Astra Howard:
CITYtalking, interactive research booth, 2006.
CITYtalking - Melbourne City Council Laneway Commissions 2006
4 October – 5 November 2006, Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 4pm.
CITYtalking is an interactive public art project by the Action Researcher/Performer, Astra Howard. A conversation booth was designed, constructed and then wheeled around Melbourne’s CBD for five weeks. Each day the booth would stop in six different laneways across the city and members of the public were encouraged to enter inside in order to engage in a conversation with Astra. Neither person could see one another throughout the dialogue instead speaking anonymously via an intercom.
CITYtalking was an interactive public art project by the Action Researcher/Performer, Astra Howard that created a new public forum for otherwise unheard voices within the city. A conversation booth was designed, constructed and then wheeled around Melbourne’s CBD for five weeks encouraging members of the public to enter and engage in a discussion with an anonymous ‘voice’ via an intercom.
By creating non-conventional catalysts and situations for strangers to interact Astra found that members of the public express quite profound personal, social and political feelings. The aesthetic experience of the situation appears to disable the reservations associated with more normal means and contexts of communication. These works of communication are carried out in public spaces in response to the increasing privatisation of public space in cities due to the commercial development pressures including large enclosed shopping malls which allow very limited types of behaviour by certain classes of individuals only. As well, an increase in transit route functions throughout the city diminishes the number of ‘forum spaces’ that would otherwise facilitate interaction. Locals and visitors are rendered voiceless and any dissensus narratives that might potentially exist go unexpressed, unpublished and unheard
The conversation booth facilitated more stories, new stories, and across days, weeks, and months, an alternate consensus formed by people on the street. For example Leonie, a local homeless women approached the conversation booth in a frustrated, hostile manner, assuming the booth was yet another consumer gadget designing her out of the city. When she realised its sole purpose was an intimate story-telling space for people like herself to ‘feel at home’ she became quite emotional, expressing deep feelings about her life. The conversation with the intercom voice continued for more than an hour. Rarely, Leonie was getting priority treatment, and best of all, she knew that for some minutes at least her story would be broadcast like all the rest of the accumulated narratives of the city onto the two LED screens that were positioned on the outside of the booth for all to read and possibly experience. That someone was willing to listen to what she had to say and acknowledge that what she was feeling was not only true but also part of a new dissensus was a revelation.
Many passing pedestrians expressed their genuine enthusiasm for the projects ability to provide a safe space for dialogue between strangers. They also highlighted the lack of such opportunity for individuals to speak about their concerns for the world around them. This being the case, locals began to eagerly await the daily return of the CITYtalking booth to their nearest laneway. Some people it appeared were keen to read the updated stories from the day gone past, where as others enjoyed the conversation booths’ ability to legitimate dialogue between themselves and the passing pedestrians.
Centre Place. Friday 6 October 2006. Leonie - My experience is that nobody wants to know none of the ruling class wants to know. People are dying in the gutter and it is hidden.
I am lucky to be here, to have survived and now be able to speak about it. No one wants to listen to what the government did. You are just supposed to get it all together.
I do not know anyone else who is in the gutter and is able to speak. They are either dead, in prostitution, in gaol or in a psychiatric ward. I have not had a secure place to this day. I have been homeless over 100 times in 56 years.
My poor sister was a ward of the state her whole childhood. She was abused at home and then released on the street like a dog. Nothing is acknowledged.
She was picked up by the police in St Kilda and then ended up suspiciously dying. It was all covered up like she had never lived. Fifty years later I have not stopped crying. Why does this have to be hidden?
How do I get on my feet again? I need a voice. I am so distressed, I do not know how I have the strength to walk half the time. I cannot believe that at fifty-four years of age you are still told that you are a piece of shit.
My poor mother after all the children were taken she took an overdose, my father had a nervous break down. He got locked up in Pent ridge gaol for years.
I was demonised in my twenties, I ended up being trafficked in prostitution. I was lucky to have got out of it. I was helped by my late brother. It is not something that you wake up thinking that is what I want to do.
People have to stop being hyper crits and judgemental and asking why is someone in the gutter, that hurts me shocking. I am powerless and voiceless and intimidated to say anything. They take your personality.
I have got to go on, and at the moment, what is keeping me is my singing, it gives me a release. I pick songs that accentuate what I am feeling. I have come down here with my amplifier lately to start busking.
Howley Place . Sunday 8 Oct 2006. Joseph - I am originally from London. I moved to Glasgow to study and then moved to Berlin. I have been in Melbourne for the past two years. A woman drew me here.
Some of the cultural stuff in this city gets me down. Unless you have a dodgy 80s haircut and drive a ute you are not really considered to be Australian. I gave up being a professional musician and worked selling pharmaceuticals.
I sold my house in England, it was all very chicky-mickey, suave and sophisticated. I have started working for a chemical company here in Melbourne.
I have found that Australians are not very open in terms of expressing their feelings. It takes a long while in any conversation before you can get someone to actually admit to how they are.
Centre Place. Saturday 14 October 2006. Renato - I was just busking down here at Centre Place. The members of our band met at Tafe. We were about 19 years old then, all misfits.
Six years later we are still here, playing a mix of traditional folk music from Europe and the Middle East.
We all learnt our instruments for the band, the accordion player for example was a guitarist, we have just got less and less crap as time goes on. It is about anarchy for us, not really about virtuosity.
That is why we all like playing on the street, because people are ready to respond and it is also quite fleeting. The public can stay for as long as they like and so can we. In this way it feels a lot freer.
Bourke Street Mall. Sunday 8 October 2006. Jean - I am from the Western suburbs of Melbourne.
I have been selling the Big Issue in Melbourne for the past two months. I love seeing the time moving by watching the shadows change on the pavement. I also love seeing the different way people dress and how the city moves.
There are some incredibly generous people out there with an extra buck to hand over.
Some days it is rainy and often very cold, but I can change my pitch and buy lots of hot chocolates. I might start bringing a thermos. At the moment I love living in Melbourne. The only thing I do not like is the horse poo.
Cohen Place . Thursday 5 October 2006. Jackie - I work at Vincents Dom, a barber shop. I have been working there for 11 years. We were merged from the Southern Cross Hotel, that is where I used to work, starting back in 1977.
People often ask me whether I get bored, but I have never thought of that, you have to be a character who likes talking and listening.
I was born in Melbourne. I have two children and the same husband. My son, Peter is twenty, my daughter is sixteen. My daughter is in year ten.
Liverpool Street . Sunday 15 October 2006. Orriel - I have just been to the theatre, to the philosophical society, a typical type-cast bunch of senile people, philosophising about the meaning of life.
I have been going to there for the past eight years. It is full of bored middle-aged people, wearing purple sashes and looking scary as sin. I have tried to take my girlfriend there, but she gets eclectically bored.