truth-telling — would rather discourage that certainty can be double-edged. Or maybe Virginie Despentes was right,⁵  ___ ____ _______ _______ __ ___ ____ ____ ________ __ _____ ___ __ _____ ____ I mean, if she didn’t become visible the probability of that reaching me would probably have been slim to none.

______ ____ __ __ _______ _______ _ ______ ____ _ ____ __ No game plan, cut the shit, start the pit. Much like the numerous d-beat bands of yore, cultural artifacts created from similar standpoints contain a distaste or displeasure communicated through language taken out of context, revelling in the attendant lifestyles evinced through aesthetics and populist ideology. I’m Disrupting the status quo! I’m Dismantling all that came before! Then start-up culture took everything and ran. Now we hear of tech moguls narrating a similar life story: I came from nothing, I dropped out of school, I want to change the world, I want to scale the fuck up. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. Meanwhile, ‘takeovers’ of institutions — via the language of ‘collaboration’ wherein those considered on the ‘margins’ are ‘invited’ to express themselves via the cultural capital of said institutions — reign supreme. Contracts are signed, hands shaken, profiles elevated. I see myself continually returning to The Society of the Spectacle, trying to find answers: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.’ ⁶ Another classic Debord-ism: ‘Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one.’ ⁷

Now I’m just drifting. But I’ve always been drifting, I guess.  ____ ____ ______ ___ __ _____ __ _______ _ ___ ______ ____ _____ _ ____ __________ ______ ___ ________ __ ___ ___ ____ I say to some of my oldest friends (and a couple of strangers online): do you remember the times when we could spot someone across the street in a band t-shirt and go up and say hello? You may not strike up a close friendship, per se, but you’re bound to find some common thread, one that doesn’t rest on the purely aesthetic even if the initial camaraderie was presupposed by an aesthetic. I’m not sure if the rise of normcore (actual power keeps a low profile) has lowered this probability; we’re more atomised due to social media, other people are doing it in extra top secret domains and it’s not possible to know. Who can say? The thing about the slipperiness of sub- and counterculture is that they’re always morphing to suit the times, and you either morph with them or get left behind, stuck in some semblance of nostalgia, the carefree and wondrous affect attached to youth. The underground has been driven further and further below and to the outside it appears as if it’s still up for grabs via the attention economy. But here’s the conundrum: to find a collective one has to show themselves. Some people are making a living out of it. 

It’s a viscerality I can’t explain. ______ ___ _ ______ ___ __ ______ ____ ____ _____ ________ __ ______ ____ _____ ______ __ _ ______ ______ ______ This way I don’t fucking owe anyone anything. _ _____ ____ ____ ___ _ _____ ____ ___ ___ ______ ____ _______ What do I mean I don’t know? Of course I know. I know there are vultures in my midst ready to pull the rug out from under my feet. ______ ___ _ _____ _________ _ ___ _____ _ ___ ___ __ ____ __ ___ ______ ____ _ ____ ______ ___ ______

I can also say: on-demand streaming services and the networked life did this. But it also made lots of things accessible to those who otherwise would not have found them, like how I, for the very first time in my life, found belonging as a lonely, suicidal teen.  __ _ _____ ________________ A fellow writer (an acquaintance, queer, older) once pointed out that I was potentially invoking a MAGA-ism by speaking about the gentrification of counterculture in this way. I recognise this as a certain kind of gatekeeping, like the generation before me who thought selling out was for losers. Then my generation made the term an anachronism completely and then they wanted to cash in too.  _____ ____ ____ _______ _____ ____ ___ _____

I fear that by even grasping at these mere notions I am perpetuating the nostalgia of before, a wilful amnesia that leads to erasure before transformation can begin. When Schulman writes that gentrified thinking is ‘… a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility’, ⁸ I nod to myself but simultaneously wonder if this is a paradox — that when one asserts certain ideas that result in an intellectual dead-end, they then entrench the conditions that brought about the criticism in the first place. It’s akin to what Svetlana Boym notes in The Future of Nostalgia: ‘The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.’ ⁹

How does one draw the parameters of outsider-hood? Where does the border begin? To witness that wee crack snap open and then declare ‘this is my life now; this is what I will do.’ _______ ___ _______ __ __ ___ _______________ ____ _____ ___ ____ ______ __ — it is easy to regurgitate received wisdoms after all; it’s how they get enshrined as history. But it’s a certain life’s work, not a costume one easily slips in and out of, not a language one can rote-learn into existence.  ___ ________ __ ___ _____ ____ _______ __ ___ _ ___ __ _____ ___ __ __ ______ ________ The walls are closing in. I don’t want to recreate that stilted history, but I also do not want to see a decontextualised present. The ones who could not survive their own epochs are dead; I am somewhat happy for them — they do not have to bear witness to this grief.

This isn’t a unique proposition. Counterculture has been declared dead too many times to count: by ______ _____ ____________ _________ ______ And each time, these figures were people who are and were the most visible. What does that say? Outside the online spaces now evermore dictated by context collapse and the aforementioned attention economy, dark forests teem, each one bristling with a sense of desire, a desire to overturn the status quo yet again. It’s just decades and decades building up now. We can’t make sense of the present until it becomes retrospective. For now, we can only keep planting seeds and hope for the best.

