KINGS › Live From the Field, Part 2

Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein and Sarah Rudledge

In Correspondence

Sarah Rudledge, Folding and Unfolding, 2020

Monday, 31 August 2020

Hello A.,

Good to talk to you yesterday.
I have a small gift for you.
You mentioned that our 5km radius (radii?) might be within reach of one another.
Do you think it would be possible to give you this gift in person if we met at a crossover point?

p.s. perhaps our correspondence could form part of the text? I think you suggested this which I like.

Monday, 31 August 2020

Hi S.,

Thank you! That sounds great—a gift exchange on a crossover, on the intersecting area of two circles.

The other day a very dear friend brought me some flowers while we were meeting in the park. A passer-by saw us talking about the bouquet. This passer-by approached and shared with us that since stage 4, they could not find flower shops anymore.

This is so exciting looking forward to the textual correspondence unfolding!

Warmest,

Wednesday, 2 September 2020 10:21 AM

Sarah Rudledge, *Keeping* *company,* 2020.

Hi A.,

I’m so glad we will be able to meet in person.

Last night I dreamt of flowers and reaching into people’s gardens. My hands were crossing that border between the footpath and the front yard—a moment of delight plagued by a little guilt.

I carry the flowers around the house in small bottles, relocating them to where I’m spending my time to keep me company.

How was your day yesterday?
I will send you my address so that we can plan our respective journeys.
Are you free this Sunday?

Warmest,

Wednesday, 2 September 2020 at 6:35 PM

Hi S.,

Great to see you on zoom earlier today with your rose-patterned shirt. ?

What a beautiful dream, thank you for sharing! Your hands almost become like tendrils climbing around a fence or a barrier. How intelligent are climbing plants being duplicitous with boundaries: moving around them with care and how willingly patient they can be trying to mould their body neither to change, nor to dominate but to transform and be transformed, and to transgress in subtle ways, hovering around and within a boundary.

The still life image you sent makes me think of transparency vs. translucency as distinct conditions for light crossing.

Yesterday I had a busy day. I went for a walk. I have been enjoying running behind Meera while she is biking around the gardens nearby. We are stuck with the same path, but she makes the most out of it, and she often greets the different plants. They wait for her every day.

How is your community garden by the way?

Yes, let’s meet on Sunday should we say in the late morning?

See you soon

Thursday, 3 September 2020 9:34 PM

Hi A.,

How was your day today? What did you do?

So lovely to read your email this evening. I imagine I will find plants weaving their way into my dreams again, crossing over as they do.

I liked hearing of your daughter Meera meeting the plants each day on her bike, refreshed and ready to repeat her venturing with new discoveries. This feels like hope to me.

The community garden has become a perplexing place at the moment. It is full of new rules and checks for the gardeners. As you know, I work there, which means I am now in the uncomfortable position of making sure people ‘do the right thing’ during their visit. While it’s a confusing time, there’s not much room for confusion; the rules need to be clear and consistent. I carry my work papers with me; I sanitise everything, I add new padlocks to old ones ‘just until this is all over’, I get anxious about all the surfaces. The plants themselves though? Oh, they’re fine – as you say – they’ve no care for boundaries, if anything they’re wilder, they make their way in their own time.

Interestingly the gardeners are visiting whenever they can too, no stopping them, and we’re all grinning from getting down in the dirt. Thank you for asking me about the garden. I have lost my job there due to COVID but this won’t take effect for a few months.

Yes, let’s meet late Sunday morning. I’m looking forward to it.

Talk soon,

Sunday, 6 September 2020 at 9:55 AM

Hi S.,

Sorry, it took me a while to reply. Somehow, I got caught up with different things.

I am sorry to hear about the situation at the community garden and your job. It is heartbreaking.
We have all turned into militants against the virus. It is fascinating that the plants have become wilder and freer while we are cocooning in isolation.

My days have been similar in the chaotic intermingling of roles and activities, a bit of art, a bit of mothering, a bit of teaching, a bit of companionship.
It is almost impossible to save spools from tangling.

I am looking forward to our meeting today. I will stroll and let the knots measure the distance intensity.

See you soon,

Azza Zein, in Correspondence, 2020

Monday, 7 September 2020 4:14 PM

Hello A.,

How wonderful to see you yesterday. Really wonderful. It was difficult not to be able to give you a hug, though! Such well-learned restraint on both our parts.

