Articles Publications Zines |
Publications |
There Goes the Neighborhood
Edited and compiled by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg (You Are Here) Or we can post you a copy (postage is $10 in Australia/$20 overseas): There Goes the Neighborhood begins with a close study of Redfern before expanding into international examples to provide a detailed exploration of how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. This book has been published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name and many of the contributions come from participating artists in the exhibition: Brenda L. Croft (Australia), 16beaver (USA), Daniel Boyd (Australia), Temporary Services (USA), Jakob Jakobsen (Denmark), Lisa Kelly (Australia), SquatSpace (Australia), Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro (Germany/Australia), Evil Brothers (Australia), You Are Here (Australia), Michael Rakowitz (USA), Miklos Erhardt and Little Warsaw (Hungary), Bijari (Brazil) and Democracia (Spain). The book also includes contributions from key thinkers about the complex life of cities such as the Situationists, Mike Davis, Brian Holmes, Gary Foley and Elizabeth Farrelly. There Goes The Neighbourhood is edited by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg from You Are Here, a Sydney based art collective which focuses on social and spatial mapping. To access a PDF of the book click here. |
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Cities Without Maps/ Kota Tanpa Peta
Cities Without Maps - Kota Tanpa Peta, 2008, Indonesian/English, isbn: 978-0-9805470-0-9. To order a copy: contactyouarehere[at]gmail.com. 24 pages. Cities Without Maps - Kota Tanpa Peta is an artistic mapping project for two Kampungs, Ratmakan and Jagalan, along the Code River (pronounced cho-day), Yogyakarta, Indonesia which was produced as part of an Asialink residency, 2008. Ratmakan and Jagalan are areas, typical of many of the new urban communities in Indonesia, which have hitherto existed without a map based on any Cartesian principles of perspective and scale. Beginning the process of making a map – for a place which exists relatively happily without one -presented us with the challenge of reinventing what a map is. Do we just map the geographic space or do we map other social aspects which constitute this physical space? For example, how does a map reflect issues such as how many people live in each house or how space is used differently by men and women, older or younger people? What purpose does a map represent for a community who has shaky legal ownership of the land they live on, and who navigate between houses based on long term memory of which families have lived there? How do we map things like the numerous ghost stories which collect in a community built on a former grave-yard and which provide traces of the lives of past residents? How do we include the numerous social maps inked directly onto the body through the strong tattoo culture in Kali Code? This project is a mapping of the community, in collaboration with some of its members, where we view space as a combination of both its physical and social aspects. We decided that a map is not just a two dimensional object but a more complex representation of the various connections which make up a specific location. This project has been generated out of drawing and mapping workshops and discussions in the local area and video documentation of interviews with community members about their relationship to the area. |
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If You See Something, Say Something If You See Something, Say Something a free newspaper distributed in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, 2007. To order a copy click email: contactyouarehere@gmail.com. 24 pages.
“If you see something, say something,” was pasted on bus shelters and train stations around the world in the wake of the 9/11 bombings asking us to view those around us with fear and suspicion. But do we see this government sponsored vision of the world or do these advertisements move us to say something very different? In the state of exception produced by the war on terror we are asked to accept a consensual vision of fear, scapegoating and state sponsored violence. Yet many are moved to dissent from this. Dissensus can mean widespread disagreement, a failure to reach consensus or a consensus only among those who dissent. Jacques Ranciere uses the term to describe rare moments of genuine democracy whereby new social actors force themselves into the political landscape demanding that their voices, which hitherto have been silent, are finally heard. While what we consider politics is often a ritualised confrontation between opposing parties, armies, or forces, with a known set of protocols on how this resolution will play out, a moment of dissensus allows a reconfiguration of how we understand the notion of politics itself by opening up pre-existing assumptions of social agency. If you see something, say something was a discussion, exhibition and publishing project in Sydney in January/February 2007. Principally this revolved around an exhibition involving a small number of international and Australian artists whose work has explored aspects of dissensus – by either questioning prevailing notions of consensus or by exploring new possibilities of social agency. Rather than being an exhibition of political art this exhibition questioned how we actually understand the connections between politics and aesthetics. The exhibition was complemented by workshops and a newspaper. Of particular interest was the role of the artist as a researcher. In Argentina during the crisis and uprising of 2001 the term “militant researcher” was popularly used to describe an engaged approach to seeking an understanding of reality. As the research group Colectivo Situaciones explains the researcher-militants’ “quest is to carry out theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability, beginning with the power (potencia) of those subaltern knowledges.” In engaging with social realities artists have increasingly become archivers, publishers and researchers. This exhibition bought together some of these research projects which have informed both how these artists have tried to engage with social realities and encourage forms of alternative knowledge and resistance. This exhibition would not have been possible without the help and generous funding from Mori Gallery, Marrickville Council, The Australia Council for the Arts, The National Association for the Visual Arts, Gallery 4a, Breakdown Press, The Bolivarian Circle, LASNET and the Australian Venezuela Solidarity Network and various donations by solidarity and activist groups. But it also would not have happened without the community of socially engaged artists and activists who are part of the exhibition or supporters of it and whose generosity and enthusiasm make “another world possible.” Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg, project initiators |
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