roarawar feartata collective: PROSTRATIONS - Loose Connections, Dandenong, 2009

performed by Benjamin CIttadini & Craig Peade, Dandenong, 01/10/2009

SHOW ME THE HEART-SHAPED BUTTON TO FLUSH THE SHIT FROM THE COLLECTIVE CORTEX OF VISUAL INFAMY - Mason St. Carpark

The forgotten yet enduring structures around this carpark exist despite the ‘progress’ enveloping it. They harbour necessarily dark echoes of things smashed, broken, passed-out, drunk, pornographic, raw meat carved, haphazard parking, violent altercations, creeping darkness and emptiness:  

There is an aspirational sun,

whose amateur rays feather down, 

barely shifting dark water molecules 

from cold stones, calling softly 

up the galvanized shine of metal to 

warm the random corners, sullen angles,

faded parking bays, broken bottles,

afternoons turned to deep night

well before their time, tired,

alone, exposed to the wet tongues

of desolate conversations

lapping at ragged surfaces, hungry holes,

histrionic glass and other shattered moments.

Freemasons Hall

The facade of this building is covered by an intricate display of tags tracing the lines and crevices in the melodramatic structure of this probably not-so-important building. There are historical narratives in this building that cannot disappear fast enough for some people, and yet it is one of the few remaining traces of a suburb or place that may have existed before  ‘revitalisation’.

Not only is it architecturally anomalous, but it is an isolated expression for the marginalised in Dandenong. Even the flora - climbing weeds and gum trees - are in contrast to the encroaching landscaped uniformity. There is defiance in the rusty roof, pastiche columns and skeletal fire escapes; one can sense that this building will not just disappear quietly one day, but it will rot, immovable like a beached whale, until its vital organs have been consumed by the elements, its bones whittled away by the flat winds across the surrounding plains.

And what of the people who use this decommissioned hulk as shelter, even a home? Will they emerge naked, startled by the ‘revitalised’ future, looking for a new shell?

There is an aesthetic depth, lines of focus framed by this building, that may have at one time defined the weary glance from homecomers walking from the trainstation - in certain shades of evening sunlight it may even have been comforting, a sign that one is finally home - how will homecomers glance upon the new structures, vistas and aesthetic fields?

Space is the Place

Space, one of the most treasured and rare commodities, here suddenly unfolds with a hazy, laconic disregard for its own worth. What it lacks in terms of use it more than compensates for in terms of the depth of vision it enables; a chance to gather one’s surroundings, to sample the sky, the ground and the phantasmagoria in between. This wide dirt and stone clearing fringed by almost pastoral grasses, suggests that perhaps hundreds, even thousands of people have stood somewhere within the bounds of this open space and taken stock of what and where they are.

There is a sense of ritual, mass ritual, in a space like this. Lines of bodies slowly reclaiming the space they first created, building a movement of consciousness, a rhythm of limbs, an impossibly seething stillness that reminds us of the deeper, intuitive and timeless mode of being. Even more than that: a memory that resides in our genome - a memory that we share and will ultimately be left with when we die.

SUBURBAN SIGHTLINES

Have we adequately memorialized our ragged suburban sight-lines? Or will they be remembered only as a rediscovered pastiche, photographed and captioned in glossy design books on inner suburban coffee tables?

On VicUrban shopfronts in Dandenong you will see two images of Dandenong:

1) Pre-suburban Dandneong

Black and white (somehow pixellated) images of wooded countryside and single buildings with horses and carriages and sturdy looking yeoman posing in the middle of empty dirt roads. This is the ‘historical’ Dandenong, after the unimaginable unfamiliarity of the indigenous culture and before the unspeakable ordinariness of the suburban culture.

2) Post-Suburban Dandenong

Somehow in the future climatic conditions have improved, providing for lush, landscaped greenery that is tastefully counterpointed by the ultra-modern building materials and bold primary colours. Young people, old people, men, women, people from ethnically diverse cultures – all are navigating these fresh, universally tasteful spaces with the kind of invigorated enthusiasm usually seen on the faces of children and holiday makers.