I remember disagreements and obstinacy in conversations that arise away from the keyboard, like the time I went to _________ and argued with a friend ___ __ __ __ ____ What was the agenda? It was that we both wanted to be loved, and equally believe in contradictory things (because we all believe in contradictory things). Difference is to discord is to conflict is to uneasy resolution. We were both so angry and we both wanted to win, but after we woke up the next morning we allowed ourselves to concede to an awkward impasse, that we are all in the same weird, mad place trying to find joy in the chaos. I did not concede to him; he did not concede to me — we just agreed to be bound by an understanding of difference, and that we were both in pain.

Of course, in a world where even the right can now be considered anti-establishment, it’s difficult to parse a sense of solidarity and desire that isn’t obstructed by performative hyperbole and aggressive loneliness, where weirdness is both novel and individualised. I don’t get off on aloneness or uniqueness — to me, weirdness has always been social; it is the normality of weirdness amongst others that allows my self to continue the work of living.

Another recent memory: I was interviewing someone who I got to know within so-called professional writing circles, and I asked them if they thought authenticity was a scam. ¹⁰ What they said surprised me. They said that if authenticity was defined by identity then it could be, but if it was defined by affect then there is nothing wrong with being sincere. In fact, it is fine to be sincere; that is where action happens. It reminds me of what Kathy Acker wrote in Don Quixote: ‘Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning.’ ¹¹

But another paradox presents itself: this is the kind of authenticity institutions try and grab at. Not an identity per se, for identities are amorphous, but the type of sincerity that comes from passion, camaraderie and belief. Some naiveté, perhaps. What do these dead-eyed people — most of whom are churned out by the university industrial complex, even if they’d like to ‘learn’ and ‘engage’ — truly care about? Why did you not learn in your multiple degrees what we did? Why did we not learn in our lived experiences what you did? But they are most often the ones with the money; they are the ones helping us survive in this futureless world. __ _____ ___ __________ ___ _____ ________ __ _ ______ Even more difficult is telling apart the lambs from the wolves. But I’ll again recall the words of Glissant:

How can one point out these limits without lapsing into skepticism or paralysis? How can one reconcile the hard line inherent in any politics and the questioning essential to any relation? Only by understanding that it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he [they] would not have generated on his own. That is, within the opacity of his [their] time and place. ¹²

Disorganising the General Residential Zone

Timmah Ball

Victoria Planning Provisions

55.01.1 (9/06/2021) DISORGANISING THE GENERAL RESIDENTIAL ZONE

Shown on the planning scheme map as GRZ, R1Z, R2Z or R3Z with a number (if shown). 

Also known as: a poetic experiment in anti-development or (am I just re-gentrifying?) 185 Ballarat Rd, Footscray. 

'First of all,
nobody will survive money.'

Purpose

For a moment the government closed off the city¹ . Panic and loneliness followed, which was often unbearable, but within the desolation it was possible to see an alternative to the lives we loathed but felt obligated to perform. 

Before we had time to understand what this meant the city re-opened as the economy had deteriorated rapidly. And any momentum or desire to understand the brief feeling of bliss experienced in its absence was lost when the city re-asserted itself with such force and beauty that it was difficult to resist, or even imagine that we could ever live without it. 

It was here that I entered the planning scheme, the bureaucratic skeleton of the city in the hope that I might understand the grief, exhaustion and addictive allure that cities offer. I imagined that I could dismantle it in order to make something worth living in because we can’t survive without money, and I wanted to fall in love with the concrete again. 

55.01.2(9/06/2021) Neighbourhood character objectives

A schedule to this zone may contain neighbourhood character objectives to ensure that future development enhances the existing amenities while adhering to the established heritage of the area. These objectives are set in the prose poem/photo essay:

Are you at one with Footscray?

My friends and I refuse to eat at Up in Smoke (excluding the time our car broke down and it was cold and we were starving and it was unclear when the RACV would arrive.) The reason why we don’t eat at Up in Smoke is because we are AT ONE WITH FOOTSCRAY. To eat there would be to capitulate to the cycles of gentrification or post-gentrification that we despise but are involuntarily complicit within. We don’t eat at Up in Smoke in order to forget our own participation with the revitalisation of a suburb we don’t recognise anymore. 

But we do eat at Footscray Ice Cream Co. The shop is scoopin’ in the west in hyper-pink. Voluptuous plants hang behind the counter where the minimalist wood panelling and bespoke shelving, storing limited edition cups and cones, further embellish the pink and green themed décor. Flavours include:

• Passionfruit and Chocolate
• Green Tea, Dark Chocolate and Buckwheat Cookie
• Lychee and Lime

… along with an assortment of other opulent combinations (my favourite being the Peanut Butter Brownie Cheesecake). A tote bag is available at their Woodend store but is currently out of stock. I wonder how long we will have to wait before we can purchase a Footscray tote. 

Obviously, we don’t eat inside Footscray Ice Cream Co. We order to go. The distinctive creaminess and alluring flavour combos updated weekly via their Insta are unavoidable. Many people are addicted. It embodies the character of the neighbourhood, which future development should aspire to. It enhances the existing amenities. Its aesthetic reveals its symbiotic relationship with Up in Smoke, sharing premises with the boutique BBQ/bar in the converted servo. (I think it was a servo before Up in Smoke redeveloped the building. It may have been something else but it’s difficult to remember.) 

On warm nights we walk along recently constructed roads with our ice creams, where half-finished developments mimic sky-scrappers. We are critically in awe of the high-rise housing that obscures views of the Maribyrnong, trying to place ourselves in the new Footscray, which looks like the Docklands or the CBD. Trying to be at one with an image that was stolen from an image that never existed to begin with but was constructed through a set of liveability criteria whereby street art and bespoke BBQ diners had recently become desirable. We lick the drips of ice cream that run down our hands, acutely aware of the water system no longer visible as the melted ice cream forms circular lines down our wrists imitating the river, which we still feel even though it’s hidden. 