Thank you for my gift of the spool of red spun thread. And for the story of its making. I have it on my desk now; I wonder how it will unravel.

Let’s continue our letter writing and see where it takes us.

Talk soon,

Hi S.,

It was great to meet you in the gardens.
Thank you for the beautiful knitted square; it speaks of time and care.
Its blue reminds me of the sea.
I cannot believe that the ocean is not within my 5 Km.
I wish I could fold the ocean and shorten the distance with my family.

To meet you, I walked the whole way knotting to mark the intense distance.

It was inspiring to enact the same ritual you did on the island in Japan. It is as though to deal with isolation; one has the urgency to live what others live, a way to have a communal living without a social life.

Tuesday, 8 September 2020 12:56 PM

Hello A.,

Nice to talk to you today.

We share a love of the ocean. Have you seen the film a Metamorphosis of Birds? It’s a beautiful work of art by Catarina Vasconcelos. This is the last time I saw the sea. It’s a very moving film that I think you would like.

Talk soon,
S.

Sarah Rudledge, The front gate: Crossing Over, 2020

Sarah Rudledge is a visual artist living and working in Narm/Melbourne. Her research explores daily rituals, tactics and actions for artistically reimagining lived experience. Using a variety of distributed, site orientated and lens-based methods, she speculates upon ways that daily routines can be utilised as forms of restoration, resistance and care.

Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable
Open every other day
Void sounds loud
In locked solitude
Dependent on timely modes

My daughter asks me ‘what is the difference between temporarily closed and currently unavailable?’ ‘Probably the same’, I say. We play with reading ‘tempo – rarily closed. It is a rare situation, with a quick tempo. We are rarely closed.’ She giggles. We have the whole day and time together to juggle words and play. We have many days to juggle words and play. We scrabble with food, with papers, with toys, with Lego and with bags. Then we come back, and the screenshot is currently unavailable. She again utters ‘Why the different words?’. I reply ‘maybe a shop is temporarily closed, but service is currently unavailable.’ She remarks impatiently ‘a service needs space.’

Currently unavailable is a word from the future, she murmurs to me a few minutes before she sleeps. ‘Yes we are in the future, everything is currently available.’ She tells me before our pillow fight. She asks for a glass of milk and forgets to drink it, then sleeps in search of the difference.

In my dream, I become a theoretical oracle. All art is on time. We can only speak of the currently unavailable condition of the economy and the currently available state of the art. I browse Instagram–non-stop–everyone is available. With a loud voice, I scream: the etymology of the verb avail comes from the French valoir, referring to be worth. So the unavailable is unworthy, and uncurrent. Between the unavailable services and the assumed available presence in the online world, the rapid swings get attention.

From click to click
Streaming floods.
Door to door
The landing page is the dancing floor.

As my dream turns from a recollection experience to a nightmarish fantasy, I am behind a mask trying to deliver a boring speech. I cannot hear my voice. An echo asks me to coin a word, a condition for my voice to be hearable.

Curremporary art: art in times of a pandemic that is both current and cures. Current is used here in the sense of live streaming. The work shall not be revisited. It is left as is. It is authentic in its timeliness, fake spectacle in its audience. It is available at all times. It can shift its frame depending on its audience. The curremporary takes its authenticity—not validation—from the number of clicks. The curremporary does not need a thesis: its meaning disappears at the very instance of any interpreting attempt. The curremporary practitioner is enduringly ready, current-ly available and starts from the hypothesis that it is not ‘a present that was always, already there’ and that it cannot ‘be prolonged into the indefinite future’.[1]

Spilt milk stains and sunk costs are everywhere. That should not matter for rational decision making. All you need is a warm glass of milk to calm your anxiety. A good image for the Insta selfie.

[1] Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time ,” e-flux Journal #11, December 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/.

Live Updates From Lock Down: Dispatch For Beirut

Facilitated by Azza Zein with contributions from Joanne Choueiri, Lina Koleilat, Lara Chamas, Sherine Al Shallah and Lujayn Hourani

Azza Zein

Two thousand seven hundred fifty tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate exploded two point four Kilometres away from my parents’ home, in the port of Beirut. How do I reflect on any catastrophe without wishing to undo an event, unfriend those moments that could have been avoided? My parents are safe; I rush to answer the flood of kind messages I receive. The distance doesn’t help. My body still shivers at the terrifying images. Disorientation follows. Even here in an Australia that is often isolated from a detailed coverage of the Middle East, the catastrophe of Beirut draws attention in the news to stockpiles of Ammonium Nitrate used for mining within Australia[1], within unceded Indigenous lands.

