SquatSpace:

Redfern/Waterloo Tour of Beauty, 2005-2007, interactive tour, video and mapping installation.

For more go to SquatSpace: Squatfest:

Art as Situated Experience

SquatSpace's Tour of Beauty takes place in the contested, congested inner-Sydney suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo. These areas, which have for many years housed a large proportion of Indigenous residents and low income public housing tenants, are now seen as potentially valuable land for real estate speculation. In late 2004, the New South Wales state government created the Redfern Waterloo Authority (RWA), effectively excising a slice of land south of Sydney's central business district from the jurisdiction of the local council by declaring it of significance to the entire state. With this legal sleight of hand, the government can now push through commercial redevelopment plans, sell off local assets, and override existing heritage regulations under the pretext that the land is too important to be subject to normal planning laws.

Not surprisingly, this heavy-handed approach to urban planning has generated great anxiety amongst the numerous local stakeholders. Many of the artists in the SquatSpace collective (of which I am a member) live in the Redfern area. We wanted to “do something” about this alarming situation, but we were confounded; How could we intervene in a supposedly democratic process when the proper channels of consultation had been swept away, and where traditional dissent seemed fruitless?

The group embarked on a process of conversational research: we began meeting with local community representatives in an attempt to understand, from their perspectives, what the RWA's actions might mean for life in the area. It became clear that the “locals” felt strongly about their own predicament - we could not do justice to their wealth of knowledge and depth of emotion by utilising second-hand information in the production of an artwork about them. In fact, we discovered that the more people we spoke to, the more we were referred to others who would report different experiences of their particular situations.

SquatSpace organised its first Redfern-Waterloo Tour of Beauty in September 2005 to investigate the disjuncture between the Redfern-Waterloo Authority's plans and the current lives of local people. “Tourists” are transported by mini-bus, or travel en masse by bicycle, to each stop. Here they are greeted by a “local”, who speaks briefly about the place and his/her connection to it, answering questions and facilitating discussion before we move on to the next site. The tour visits several endangered sites in the area: Aboriginal housing at The Block, community centres, government assets to be sold off, and public housing towers. We also visit locations which indicate a possible future: a growing commercial art gallery precinct, and new private apartment developments at the eastern end of the suburb. With the Tour of Beauty, the members of SquatSpace draw on their extensive toolkit of aesthetic strategies. We act something like site-specific DJs, mixing the conversation “live” to create an affecting (and sometimes overwhelming) experience for our “tourists.”

 'It is a commonplace that we cannot direct, save accidentally, the growth and flowering of plants, however lovely and enjoyed, without understanding their causal conditions. It should be just as commonplace that esthetic understanding – as distinct from sheer personal enjoyment – must start with the soil, air, and light out of which things esthetically admirable rise.'

With this statement, John Dewey deploys a botanical metaphor to connect art with life. Rather than cutting a flower at its stem and placing it in a vase in my kitchen, I am urged to admire it in the garden, grounded in the earth where it grows. Similarly, aesthetics, for Dewey, is a situated practice in which our senses are stimulated and challenged continuously in the places and spaces we inhabit every day. In his 1934 book Art as Experience, Dewey sought to restore continuity between aesthetic experiences usually thought to reside only in “special” places like museums and galleries, and those that happen in our daily lives. As a result, both spheres might be enriched. Art within museums would be viewed as intertwined with a wider ecology of cultural practices, and everyday life could be equipped with a set of aesthetic tools to make sense of, and enhance, its rhythms, forms and intensities.

SquatSpace's Redfern-Waterloo Tour of Beauty belongs to a long tradition of art which attempts to connect aesthetic participation with a rhetoric of participatory democracy. In contemporary art, “participation” has often been used by artists and critics to connote a kind of liberating function. The involvement of the audience can be framed as a salutory move towards a model of idealised social democracy. In allowing the audience to share responsibility for the act of creation (rather than merely its reception), interactive artworks break down the authoritarian, privileged speaking voice of the artist. By extension, an individual's participation in the creative act might lead to a stronger sense of his/her ability to participate in society. Audiences are thus released from their passivity and empowered to take more responsibility for governing their own lives.

This relationship between aesthetic interactivity and participatory democracy is by no means uncontested. However, in the case of the Tour of Beauty the model of participation employed – verbal dialogue which takes place within specific sites and neighbourhoods – brings the question of democracy itself sharply into focus. By considering and discussing redevelopment plans set in place by the NSW state government in the very places those plans are set to affect, the Tour of Beauty allows aesthetic considerations to come into play in a directly experienced manner. The texture of the streets and buildings, the tone and passion of spoken voices, and the presence of my own body in these sites makes me conscious of the complexity of lived space. By taking on board many different voices, the Tour of Beauty embodies the difficulty we have as grounded citizens in coming to grips with the disjunction between lived space and something as abstract as a “plan.”

The dialogical nature of the Tour of Beauty acts as an implicit critique of the systems and methods of the tourism industry, where conflict and contestation is swept under the mat and not regarded as appropriate for public display. In standard city bus tours, a prosperous atmosphere of harmony and progress is presented as an outcome of the well-functioning democratic process – a process in which we participate via the proper channels of voting and buying. By contrast, SquatSpace's tour offers a more direct experience of democracy – one more closely aligned with Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau's vision in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics:

'a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate—in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained , not erased.'

In this, the Tour of Beauty resembles the Western Cape Action Tours (WECAT) in Cape Town, South Africa. These tours are run by former members of the Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress who fought against the old apartheid regime of South Africa. They visit the Cape Flats, a place “most white South Africans, aware of rising crime rates and a history of unrest, would never dream of visiting”. Heidi Gruenebaum-Ralph describes the passionate and conflict-laden stories told on the Western Cape Action Tours as a process of “claiming one's own memories”. This is impossible in national memorials of apartheid atrocities because of the necessity for the official voice to speak with a certain “propriety” and thus efface individual, messy and contradicting accounts. Similarly, on the Tour of Beauty speakers represent themselves, and not an official, editorially sanctioned position.

After each tour, SquatSpace uploads reports, information, links, and photographs onto its website. On the site, “tourists” are able to write about their own experiences, a dialogical process which directly feeds back into the way we carry out subsequent tours. Importantly, rather than exploiting a local political situation for the production of a gallery-based artwork, the group has, in fact, begun to produce a series of relationships. We choose not to instrumentalise these relationships in the production of a commodified art object. Rather, the work-that-art-does is to allow “knowledge” to emerge through social interaction in contested places. In the process, SquatSpace's developing network of local knowledge becomes a resource in its own right, feeding back into the very earth from which it springs.

Lucas Ihlein is a member of the SquatSpace Collective.

Dewey, J., 1958, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, New York, p.12
The political theory of Laclau and Mouffe is discussed in relation to participatory art practice in Bishop, C., 2004, 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', OCTOBER , no.110, p. 66.
Tarica, A., 2004, 'Choosing the Rebel Tour: A visitor to Cape Town takes an alternative look at South Africa's recent past', Budget Travel Online, August 5, 2004,
< http://budgettravelonline.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400728.html >. See also the WECAT website: < http://www.dacpm.org.za/wecat.html >
Grunebaum-Ralph, H., 2001, 'Re-Placing Pasts, Forgetting Presents: Narrative, Place and Memory in the Time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission', Research in African Literatures, Vol.32, No. 3, Fall 2001, p. 205.
Dewey, 1958, p. 3.

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