TABLE OF USES

55.01.3 (9/06/2021) Section 1 - Permit not required

The following uses or developments are permissible without a planning permit. It is interesting to speculate which are most likely to attract developers and/or be adapted for creative use and/or place activation, in order for artists to maintain practice within Melbourne’s inner west while maintaining a sense of community.

55.01.4 (9/06/2021) Section 2 - Permit required

The following uses or developments require a planning permit. However, given the intrinsic disorderliness of poets, it is likely that they will proceed whether permission is granted or not. If developed illegally success is definite, though quickly co-opted by the planning and development industry that the poetry event intended to critique, unintentionally resulting in ancillary uses such as expensive bars, retail and cafes.

55.01.5 (9/06/2021) Section 3 – Prohibited

The following uses or developments are not permitted under any circumstances. However, it is likely that their illegality will appeal to creative industries triggering further development opportunities over time. 

55.01.6 (9/06/2021) Subdivision

Permit Requirement

A permit is required to subdivide land in order to achieve the following:

Poetry readings, book launches, ARIs, performance spaces, theatres, music venues, arts precincts, etc., which thrive in the following conditions:

• Office (other than Medical centre), 
• Retail premises (other than Convenience shop, Food and drink premises, Market and Plant nursery)
• Warehouse (other than Store)
• Nightclub
• Cinema based entertainment facility
• Industry (other than Car wash)

Other prohibited uses are likely to trigger interest, which may be achieved through an application to subdivide land to create a vacant lot less than 400 square meters that is capable of development. While the planning process required to achieve these outcomes is intentionally convoluted, squatting is always optional.  

Unravel

3CR Thursday Breakfast

If you could move between beauty and bend

bottlenecked at the base of gum

you would hear water rush from falls. As they do now.

If you could move between dateless and dendrochronology

you would hear the sounds of 1960s plaster on Dight Street houses falling apart.

And you would watch governments spend money on arts projects while Atherton public housing lifts have broken down and refurbishments of units have stopped.

If you could move between public and private space

you would hear a cowbell ringing in Collingwood Technical School.  

And you would find yourself stuck in a newly refurbished precinct with no water bubblers.

If you could move without complicity

you would continue to stomp out grassroots connections in Collingwood and Fitzroy.

You would notice that the original Aboriginal health services, childcare services, and legal services slowly moved out. 

But you would say it was inevitable. 

And you would be well aware of the new tenants: innovation and justice.

If you could hear gentrification, what do you think it would sound like? 

3CR Thursday Breakfast Interviews

3CR Thursday Breakfast

Interview with Kutcha Edwards

Kutcha Edwards is a Mutti Mutti songwriter. He spoke with us about his long-spanning music career, his twenty year involvement with the Beyond the Bars Radio broadcasts and memories from Fitzroy in the 1980s. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners, this conversation references Aboriginal people who have passed away. 

Interview with John Harding

John Harding is a Kuku-Yulangi, Meriam man and playwright. He spoke to us about his play ‘The Dirty Mile’, a 2008 production by Ilbijerri Theatre Company and his time broadcasting and working as the Aboriginal Programming Coordinator at 3CR in the late 1980s. This interview includes excerpts of two 3CR broadcasts, the full broadcasts can be found here: Bicentennial protest broadcast and Tent Embassy broadcast. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners, this conversation references Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have passed away. 

Interview with Porobibi and Izzy Brown

Porobibi is a West Papuan based in Narrm, a human rights activist and campaigner for Make West Papua Safe. Izzy Brown is the lead singer and MC of Combat Wombat and founder of the United Struggle Project. They joined us to speak about political organising, performing in public spaces in and around Collingwood and the importance of creative autonomous zones.  Read the full transcript here.

Interview with Kelly and Spike

Kelly and Spike are longtime housing activists and broadcasters on 3CR. They speak with us about the Homeless Persons Union, the 2016 Bendigo Street housing occupations and share reflections on hosting the 3CR Roominations show. 

Interview with Professor Libby Porter

Professor Libby Porter (RMIT) is a planner and urban geographer working on the role of planning and urban development in dispossession and displacement, and what we might do about it. In this conversation, Libby explored the problems of urban planning on stolen land, selective state investment in development projects, and the valuation of cultural production and heritage in inner-city areas. Read the full transcript here.

Interview with Dr Kate Shaw

Dr Kate Shaw is an Honorary Research Fellow in Urban Geography and Planning at the University of Melbourne with an interest in alternative cultures, particularly the maintenance of Melbourne’s live music and indie arts scenes. She joined us to discuss the tensions between arts redevelopment projects and gentrification focusing on the Fitzroy-Collingwood area.

Interview with Karen Cummings

Karen Cummings, local historian and President of the Collingwood Historical Society, joined us in the 3CR studios to discuss the early colonial history of Collingwood and the suburb’s built environment.This interview contains excerpts from the Collingwood Historical Society’s Oral History recordings made in the 1970s. The recordings are held in the Yarra Library collection. 

Further Resources

For further interviews and local history resources we recommend having a look at the following resources which have informed our research:

Yalinguth

The Aboriginal History of Yarra

Yarra Elders

Note that full transcripts for the interviews are on their way.

