There Goes The Neighbourhood

“As we got deeper into the study,” says Zanny, “we started coming across a lot of other artists who were looking at Redfern and we felt we wanted to bring all the people and ideas together.”

As a result, There Goes The Neighbourhood (TGTN), a new exhibition and forum for dialogue investigating the gentrification of Redfern and the politics of urban space more generally will be taking place in and around Redfern from the end of May, presented by Performance Space.

To coincide, an urban activist from Denmark named Jakob Jakobsen will be coming to Sydney with a series of works about the controversial closure of Youth House in Copenhagen, which had been an important music venue and rendezvous point for leftist groups for many years. In a move to ‘normalise’ the area the government sold the site to a Christian group in 2007, sparking several days of riots across the city and over 1000 arrests.

In addition to being strongly involved in the Youth House struggle, Jakobsen is an international expert on the Situationists, so his appearance for TGTN will be an important part of the program.

Also dropping by will be Temporary Services, an art collective from Chicago who will be making a new work about public art in Redfern. Having conducted opinion poles on various public sculptures in the past, they’ll be focusing on the cluster of huge metal spikes that were placed at the top of Cope Street in Redfern.

Many have remarked on the aggressive and imposing look of the monument, and the inappropriate nature of it being there – given that it was at the bottom of this street that the Aboriginal teenager TJ Hickey was fatally wounded being impaled on fence posts during a police chase in 2004 – so Temporary Services’ community consultation will be particularly apposite.

The process of urban change has been an ongoing focus for the local collective SquatSpace and on May 31 they will be conducting one of their tours of Redfern, inviting people to learn the history of selected sites and hear from locals about how changes in the area affect their lives.

Also part of the TGTN program is a re-enactment of Allan Kaprow’s 1963 participatory installation Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann. With participants invited to move furniture around a designated space, the process of arranging and rearranging within a group will form a microcosm of broader spatial negotiations and neighbourhood politics.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by the launch of a new book There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space, including articles by some of the best-known theorists of urban change such as Mike Davis and Brian Holmes as well as key writers about Redfern.

By the end of the first year of their archiving project Keg and Zanny had ironically found themselves pushed out of Redfern to cheaper suburbs. “It seemed like all of a sudden there were planter boxes and home wear shops along the main strip and everything was looking really nice, and we could no longer afford to live there,” recalls Keg.

But at the same time, they are quick to clarify, the gentrification process in Redfern is far from complete. “The community is very resilient, and that’s something that interests us ­– more than the nostalgia for what’s been lost. It’s very hard to erase the history of a space, and the proximity of Redfern to the city makes it hard to ignore.

“Redfern was the site of the first urban land rights claim in Australia and despite Frank Sartor’s best attempts the department of housing residents are still there. The pockets that evade homogenisation will stay interesting to us and because we will be tracking it for 10 years, we’ll get to see exactly what unfolds.”

There Goes The Neighbourhood will be opened by prominent Indigenous activist Gary Foley at Performance Space, CarriageWorks on May 22, and the program will continue until the end of June. To see the complete list of artists and the full program of talks, film screenings and events coinciding with the exhibition see theregoestheneighbourhood.org

Source: www.altmedia.net.au/there-goes-the-neighbourhood/6023