October 3 – 11, 2014: Airds Bradbury Housing Estate
Suburban Monument / Lachlan Anthony, VIC & Benjamin Forster, NSW
Is a mobile lighting installation that seeks to transform public space within the Airds precinct through the nocturnal application of intensely saturated, monochromatic light. A convoy of white vans, fitted with generators and a single high-powered architectural light will be deployed and configured at specified locations during the Temporary Democracies presentation period. The artists have understood houseless boulevards, empty fields, abandoned shop facades and vandalized play equipment as suburban monuments. Through lighting these monuments with architectural lighting fixtures predominately employed to illuminate the utopian constructions of cultural success, an interesting paradox arises. The forgotten remnants of blundered social design are valorised through sublime light, to offer a sense of warning to future processes of bureaucratic planning. In this way the project actively inverts the progressive light of modernism, summoning the disregarded suburban landscape to a position of significance in the dialogue between people and the governments who purport to offer social solutions. The resultant documentation will provide a visual record of a suburb and community, in the state of flux that has defined its historical development.
Riverside Drive Precinct & Kevin Wheatley Memorial Reserve playground / 3, 4 & 10, 11 October, 7.30-10.30pm
Pop Up Portraits / Bindi Cole, VIC
Pop Up Portraits is a temporary photo studio set up in the AB Central shop within the Airds Shopping Mall offering free portraits to the citizens of Airds. Each portrait will then be displayed as part of an evolving and growing gallery of the local community within the shopping centre. As the landscape of Airds changes due to the local council’s renewal strategy, the community is forever altered. Pop Up Portraits celebrates the people of Airds today and the dynamic connection they have with each other and the land while also creating a photographic legacy of the moment. At the end of the project, a full set of portraits will be donated to AB Central. A selection of portraits will be chosen for exhibition in a gallery setting.
Airds Shopping Village / 3-11 October, 10am-12.30pm & 2.30-5.30pm
Sanctioned Stereotype / Darren Bell, NSW
Large-scale video projection of photographs of local families and individuals set on the outer skin of a house that dispel and demystify clichéd social housing stereotypes. “Sanctioned Stereotype is my way of showing that families and people from Airds/Bradbury are not what they are made out to be, they are not the stereotype so often associated with people from housing department homes and estates. They are loving families. They are friends and neighbours but above all they are a strong, thriving community of eclectic individuals. They are Australia. I want to show that in my work, to show the community pride.” Darren Bell
4/6 Byrne Way, Airds | 3 October, 7-9pm
152 Riverside Drive, Airds | 10 October, 7-9pm
Monster Park – Cheviot Place, Airds | 4 & 11 October, 7-9pm
SKYBALL / David Cross, VIC
SKYBALL is the world’s newest competitive ball sport that world premieres at Temporary Democracies. It combines a number of sports with inflatable sculptural forms to create a challenging participatory art project. Players are positioned inside there own unusual inflatable structure and compete against each other with the objective to catch a ball in a net placed at the centre of the inflatable structure. Its variable set-ups include a combined team version where only one of the four players can see while the others rely entirely on their instructions to be in the right place at the right time. The games are high impact, high intensity, super fun and definitely challenging!
Monster Park – Cheviot Place, Airds / 4 & 11 October, 12noon-6pm
Future Fallout / Kate Mitchell, NSW
Future Fallout continues Kate Mitchell’s exploration of the comic and cartoon logic. In the single channel video artwork we see the artist ride up to a Psychic Shop in the middle of a field and as she opens the door, the set falls down. After the initial jolt of humour a cascade of densely layered and often poetic meaning is revealed; in her attempt to access the future it collapses around her. Future Fallout has something for everyone. In only a few minutes we might laugh, contemplate the nature of time, the inaccessibility of the future, or the cruel and joyful ironies of human existence. The true essence of this work lies in its simplicity, the resolved relation of action and idea, absurdity and philosophy.
Airds Shopping Village, 3-11 October, all day
Site narratives / Rebecca Conroy, NSW
An online discursive space for the collation of local Airds stories, artist interviews and reports from the field of Temporary Democracies and the housing estate known as Airds-Bradbury. The blog will provide additional context for the project to be considered in the lead up to and during the public presentations on site, and will serve as an archive of the work. As well, each public presentation is occasioned with a series of commissioned essays that explore and expand on themes provoked by the temporary occupation of Airds-Bradbury by artists, as the suburb is renewed and 80% of its public housing removed and residents relocated.
Mobile Cooking Hearth / Robert Guth, ACT
The houses are disappearing from Airds; only memories of the homes remain. Last year Robert Guth, With the Men’s Shed preserved some of these memories by building a mobile kitchen out of a camper caravan and demolished houses. Now he is bringing the kitchen back to the community to provide a warm hearth for the two days of events.
On the 4th the kitchen, including a big friendly table, will be at Dragon Park providing a space to sit and have a cuppa with nibbles coming from the oven and stove. By using the kitchen we activate it as a memorial to the houses and households that have been cleared from the area. On the 11th the community is invited to contribute ingredients and skills preparing food to share. People can bring ingredients that we will cook into something delicious to be served as part of the community dinner. Whatever arrives will be baked, boiled, or fired and eaten by everyone present. When activated by our preparations and eating the mobile cooking hearth will reflect the diversity of the gathered community.
Monster Park, Cheviot Place, Airds / 4 and 11 October, 12noon- 8pm
Community Cooking Event – Monster Park, Cheviot Place, Airds / 11 October, 1.30-7pm
The Meyers Briggs Mixer / Bennett Miller, WA
The Meyers Briggs Mixer is a quest to find 16 people that each represent one of the 16 unique variations of the ‘Meyers Briggs’ personality type system. Together these 16 people will become the inaugural ‘Meyers Briggs Allstars’ (Airds Bradbury). To begin with, the 16 people must be located. Testing and recruiting has already begun, and will continue in the coming weeks. A live testing facility will be installed in a park in Airds on consecutive weekends in October, beginning Saturday October 4th. On the second Saturday this testing facility will be expanded into the venue for the Meyers Briggs Mixer. At the mixer the freshly recruited ‘Allstars’ will be gathered together for the first time. The mixer is an informal party that spans the afternoon, but during this time the ‘Allstars’ will also be documented together in a series of portraits.
Every respondent to the test, either in the lead up to the project, at the testing facility or at the mixer, will receive their choice of hat, t-shirt or socks depicting their four- letter Meyers Briggs personality type, irrespective of whether or not they are also a member of the ‘Allstars’. A commemorative banner will also be produced to mark the occasion of the mixer, and to celebrate the formation of the ‘Meyers Briggs Allstars’ (Airds Bradbury).
Monster Park – Cheviot Place, Airds – 4 and 11 October, 12noon-6pm