Opening a Can of Worms

Xen Nhà

In the midst of the pandemic, there is little that feels surprising anymore. Not even a 6th, 7th, 8th?! lockdown. Yet as Liquid Architecture’s Debris Facility noted, 'a can of worms has been opened'. Like the way acupuncture targets a pressure point to release built up tension and encourage the flow of qi. Sometimes after an acupuncture session we feel tired; we need to rest and restore energy before moving on. But the days following are often accompanied by a surge of energy unlike before. 

This energy is like a blooming cactus flower that rises from the soil after it has had time to rest,  been fed compost, and just enough rain has trickled deep into the roots of the system. Or like the caterpillars that feed at night before undergoing a state of metamorphosis to become a butterfly.  

During a long dry summer we pray for the relief of rain, but we forget the magic of trickling water through our system. As we recently shifted from Warin season (highest rainfall, funghi, moths) to Guling season (wattle trees, sunnier days, caterpillars feeding at night), where will the excess rainfall go? Will it trickle down to be stored in our root systems for the long summer days to come? 

‘disorganising is a rare summer that will become only a fond memory ...’ 

Guling season invites us to tend to the soil and to our systems, to think about what we feed into it (as hungry caterpillars) before chrysalis happens. Rather than a flood that potentially destroys all in its path, trickling asks us to confront and contemplate our relationship with time, each other, fragility, and labour.  

For disorganising, we were given six months. Beyond the ‘project’, disorganising has become, in moments of grace, ‘a way of living’ (Meenakshi Thirukode, disorganising collaborator), with multiple parts of the work trickling through our time together. As we sit and be with the mess, we are also building care practices into the infrastructure: eating together, taking time to consider how seed sharing is a political excerise in knowledge sharing, the building and revealing of the disorganising trolley, reflective writing, and facilitating space for vulnerability and friendship.

The tail end of disorganising finds us preparing for chrysalis,becoming 'soft like ash' (Lana Nguyen, disorganising Producer) and mushy like compost. 

Our three organisations and their respective Board Members have been spending time with artist Jack Tan, who works across social, legal and art communities, to imagine the possibility of enacting a quasi-institutional structure, as per the organisations’ speculative proposal made at the end of last year. Our initial proposal for working with Jack was a series of roundtable discussions with international organisations and artists, but Jack refused and instead proposed a different, and perhaps more meaningful process; the creation of an artwork that would tease out the contours of the quasi-institution we had speculatively imagined.

As we draw closer to chrysalis, farewelling the full moon, the end of our Producer and Editor’s contracts, the change in season, we are deeply curious to see what will blossom in the moments and days and months to come, what follows disorganising.

Composing our disorganising

Jacina Leong

Twice we met to compost our practices. To churn and digest our disorganising, to think with and alongside slow infrastructures and dominant productionist timelines, deep time, and container logics. To ask what needs to be transformed, what is transforming, individually and collectively, in and through our practices. Physically dispersed, we gathered online, between and across lockdowns, towards the end of the Waring season and the beginning of the Guling, and as our meridians and body clocks moved through heart time.

The following are excerpts from Jacina Leong's composting workshops with disorganising, which took place on the 29 July and 12 August 2021.

...For the question, what does disorganising smell like and taste like, I thought about burning. The smell of burning and the smell of forgetting that you have something on the stove or in the oven, or like burning toast and the sound of an alarm. I was also thinking about forgetfulness and the feeling of frenetic like panic, like, ‘oh shit, I've forgotten something!'

I was thinking about disorganising as this low hum. Something that is always there rather than an alarm or sudden burst. Something that can be easy to ignore as demands pile up, but remains a consistent urgency.

We live in a flat and we share a compost bin. There’s a whole lot of negotiation that goes on about who’s taking responsibility, who’s churning it, because it is not always a joyous job.

I guess all the things I was writing down had this dual side of discomfort and then spaciousness. A feeling like sandpaper, but then you start to relax into the unknown.

I suppose you can be an organ donor and you can receive an organ transplant. This idea then that while an organ might outlive its use in one body, it can remain useful to another body, which could be helpful in thinking about how certain aspects of our project might be more useful to someone else than they are to us.

I feel like composting is also this process of stretching open the binary between living and dead. Do you think that dead language can and should be revived?

We were talking about the worms trying to escape the bin when there's not enough oxygen. That got me thinking, are we the worms trying to escape from the bin?

...when you know the word for tree in multiple languages, you have a better idea of getting towards the essence of what the tree is. Rather than this association [points to head] of tree is that [gestures to tree]. This multiplicity of understanding.

My mum’s from the Borneo jungle, and for me, disorganising feels like the jungle. It's a confronting space. It's unfamiliar but full of potential. It’s very evocative. It's dark and mysterious. It’s somewhere that I don't quite understand yet but there’s an invitation, like you said Amy, in the unknown Tiyan for spaciousness.

I guess this is where it gets quite complex because arguably the capacity to make new meaning is made available to us in the expanded domain of capitalism. It provides us with, you know, access to the material to make value to pass up the chain. So maybe it’s about reconciling that we're all part of this capitalist platform and working out how to at least make it as equitable as possible for those trapped inside the compost bin.

I thought the sound of disorganising is a little bit like when lots of people are in a kitchen and they're cooking.

Read the full transcript, that Jacina has prepared, featuring conversations and questions that were shared between breakout rooms and group chats.

