Transforming Systems of Power and Personal Horizons of Possibility through Radical Cultural Praxis
When engaged symbiotically, the dual processes of creative work and community building have the capacity to produce transformational change. This hypothesis has been explored throughout my candidature, culminating in a multimodal research-event The Capital. Experienced across several floors in the iconic Nicholas Building, The Capital addressed the value of artistic labour and the conditions required for the efficacy of critical creative practice. The project positioned aesthetics and subjectivity at the intersection of finance capital and state power, and the specific ways ‘acts of commoning and resistance’ have attempted to reconfigure these through practice.
Intro
Each work has been informed by what I call ‘else-possible propositional architectures’, referring to provocative and radical transformations of social, political, and economic systems, as well as alternative physical and cultural spaces of artistic exchange. These utopian, large-scale projects are unlikely to ever be realised due to any combination of material limitations: lack of capital, institutional restriction, political will. However, in the attempt toward making them possible, actual project outputs are infused by the ethic of the proposition – a process I call ‘ethicacy’. In The Capital various propositions I have engaged in throughout the PhD are braided together into new forms, simultaneously expressing their process, and aiding in understanding the arc of the thesis, especially how and why we ended up at the Nicholas Building for the final show.
Work
Ideologically and pragmatically, translocal practice has been integral to my research into the interconnectivity of experience across borders and perspectives. Therefore, virtual, and actual artworks developed, created, or abandoned in the PhD journey have been across international and interstate borders. This nomadic praxis critically engages with the ethics of ‘situated knowledge’, questioning approaches to material experimentation based on relationship to site, object, subject. I have critically examined other approaches to this problem in the exegesis, and self-reflexively asked a series of rhetorical questions: Is this my story to be told? What is the standpoint from which I work? Can my perspective be nomadic and grounded within each place I am living and working? How does my becoming-with each new context change the context? Do I, as a second-generation migrant born in a country founded on violence which does not hold my ancestral dead, have a home-perspective? Or is my home liminal, lying somewhere between the land of my ancestors and the place I was born? Is that liminal home akin to the conditions required to produce creativity and transformation? …
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