Runway x Watch This Space: Froth

The eighth Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from Watch This Space, situated on the unceded land of Mparntwe/Alice Springs.

Watch This Space’s Beth Sometimes reflects on institutional challenges in the context of Marlene Rubuntja’s exhibition Looking Back, Moving Forward (Watch This Space, 11 Sep – 3 Oct 2021).

Marlene Rubuntja associates Watch This Space with coffee. After our interview she asks us to bring one back, because just the sight of Charlie – one of our co-directors – reminds her of coffee. Sure, coffee is the definitive beverage of gentrification but it’s also an exciting drink.

As artist run initiatives and creative institutions across the many-Countries of this continent scramble to subjugate their own proliferating whiteness and be more relevant institutions to their locations and histories, Watch This Space ARI, on Central Arrernte Land, is operating among a divergent set of forces from our cousins in the south east. We are geographically located amidst a vast network of Aboriginal run art centres and dealer galleries, all specifically supporting the production of First Nations creative content, primarily for market. The irony is that Watch This Space was created in the 1990s in the specific context of a lack of exhibition space for experimenting white artists and their audiences. But this is no reason to stay thus governed, and in an attempt to be less white we must ask, what can Watch This Space do that is distinct?

Local Arrarnte artist Marlene had the most recent exhibition here in the Watch This Space gallery Looking back, moving forward - an energetic collection of soft sculpture landscapes, paintings on paper and prints. This conversation weaves thoughts from her, Arrernte grandmother, language and cultural worker and WTS studio resident Kumalie Kngwarraye Riley; Arabana,Wuthathi, and Mualgal woman and Curator of Aboriginal Art and Material Culture at MAGNT in Darwin Rebekah Raymond; co-director/caretaker at Watch This Space and film-maker, Charlie Freedman; and me, Beth Sometimes, a studio artist at Watch This Space and locally based Pākehā artist, interpreter and language worker.

I’ve long been interested in how Watch This Space might support forms of First Nations led or collaborative creative practices that are inherently anti-market, non-commodifiable, experimental and otherwise to what exists in saturation. I’m wondering if this desire (for white people) can function as a kind of conceit, how we openly erode the conceit of inclusion and move toward being moved, make ourselves available to be permeated and altered from within? My own position against settler-capitalism is much informed by many years of intimate experiences of its effect on Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte lives.

Is Watch This Space’s position also thus? If so, where are the positions of mutuality that are not us inflicting our idealism and enthusiasm for unpaid labour on people living in poverty? My belief in income as a sustainable solution to poverty waxes and wanes. It is a vital material argument in the present that people get paid, (and more and properly), but is ultimately just propping up the same extractive system which generates the poverty. Thinking economics in relation to the societies who have sustained and co-created among the most arid conditions in the world is a boom and bust exercise. How could our practices be defective for capital? How do we mobilise the middle class froth of this art world to caffeinate subversive activity?

I acknowledge to Rebekah over lunch in Darwin that to speculate about these possibilities from my position alone is somewhat meaningless and she articulates that of course cultural safety can only be measured by the community. In a meeting to continue processes in addressing our lack of First Nations governance involvement Kumalie Kngwarraye Riley expressed how before she came to know this place by way of entry, she would drive past or peer in the windows assuming it was a place for whitefellas. As we begin to discuss how Watch This Space might be more useful for local people she talks extensively about her work with the Strong Grandmothers Group, patrolling the streets of the CBD at night, chatting with young people and intervening in interactions between them and the police. She talks about the painters selling their canvas in the streets. We examine what Watch This Space could possibly do that other organisations are not specifically funded for, interrogating where the political allegiances are between how we do things and a diversity of local First Nations positions. With many of the invitees to our next meeting coming from language backgrounds other than English, we must adjust the timbre of our discussion and be led by those coming in to make it available.

Kumalie is in permanent residence at Watch This Space since her former workspace was converted without warning to be a covid facility. She hosts us from within, offering a welcome in Arrernte and English for most openings and events these days. She consistently and generously takes time to speak with artists about their work, weaving in affinities she observes between what they are working with and matters of local significance. A memorable recent welcome was her acknowledgement of Lucreccia Quintanilla’s show Our Voices Together Bouncing Off The Walls picking up on the resonances of Lulu’s Mayan ancestors echoed through the sound works and wall squiggles to acknowledge the echoes of Arrernte ancestors humming eternally in this land. Objects, at their best, generating a citrus hum through the assembly in their midst.

These Countries do not have a scarcity of story, song or record of violences done. The issue is in the listening apparatus, the ability to process various utterances as meaningful and generate appropriate responses. Paying attention to the sound around this space, the languages that conversations are hosted within might tell us something about how we’re going with the endeavours pointed to by this article. Last week a group of us were recording sentences for a picture dictionary for Akarre - a dialect of northern Arrernte. The Akarre speakers busily discussed Marlene’s show in Arrernte and Akarre as we sat having our lunch break. What local poetics vibrate through the space?

I would speculate that Watch This Space has acquired collective knowledge that ‘harmony’ is characteristically something that white people like to steer, in order to maintain certain existing power relations. In a town and a country raw and rupturing with trauma it is also imperative that we are in the business of creating joy. A distinction between the raucous peel of joy and the flaccid persistence of harmony is worth attending to.

Marlene’s show feels like windows to what was obscured by the walls: grandiose, joyful, central Australian colour. In our chat she emphasises how the opportunity to work in paint allowed her to feel that she is following in footsteps laid out by her father. She gestures to the hills around Larapinta Valley saying “I love this hill here, this is our life, our dream. This pwerte (hill), knows this mob. This pwerte - get to know you, when you stay for long time.” She knows the pwerte well too, and describes the wild use of colour in her sculptures that gives proper homage to their myriad hue. In her opening speech she waves toward the soft sculptures and wryly asks “Which bit of Country you want to climb on next?”

Rebekah expresses how it’s often just a numbers game whether people feel safe or not in a room, a critical mass thing, Marlene emphasises how important it was having her family at WTS for the opening. People come to support their people, it is the same for all of us, and Alice Springs offers potential for slippage in who one’s people are, as much as it offers limitations. Rebekah described her recent trip to Arrernte Country for a big art weekend, now holding a title in the art world. Her new position led her to exposure to the frothing ‘lefty art world’ pacing at the doors of Desert Mobto enter the acquisitory fray. Having visited family here other times she said she was here freshly exposed to an entirely other Alice Springs faction - an experience which struck me as important for the constituents of that froth to reflect on.

Rebekah and I spoke – from our very distinct positions – of the endless generosity of Elders that have made it possible for each of us to know different things, the mammoth labour undertaken without hesitation for the purpose of young peoples flourishing, and how, perhaps too regularly, that spills over to white people too. Knowledge looks for gradients to flow toward and Elders must make careful assessments about in whose hands that knowledge is functional. My sense is that the art market leeches it always away from the critical destinations. We talked about the need for keeping places for artwork and cultural materials in local communities and how to make the art sing for the people it’s not always singing to.

If a significant part of the practice of an artist run initiative is to produce relationships and relations, then we must locate our activity with regard to what’s speculated at in this writing there, and if the lines between labour oriented relations and friendship are happily blurry in this area, then it matters who we turn our bodies toward in any given moment, over lunch, coffee, on the weekend.

Looking Back, Moving Forward ran from 11 Sep - 3 Oct 2021 at Watch This Space, Mparntwe/Alice Springs.