Revealing the mess of it all

Public Assembly

I am shuffling the disorganising desk across the courtyard — it rattles, making itself and me visible. I can't tell if I am uncomfortable or actually joyful with the attention that the desk brings to itself and to me.

Revealing the mess of it all. 

The desk moves through Collingwood Yards alongside but in an uneasy relationship to its workers / carers / chaperones. It is both baggage slowing and weighing us down, and a life raft full of surprising survival tools.

Extending use value in everyday situations and applying components at opportune moments, the disorganising desk fits seamlessly into the routine of work.

A greeting and information station with signage and storage.

A visual prompt for a discussion about disorganising.

A score of possibilities.

A rolling action list to improvise.

A place for food, drinks, and materials for workshops that we forgot.

A recipe for making a meal of disasters.

A recharge station.

A shared space for Hằng and Lana to work together.

A form of convenience, in that we can (conceivably) work from anywhere.

A form of entrapment, meaning we are always potentially in our working environment, in proximity to the demands of work.

A reminder of the space that it takes up and that it needs to survive.

An interruption.

An obstacle to business as usual.

The desk physicalised some of the joys and tensions of the disorganising project. Anchoring fluid ideas that would have otherwise only existed through acts, conversations, and feelings. 

Makeshift to make shift.

It is its own manual for handling the unforeseen.

It was a bit of an eyesore, but in the clean, crisp, resolved world of the arts, this was one of its real strengths. It articulated the ad-hoc, messy nature of disorganising, and highlighted the very organised structures within which the project has inserted itself. 

In between and at the threshold.

Made to be remade.

A yard stick of Collingwood Yards.

Steadying, stumbling, stirring.

It made you feel an acute awareness of the people, infrastructures, and logics that underpin these arts organisations and their place within the broader ecology of Collingwood Yards. 

It underscored the scary necessity of being seen, taking up space, and having supportive infrastructure. The artists feeding and supporting the work of the producer, and vice versa, is a symbiotic relationship of care.

Ever so silently supporting, it speaks for itself.

An experiential metaphorical object.

Objecting to the conditions at play.

Often at odds with the space or the task at hand, the disorganising desk offered joy as a necessity, extending strange objects and materials for conversation. Opening you up to the gamble of being disorganised.

It was a bit embarrassing.

It was loud, strange, ultra-visible.

It was stretching.

It was supporting.

At times it fell apart and mirrored the project perfectly. 

It was both the impossibility of imagining a world beyond work, and the possibility of imagining a world in which work transforms into play.

Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Conversations with Tenacious Bee Collective and Cocina Collaboratio

Food Art Research Network x School of Instituting Otherwise

Food Art Research Network and School of Instituting Otherwise are collaborating for disorganising to explore diverse economies that care for people, earth and gut biomes.

As part of this research Madeleine and Meenakshi have been interviewing friends and colleagues in different contexts that are creating long term artist-led infrastructures that can address environmental and economic urgencies. Conversations with people from these organisations will start to appear here on the disorganising website over the coming weeks so keep an eye out for them. We are hugely thankful to those that have taken part in these conversations. 

Tenacious Bee Collective conversation with Malini Kochupillai

Over the last two to three decades, things have changed dramatically in Himachal. People still have small land holdings. Farmers have very small land holdings, but they've turned from their traditional farming practices to more monoculture practices. Shops have become flooded with inexpensive grain and food and everything's available at some shop nearby, even in a village as small as this one. And as a result of that, a lot of traditional grains have been lost, a lot of traditional crops that people used to grow seasonally and use for medicinal purposes are gone. So at (Tenacious Bee) our work is multifaceted. We're trying to look at a problem from a very holistic understanding instead of trying to come in as a city dweller and say, 'I know better', and 'here's what you should do', and 'this is how you should live your life'. That's never worked for anybody.

Watch the full video conversation below and read the full transcript here.

Cocina CoLaboratorio conversation with Mariana Martínez Balvanera

...how do we create stronger networks of seed sharing, or seed keeping? Resisting the genetically modified corn and not lose all the varieties of corn that we have. But we also found amazing stories about families that have modified their corns through generations, for example, to make a red corn, or a variety of different color corn, and putting those stories into the open and visualizing the variety of stories of seeds of where they come from is a political exercise in recognizing those practices beyond the house. 

Watch the full video conversation below and read the full transcript here.

Time for Maintenance

Xen Nhà

Time for maintenance. 

In the film Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), the castle, which is made of junk, is maintained by a fire named Calcifer. It is Calcifer’s burning embers that keep this steampunk home magical and chugging along.

But right now, it does not feel like we are magically chugging along. The fire is out. The castle is falling apart. Amidst the pandemic, we are all wondering how much fire we have left and how to bring back the magic in our lives. The dam(n) walls are bursting — contents living uncontained. Clarity is hard to see in raging rapids.

Disorganising and maintaining is dirty work. Just like the way compost requires all bodies to churn the system: waste, (worm) labour, and life. Recently we spent some time with disorganising collaborator Jacina Leong, who guided us through a workshop on composting our practices: 'Compost is hot shit'. In one of the groups we spoke about how if the compost bin is the State, then the hot shit inside must be the system and the worms are the artists, arts workers, and our communities. What are we labouring to maintain, and what needs to decompose and die in order for something else to grow? 

We need a new bin or perhaps a different apparatus altogether.

The sediments, minerals, and matter of disorganising begin to pool, forming into soft foundations — no longer liquid, not yet solid. Some foundations exist as wooden blocks building and falling on top of each other like disorganising childcare and others have tangled and formed through weaving of time and conversations, and the collective moulding of a disorganised font.

