TREATED

The exhibition and community engagement hub, TREATED (the sublime passage), is at the Wyndham Art Gallery. The show allows a greater number of people to reflect on and engage with the works completed on-site, engage with the practice of the artists, and to consider ideas around process, elimination and purification as seen in the public art event, TREATMENT. There are tensions to explore here for as sewerage is transformed into liquid gold (water), ideas take form through material processes to become artworks. The exhibition also reveals much more about the artists’ research and aspects and factoids about the site. Architectural elements (installed by Bishop and Reis) referencing Melbourne Water’s Information Centre will activate the space – in displays, archival material, discarded materials and unused footage, diary notes and documentation of the project including video interviews with key people involved in the project. Two workshops will run with artists and members of the community, inviting participants to respond to the work, a particular process and prompt. This is a feature of the project that will allow for collaboration with a wide range of community stakeholders as workshops would draw on the histories and technologies of the site to provoke reflection and a material response from participants.

Investigating the sustainability of a vernacular village

Vernacular architecture, as an attractive product of the society, is an expression of the cultural beliefs, geographical characteristics and available local materials, which inevitably reflects on its territory and context. The vastness of countries such as Iran, with different climatic zones, has initiated the development of logical design solutions via vernacular architecture. The vernacular heritage with self-efficient local materials and climate responsive design is a manifestation of sustainability. This paper presents the principles and methods of vernacular architectural design, used in a historical village, Abyaneh, in the central part of Iran, to address how sustainability has been achieved through vernacular design in this region. This paper also explores how physically sustainable urban settlements can lead to socially sustainable and viable communities. There are many lessons to be learnt from the vernacular architecture of traditional villages, like Abyaneh, which have been shaped organically, throughout the centuries. Through investigation of vernacular strategies, we need to find economically viable and context responsive design solutions in today's contemporary architectural designs. This study is based on the systematic review of the existing literature, site observations and field studies.

The big sleep

Artist book of found photographs of people who are in repose (either sleeping or dead) with an essay entitled 'The Long Sleep of Photography' by Dr Daniel Palmer. Published to accompany an exhibition at Paris Photo, 2015.

Commemorating migrant camps: vernacular memories in official spaces

Bonegilla, Australia's largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, re-emerged in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former residents, it was considered a success by its organisers, a grass-roots committee of former residents. Another reunion was held ten years later, this time by a committee led by local council members. Both these reunions are important moments in the formation of Bonegilla's public history and its orientation to a narrative of progress and Australian multiculturalism. Analysing them highlights wider changes in heritage discourses and management, and in the evolution of multiculturalism in Australia. Many recent studies of public commemorations in Australia have argued that vernacular or participatory commemorations can be, and almost inevitably are, overtaken and dominated by state-sanctioned narratives. In this article, I will focus on these two reunions in order to argue that despite the progressive dominance of official or institutional powers over Bonegilla's public history, participants’ voices endure within or alongside official frameworks. Despite the obvious differences between the 1987 and 1997 reunions, collective and individual recollections from ex-residents and their families creatively operate within established and seemingly official narrative frameworks. These are not restrictive, nor do they silence alternative articulations. Some ex-residents actively draw on the narrative frameworks available to them to attribute new significance to their experiences, whether melancholy or fond, and consequently include alternative stories that add further to Bonegilla's public multi-vocality.

Under western eyes again : rights vernacular and the gender culture 'clash'

Gender features prominently in debates about the clash between human rights and culture, where ‘culture’ is often portrayed as a supreme obstacle to the realisation of women’s rights. Sometimes framed as an ethical conundrum between universalism and cultural relativism, the clash between culture and rights recites one as always and inevitably undercutting the other — culture undermines rights, and the imposition of human rights damages culture. An innovative attempt at recasting this clash has been a focus less on abstract philosophical debates and more on the cultural politics of rights — in particular, how they are made relevant to everyday life. Anthropologists Merry (2006; 2008a) and Levitt and Merry (2009; 2011) propose the analytical and ethnographic study of vernacularisation by demonstrating how, in local contexts, women’s human rights are remade in the vernacular. This approach has yielded rich knowledge about the myriad ways in which expectations of female inferiority and masculine entitlement to violence are contested — not through the import of Western ideas of human rights, but through the local idiom. This article considers the productive contribution of vernacularisation to this contested terrain, while also pointing to the limits that issue from its dependence on distinguishing the global from the local. Today, these two spaces are not so clearly discerned — particularly in multicultural settings where the local and the global are fused, and where human rights are translated into a vernacular of current political anxieties to do with racial and cultural difference. This is a vernacular that disguises or disavows racism through the language of human rights. These themes are illustrated and explored through the case study of a small community event in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where gender, culture and religion play out through both local and international rights vernacular.