‘Post-Suburban’ Dandenong is no longer a suburb, but a neatly arranged one-stop transport and services shop for an ever widening desert of suburbs. This is ‘Post-suburban Dandenong , where the current residents emerge, blinking, from the oppressive aesthetic rabble of dark, utilitarian years, into the simulacra of the ‘new’ – the unobtrusive, inoffensive illusion of progress and prosperity.

TENSIONS

>The tension between a genuine desire to live in harmony with each other and to eliminate difference (hence fear) by assimilating others into one’s own ideology - this is what shadows everyday life for many people in Dandenong. There is a constant desire to remove this tension, dissolve it or just make it disappear. yet it is this very tension which provides the energy and impetus for all the vibrant and desirable aspects of daily life as well. 

> Dandenong is also home to a large band of nomadic Government Services employees - a wary bureaucratic underclass striding around awkwardly on heeled shoes, slurping giant buckets of caffe latte, surveying their surroundings with the kind of contempt that authority and aspirational income engenders.  

HOW TO UNDESIGN SPACE

You need to make a space feel special - comment on its vibrancy, it’s seemingly intractable permutations . . . solved. Its marrying of styles . . . successful. The its angles and sightlines complete the experience. Be gentle. Laugh conservatively at its quips and nod understandingly at its grand statements. Be obedient at first: sit in designated areas, move wherever the space leads you like an obedient child.

Every now and then, ever so gently, give the space a nudge. Touch it in a place it’s not expecting, then apologise. Then do it again. One by one, drag your fingers over its proportioned surfaces. Dance across its determined lines, rub yourself against its angles, sing loudly in its dead corners.

Finally, lay down with it - put your whole body in it embrace. Melt its coy structures with the warmth of your skin. Undesign its naive facade with the fluid reality of your limbs. Re-integrate the space back into yourself. Be a loose collection of ideas.

HAVE AN INTERACTION

Go on

Take it slowly

Cross paths

Be surprised

Bump into someone

Don’t apologise

Say hello in an unfamiliar language

Say yes instead of no

Let go

Let yourself be drawn into a conversation you don’t want to have

Give in to the feeling you don’t want to feel

Be here

Be vulnerable

GO there

Listen, then talk, then listen again

Agree

Disagree

Explore other options

Take it all on board

Raise your eyes from your phone

Take your headphones off your ears

Give something for nothing

Take something

Don’t understand

Cross the line

Be afraid

Forget what to say

Meet someone with nothing but yourself, trembling.

PROSTRATIONS

As a performance ritual, this at once an act of humbling oneself before the real mysteries of place and removing the hard map-lines of space by placing one’s body into contact with it. The kernel of this performance came from the surveying process, in particular the response to the question “How often do you think about God?”, with the overwhelming response to this question being “All the time”. This now, the more I am distanced from it, makes perfect sense. However immediately it pierced my faithless paradigm and challenged me to look at my response to Dandenong in a different way. 

Being brought up within the laconically secular structure of Australia, we are used to our religious symbols and spiritual needs being expressed in private (even our mass Christian festivals such as easter and christmas have assumed commercial figureheads that help to allay their religious specificity). However, sometimes religious ritual does make into our streets, such as an orthodox procession at easter or the Chinese Lunar new year. The effect of these highly stylized rituals on our secular public spaces is extra-ordinary, theatrical. (RE: BERNARD TSCHUMI & ARTAUD) Suddenly an ordinary street corner becomes a site for the profane, a battleground for angels and demons, a solemn thoroughfare for the veneration of gods, a portal to the limitless space of heaven. It is this gathering of people in space, whose purpose is to signify the presence of something above and beyond the ‘reality’ of streets and buildings, which is the essence of our experience as societal animals. Through the performance of ritual we can dissolve our everyday surroundings and inhabit, however briefly, unregulated and indefinable spaces.