Given the nature of organising under the pandemic, we’ve decided to trickle the disorganising program out, over a period of time, both online and in person. In unsettled murky waters it is best to paddle along the turn of the bend, rather than exert more force than is necessary.

We want to invite your attention towards Jacina Leong’s upcoming virtual workshop next Thursday 29 July on composting our practices: over tea, we will consider what ‘mucky but nourishing insights from the mash-ups’ might be revealed. Later in the evening we will be joining Marrickville School of Economics and Instituting Otherwise for another online session to metabolise on artist-led economies.

Disorganising Metabolisms

Marrickville School of Economics x Instituting Otherwise

Marrickville School of Economics are collaborating with the School of Instituting Otherwise and the Food Art Research Network to explore economies that foster circularity, interdependence and establish bio-culturally diverse principles that circumvent capitalist paradigms of risk and profit.

In this workshop we will explore how artist led economies are reimagining collective health in a metabolic relationship to the earth/soil/gut biome.

'We want a system that puts care based labour at the core of an entangled more-than-human biosphere. A system that is relational, seeks balance, fosters circularity, pleasure, and is emotionally intelligent.We want an economy that is shaped by hands in the soil—an economy that is led by practice, facilitated by those who are best positioned to design the production and distribution flows in a remaking of worlds and our more-than-human relations.'

The workshop will explore protocols for inefficient mapping with artist Linda K Knight, the metabolism as a site for disorganising our relationship to capitalism, and set out key principles for community economies. In the last part of the seminar we will work in groups to build an MSE Glossary for bio-culturally diverse economies and map some institutions by artists that explore food as a collective resource, beginning wth Cocina Collaboratorio, Tenacious Bee, Company Drinks, Manthithoppu Milk Coperative Society.

Event Details

Thursday 29 July 2021

Online via Zoom

7 – 9.30pm

RSVP here.

Composting with y/our Community

Jacina Leong

A couple of weeks ago, a group of disorganising collaborators met to compost our practices. To take up composting as a metaphor to pay attention to what is transforming, to what needs to be transformed, individually and collectively, in and through our practices.

This time we extend an invitation publicly to compost y/our community. To take stock, together, of y/our relationship to place, to other tenants, and to those (human and more-than-human) gathering in and through your practices. The workshop will take the format of shared conversations and (online) wanderings, facilitated by one of the disorganising collaborators, Jacina Leong. Bring a cuppa, notebook / paper and something to draw with (pens / pencils).

Event Details

Thursday 29 July

Online via Zoom

11am – 1pm (Heart Time)

RSVP here.

Composting is hot shit

Jacina Leong

From the ‘Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities’ reading and writing group — which promotes composting as a ‘material metaphor’ [1] for paying attention to ‘our critical metabolisms’[1] — to the speculative fabulations of Children of Compost and ‘the layered, curious practice of becoming-with others for a habitable, flourishing world,’[2] compost is ‘having a moment’ in literary and theoretical contexts.[3] 

Compost is hot shit.

I compost at home with the help of worms, soil dwellers. Their careful and persistent work, metabolising the layers of carbon and nitrogen I feed them, slowly transforms organic matter into nutrient rich castings — worm wee and poo that I return to my garden beds. I check in on them — red wigglers or eisenia foetida, which is their Western scientific name — probably more often than I should. Sometimes I run my fingers through the layered composite, saying hello and thanking the worms for their ceaseless work, learning to ‘apprentice with them’[4] by attuning to their rhythms and temperatures through smell, touch, and sight. Where I live, on unceded Wurundjeri Country, a short walk from where the Merri and Edgar creeks meet, this time of year is known as the waring (wombat) season by the Eastern Kulin Nation people. Days are short and nights are long. A felted blanket provides an additional layer of warmth for the worms when temperatures are low. 

When I was invited to disorganise, I thought about the process of (dis)organising from the perspective of composting. I carefully prepare and separate organic matter into small containers on my kitchen counter: coffee grinds, vegetable peelings, non-acidic fruit, newspaper, cardboard, eggshells. I avoid acidic foods like tomatoes, onions, and garlic. Sometimes I add dried tree leaves collected from my backyard, the crunchy kind I used to like to forage for as a kid. Once every couple of months I scatter a handful of dolomite lime. An elderly neighbour tells me this will help keep the acidity levels balanced and provide the worms with an additional source of calcium. He’s currently harvesting dark greens from his backyard veggie patch. 

Composting is slow, intentional, collaborative.

Thinking with these (human and more-than-human) companions, I wonder: ‘what mucky but nourishing insights might emerge from these mash-ups’[1] if we — those of us gathering and being gathered to disorganise — take up an invitation to compost our practices?

References

[1] Jennifer Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, ‘Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities,’ Environmental Humanities, 10:2 (2018): 501-527. 

[2] Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016).

[3] Michelle Niemann, ‘Composting’s Colonial Roots and Microbial Offshoots,’ Edge Effects (April 2020), edgeeffects.net/composting-colonial-roots/.

[4] Natasha Myers, ‘How to grow livable worlds: ten not-so-easy steps’ (2018),natashamyers.wordpress.com/publications/.

disorganising is a practise

Xen Nhà

disorganising in the mess. 

