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HOT LINKS

Forthcoming events:
Homelessness & Cultural Democracy
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Making the Case for Culture: Creative City Network of Canada
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Poems about Community Spaces
& other papers from Connecting Schools & Communities conferences, June 2008
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Meet, Meld, Merge Art Bringing a Community Together:
the Toil Art Project, in Yea, N.E. Victoria
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Home Lands: Internet TV program which connects young refugees to their home lands
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The Agenda 21 for Culture is the first document with worldwide mission that advocates establishing the groundwork of an undertaking by cities and local governments for cultural development.
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Projects

Current Projects | Past Projects

Read more below about these past projects:
Knot@home
Small Towns Big Picuture

The Knot@home project   2001

Scott Rankin, Artistic Director of BIGhART, and his social justice oriented national artists team had not worked in a central city context before the partnership project initiated in 2001 with the Network and the City of Melbourne. BIGhART’s award winning arts-led social inclusion programs had already saved and positively changed the lives of countless young people in rural Australia and had theory and practice elements that we believed would be beneficial to the community cultural development agenda in Victoria.

With funding support from VicHealth, the project partners engaged a group of disadvantaged young people, case workers in social welfare agencies working with them, and a team of mentoring artists led by filmmaker, Phillip Crawford in a public art project that used a mobile bed (symbolising homelessness) as the site for the screening of a series of short films made by young people in which their stories were creatively told.

The bed, with a built-in multi-media screen, was pushed around the streets by project participants as it toured Melbourne’s CBD during the Next Wave Festival in 2002. It stood in Federation Square during the 2002 Melbourne Festival in the bed-vigil project in which the bed was slept in 24 hours a day by project participants and notable Melburnians who shared their stories of being Knot@home with visitors to the newly opened Melbourne landmark. The bed vigil was Federation Square’s first ever public event.

Footage shot for and during the bed vigil was then integrated with other screen-based and live performances that formed BIGhART’s Melbourne Festival theatre work, Knot@home at the Capitol Theatre. This continued the creative exploration of homelessness and the impact of being Knot@home by sharing indigenous and refugee experiences. Kerry Armstrong was one the professional artist mentors involved in this extraordinary project which has led, among other things, to a greater awareness of the power of cultural expression as a vital component of effective social justice interventions.

The power of the arts in juvenile justice contexts was examined at a forum, Taking A Risk – the ART of Re-engaging Young People, convened by the Network at the Melbourne Town Hall immediately after Knot@home’s conclusion in Melbourne. This forum consolidated links with other community cultural development artists and agencies in this field, including Sally Marsden and the Jesuit Social Services and Maud Clark and Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company.

The Small Towns: Big Picture Project    2001-2002

This project was developed by the Network in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities at La Trobe University in Bendigo. It began life as a ‘triple bottom line’ university audit of five small towns in central Victoria. Dr Maureen Rogers led the research program that gathered and analysed local data against ‘sustainability indicators’ in social, environmental and economic terms.

When the Network got involved in 2001 and added the ‘fourth pillar’ of culture to the equation, this academic research study was transformed into an arts-led community engagement program actively involving hundreds of people in the towns of Dunolly, Talbot, Carisbrook, Maldon and Wedderburn. Artists were commissioned as animators and interpreters. The processes of collecting, interpreting and expressing the research data were transformed. Thanks to the arts, the elusive element of active engagement by community members was achieved. The results exceeded all expectations.

Thanks to Andrea Hicks, a visual artist and community activator par excellence, schools, children, tertiary students, local businesses, councils and community leaders were drawn into the project. They made it sing. During 2002, Andrea co-ordinated a massive undertaking: countless townspeople made (and later exhibited) a range of artworks in clay, on fabric, on film and on paper that explored the research themes. These were created at workshops led by local artists Andrea commissioned to share their skills. They were exhibited at the project’s finale events in each centre’s town hall through October 2002.

Another critical ingredient in this project’s extraordinary success was the creative genius of Craig Christie, a composer, writer and director who worked with townspeople to produce an original musical theatre production that drew on ideas shared during focus groups that explored social cohesion. The show, Right Where We Are, celebrated real-life stories of experience in small country towns. It was performed and staged by local people at the finale town hall events. Each night, a local talent show warmed up packed houses in all five towns before the curtain rose on Right Where We Are and then the roof nearly lifted off.

Local filmmaker, Philip Ashton caught it all on camera and produced a documentary of the whole project including the early planning stages. This film, A Journey in Community Building and a CD of songs from the theatre show are still available for sale. Local artist Anne Moloney has designed an interactive website that depicts the social connections in each town along with research material and project highlights.

A key reason for our involvement in the Small Towns: Big Picture project was to promote the value of the arts in community development, economic development, and environmental management in regional communities, and to strengthen connections between the arts and academic institutions and policy bodies in the regional development field including local government.

The partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities at La Trobe University has proved to be an excellent way of promoting the incalculable value of artists as ‘engagers’ of community action. The key researcher, Dr Maureen Rogers, in all her discussions and presentations to academic and policy colleagues all over the country, usually ends her story of the Small Towns: Big Picture program with the words: “this researcher will never go into a community without an artist again”. She made this comment to the 300 strong audience at the Local Government Community Services Association of Australia National Conference, Just and Vibrant Communities in Townsville in July 2003 after she and Judy Spokes had presented the project. The message was well received and more than usually credible coming not from an artist but a social/environmental researcher.

Small Towns: Big Picture continues to be promoted at various arts and regional development events. Most recently Judy Spokes and Maureen Rogers made a presentation about Small Towns Big Picture in Kamloops, Canada, at the Cultural Future of Small Cities conference in May 2005.

The legacy

The major outcome of Small Towns: Big Picture was the performance of Right Where We Are in the five participating towns. But the legacy of this model program has had wide repercussions. There have been many notable achievements.

In April 2003, the visual arts exhibition of the project (curated by Andrea Hicks and comprising mainly children’s artworks) was launched at the City Gallery in Melbourne. This was a rare example of country arts showing in the city rather than the other way around.

This event was also the premiere of A Journey in Community Building, the 30 minute video documentary of the program by Phillip Ashton. This screened on a loop during the six weeks of the exhibition season.

Also premiering on the opening night of the exhibition was the CD soundtrack of Right Where We Are, featuring the songs from the musical theatre show created with townspeople by Craig Christie. A live performance of excerpts on the night was also a big hit.

Many of the original artworks are now embedded in the public spaces of the towns or hang in community centres and schools as a lasting legacy of the project. The new permanent artworks to be installed by the Central Goldfields Shire Council together w ith Celebrating Carisbrook, a community festival in for March 2004, are further tangible results. An arts policy for the Shire is another important development encouraged by this project.

Links have been created between Small Towns: Big Picture and Connecting Confident Communities, a Community Building model program in the region established by the Victorian Government. Andrea Hicks has gone on to co-ordinate various community arts activities in Carisbrook and Maryborough that create a high profile for the creative dimension of community building. This development work has led to the commissioning of a community public art work program in Carisbrook that is fed by the Small Towns: Big Picture social research. This new ‘legacy project’ has been supported by a VicHealth Local Government Arts and Environment grant.

The project also featured in the (preview) opening for participants at the ACMI Memory Grid Project at Federation Square.

More information about the project can be found Latrobe Univeristy's Bulletin in this PDF document.