The stuff emerges. An excess pours forth, leaving a trail behind. Cleaning up the mess is an action set through repetition over time — it becomes a habit, which then turns into a practice, which then turns into a system, which then turns into an institution. In our first newsletter, we asked, quoting Fred Moten: ‘What if this got to be a mess that the Museum chose to present, rather than clean up? There’s a poetics of the mess, you know?’

disorganising is a practise. But rather than mastering this practice, bringing clarity to it, we are allowing the process to first disorient us. Be Oakly, from publishing project GenderFail, says that ‘there is an unpredictability that comes with inexperience, which is ripe for the creative rediscovery of how to occupy new forms of communication through my work.’ No matter how many years we all have under our belts working with organisations and as individuals, there is a level unpredictability when a group of people, some of whom have never worked closely together, do so to disorganise. This unpredictability is a beautiful way of seeing more wildly in the world. Like the way Robin Wall Kimmerer is compelled by the reciprocity between goldenrod and asters in Braiding Sweetgrass. How the colours of yellow and violet are strikingly attractive to both human and bee eyes, due to the dance between wavelengths. Or how the unpredictability and messiness of collaboration is like water pouring, flowing, trickling and bursting the dam(n) walls — contents living uncontained.

To refuse is often read as being against. But refusal is also what AM Kanngieser describes as ‘return’. The etymology of refusal means to give back, to restore, to return, derived from re-, ‘back’, and fundere-, ‘to pour’. Liquid thinking. One understanding of refusal as return: ‘a (re)turning to an (un)known because nothing ever returned to its self-same or absolute – unsettles narratives of resistance that are framed only in opposition. The idea of pouring back or watering expands the conceptualisation of refusal as an act of liberation.’ 

As we dive collectively deeper into the work of disorganising, the sediments, minerals and matter begin to pool, forming into soft foundations – no longer liquid, not yet solid.

Like the disorganised manifesto of Nina M Gibbes, which begins by meditating on the shape of a letter and ends with a material promise in the form of a flag; or the way in which Public Assembly’s modular office trolley disorganises the space of productivity and folds us into the labour of living from work. But time isn’t money. There is always the promise of more. We have eaten time and spent food with Julieta Aranda towards the conception of a collective newspaper. 

disorganising is, in one part, a public practise, a rehearsal without end, which sometimes is repetitive and unpleasant, like the construction noise next door to Collingwood Yards. Finish tearing down the dam(n) walls already. We need a counterspace for connection, strategies strategies for survival with and in institutions – like Torika Bolatagici’s workshop for solidarity-building between First Nations, Black, Indigenous women of colour working and producing knowledge at educational institutions. 

Meanwhile, at Bus Projects, Liquid Architecture and West Space we’re standing on a pontoon with these rapids raging around us. But don’t worry, next week, we will announce the full disorganising program on our website featuring workshops on alternative economies and composting, readings from an unbound workbook and more. These will be running sporadically throughout July with key events happening Thursday 29 – Saturday 31 July. We look forward to inviting you into the thinking, reflecting and practise of disorganising. 

Public Practise

Play On

Public Practise is a collaboration with contemporary music organisation Play On.

The premise is simple; over four lunchtime sessions in the Collingwood Yards courtyard: 9, 16, 23 and 30 July, beginning at midday, musicians are invited to practise in public.

Bring your instrument and work on something you are developing or learning. Tune into the sounds of construction taking place next-door, or go into your own world and refine scales or a passage from a piece or score that you are attempting to master.

Free lunch from Collingwood Neighbourhood House’s Cultural Catering team for anyone who takes part. Listeners join us to experience the magic, struggle and satisfaction of practise. All welcome.

Event details

Friday 9, 16, 23 and 30 July

Noon onwards

Collingwood Yards Courtyard

No RSVP required, drop in anytime with your instruments.

A counterspace for connection: strategies for survival with and in institutions

Torika Bolatagici

"We need space that is not designated as institutional space to be able to talk about the problems with and in institutions.”

The aim of this workshop is to provide a safe space for connection and solidarity-building between First Nations, Black, Indigenous, women of colour whose work interfaces with higher educational institutions as students, administrative staff and faculty members and invites participants to engage in a discussion around the transformative possibilities of constructing communities in counterspaces that exist in parallel with mainstream institutions.

The workshop will begin with a shared reading of selected texts that have contributed to the critical discourse around embedded power dynamics and politics of exclusion within the academy, including: Aileen Moreton Robinson; Fred Moten; Gloria Anzaldúa; Julietta Singh; Linda Tuhiwai Smith; Sara Ahmed and Tatiana De La Tierra. All readings will be provided and there is no expectation to read the texts before the workshop. Excerpts will be read to the group for reflection and discussion. Participants are also invited to bring texts to the workshop that have sustained them through their journey in academia.

Following a series of shared readings, participants will be invited to contribute to the production of a collaborative document, intended as a guide with advice and strategies for survival in the academy drawing from the lived experiences of workshop participants. The guide will be printed and distributed along with the disorganising project publication which will be launched in late July.

 This workshop is presented by the Community Reading Room (CRR). CRR is a pop-up destination for research, community discussion and engagement with ideas about art, culture and identity. Founded by Fijian-Australian artist and academic Torika Bolatagici in 2013, the CRR is an experimental discursive project that invites the public to consider how mainstream institutions and public collections privilege particular methodologies and ways of knowing. Each iteration of the CRR evolves from the previous installation and responds to the space in which it is located.

Event Details

Saturday 10 July 2021

Composite, Bus Projects

12-2pm

Participation is free and all materials will be provided. RSVP here.

A promise was made

Xen Nhà, Editor

A promise was made: our three organisations bound together for six months, sharing resources, skills and time to experiment with practices of interdependence.

Questions were devised. Proposals were assembled.

Something less than an organisation emerges: a disorganisation? Or even less, simply an organ. Rather than building anew, the organ asks us to remember that we are breathing, pulsing and in relationship to a larger living organism — we cannot thrive on our own.

Interdependance fuels competition and narrow thinking. Our systemic and institutional structures favour criteria over spontaneity, competition over collaboration, newness over return. Interdependence becomes a demanding yet imperative and generative practice.

Interdependence requires a level of attention that is generous. Deep listening is a practice of interdependence, wherein relationality is key to a ‘deeper state of awareness’. Daniel Browning remembers his first trip to Lake Mungo in far south-western New South Wales. He remembers the ‘dramatic soundscape’ of a dry, bone-coloured trackway. The sonic clues to Country become what he describes as a text, imprinted ‘thousands of years ago’ by ‘several ancestor groups’ moving across Country to track kangaroos, ‘a family with a wandering child and an agile one-legged man’. Text and texture are inscribed into the lands we reside on. This is not a flat view of our world, our artists, our community — instead, it becomes a capacious organ, alive and singing. Yet in an arts landscape where attention is demanded and often echoed in the white chambers of institutions, where does one offer their attention? Where do we deeply listen?

We begin by immersing ourselves in the mess.

‘Revolution or anti-colonialism, as [Frantz] Fanon says, is a program of total disorder, and museums and academic institutions clean up messes. I mean, really, the history of the modern subject, as codified by Kant, is about the cleaning up of mess. It’s about the eradication of swarm, and of fuzz and buzziness. He just hates that shit. And politics is meant to regulate that. But what if this got to be a mess that the Museum chose to present, rather than clean up? There’s a poetics of the mess, you know?’

The thing about poetry is that it is unpredictable, it can be slippery and opaque and, as Ocean Vuong says, it is ‘an art of disorientation’. Fumbling and learning together. disorganising in the mess.

Program Statement 2

All organisations

Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are disorganising.

In November last year, disorganising promised an ‘experimental exercise in cooperative practice beyond previous models of partnership, grounded in principles of solidarity and interdependence.’

Today we can announce that we have commissioned the following artists and collectives to think, work and practice in response to, and as part of, disorganising: 

3CR Thursday Breakfast; Julieta Aranda; Tiyan Baker; Timmah Ball; Torika Bolatagici; Maddee Clark; Fayen d’Evie; Nina M Gibbes; Madeleine Hodge (Marrickville School of Economics) & Meenakshi Thirukode (Instituting Otherwise); Yasbelle Kerkow; Jacina Leong; Play On; Public Assembly; Hoang Tran Nguyen, Danny Butt and Tania Cañas; Michelle Nguyen; Ari Tampubolon; Cher Tan; Joel Spring & Carol Que.

We look forward to sharing these works with you in and around Collingwood Yards on July 29, 30, and 31 and through the forthcoming project website, designed by Alexandra Margetic and Zenobia Ahmed, and also our audio archive, developed with Jon Tjhia. In the meantime, you can expect the first of a series of email newsletters, combining poetry and plans, from Xen Nhà to arrive tomorrow morning at 8am.

Between our first statement and today’s announcement of commissions, we have spent the first half of this year meeting, experimenting, struggling, and learning within the mess and joy of our disorganising process, against the backdrop of both the public opening of Collingwood Yards, and the repeated emergency closures of the city due to COVID-19. Notably, we appointed Lana Nguyen and Xen Nhà in the roles of producer and editor respectively. We staged the first disorganising dinner, hosted at Hope St Radio, where we came together with fellow Collingwood Yards tenants, community groups, artists and friends to share food from Collingwood Neighbourhood House, make a series of written promises to one another, play Mah Jong with Scotty So, listen to records selected by Licorice Pie, and witness performances by Blak Metal. 

Program Statement 1

All organisations

Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are disorganising.

Earlier this year, in the context of numerous challenges to our organisations and communities, Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects came together to discuss a collective response.

We tabled many possibilities including, rather speculatively, the idea of forming a quasi-institution, comprising our three organisations. What would it mean, at a moment of precarity, to become institutionally inseparable? What conventions, protocols, legacies and habits separate one organisation from another, and to what end? How, as independent organisations, might we refuse to compete with each other for resources, and the attention of audiences, artists, stakeholders?

Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are disorganising. This methodology is not a pathway to merger, but an experimental exercise in cooperative practice beyond previous models of partnership, grounded in principles of solidarity and interdependence. We are informed, here, by our shared context and ambitions as neighbours at Collingwood Yards, on unceded Aboriginal land. Disorganising means, wherever possible, shifting knowledge, resources and opportunities from existing organisational silos into the common spaces that present conditions demand.

Disorganising is underwritten by stimulus funding from the Victorian government, designed to aid in the economic recovery of the sector. For us this means redistributing funds to artists, curators, writers and members of our communities, sustaining our staff, as well as recruiting new people to join our teams. It also means understanding ‘economic recovery’ in political and cultural terms, as a fundamental questioning of the nature and value of our work.

So we end this announcement with opportunities, and more to follow. Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are seeking to appoint two new positions, an Associate Producer and Associate Editor, in support of disorganising.

This, being the first time we have ever recruited collectively, is an experimental proposition to work between our organisations, and help imagine possibilities to come. We welcome, with excitement, applications, queries and feedback.