At the blurry site of the future of my friends and my family, on the grounds in Beirut I sigh and lose words. At my internal mimicking of the protesters’ screams ‘Everyone means everyone’, and the disgusting scale of corruption, I stand immobile at the negligence manifested in the shattered glass.

A seemingly trivial question persists in my mind, what does it mean to live in this contemporary economic world where we condition our lives around hazard regulations and extractive practices with industrialisation. In the mapping of traded goods[2], Ammonium Nitrate (above ten kg) is classified under non-organic fertilisers, not explosives?!!

While it would be a superficial euphemism to call the event in Beirut an industrial accident — as it is a result of a failed state, a ‘ crisis layered upon multiple crises’[3], such catastrophe reminds us that industrialisation is a violent process where the same material is used for blasting, as explosives and as non-organic fertilisers.

I have invited my compatriot artists and writers — those for whom Beirut has inspired and continues to do so — to share their pressing feelings, from isolation. Their diverse responses speak of dislocated bodies and the challenges of distant belonging. We are thankful to KINGS Artist-Run for giving us this spontaneous platform.

Addressed to our friends who have been protesting for a very long time and to our families who have been resisting by remaining there, this is an URGENT and FRAGILE DISPATCH for Beirut.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-06/ammonium-nitrate-stockpiles-in-sa-low-risk-safework-sa-says/12529594
[2] https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=undefined&product=6389&year=2018&tradeDirection=import&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02361-x

Azza Zein is an installation artist and writer from Beirut. She lives and works in Narrm/Melbourne. Her research explores how artworks can comment on the dematerialisation of the economy and invisibility of labour.

Joanne Choueiri

Joanne Choueiri, Dear Pap (Dad), 2020

9-August-2020

Dear Pap (Dad),

When I think of how we are living, surviving, I am glad you are no longer here.

I am not sure if this explosion would have given you another cardiac arrest, and you would have died right then and there. I was not there. I was here in Brisbane.

It was an explosion on the port, but everyone in Lebanon felt it. Mom, Christy, Hilda, and Teta are physically fine. Halloune and Yonna as well. Maya, Nada, and Fadi’s houses were damaged. Nabil’s parent’s house was severely damaged. Even our neighbours the Melhems’ glass was shattered!! Can you believe it?

Do you remember how many times you went to the port, Pap? Do you remember how many times you warned me to stop partying and come back home right away from Gemayze? Do you remember how many times you told me not to go out after 10 pm? This happened at 6pm. No one could have seen it coming, not even you! (well except the assholes in their chairs).

When I remember the events of the 4^th of August, I find parallels with your death. Awoken on the 5th of August at 5:30 am by 120 messages on my phone, the only thought that crossed my mind was: who died this time? Mind you, this was three hours after the explosion occurred due to learning to put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ mode, something I learned after you died. I am now wondering how long they waited before they called me to tell me that you died. I scrambled through my phone to try to make sense of what had happened to understand the full gravity of the situation. I didn’t the first time. I thought it was a mini targeted explosion like the ones we are used to. I guess that’s also part of being far away. Normalisation. Pap, it is all gone. All gone. More than 200 dead, 6000 injured, 300,000 displaced, and still some victims have not been found yet. Philippe Ariès said ‘only the dying man can tell how much time [they have] left.’[1]This time, I don’t think they knew.

Do you know that when you passed away, there was and still is an unbearable void. A cold emptiness. One that only grievers can understand.

Sometimes I try to describe it to my friends (remember Sontra?), or picture it:

It’s a hole. A physical hole in my heart. It runs so deep; it hurts so much that I need to grab my heart to make sure I am not dying. Pap, I am scared to say that this is worse. It feels like 2750 fathers died at the same time. It feels like you died 2750 times.

11-August-2020

Dear Pap,

I’ve had a recurrent dream ever since you died: you did not die you actually abandoned the family. Is this what’s happened here? Did the city abandon us? Or did we abandon it? Who died? the city or its people? Either, or, how do we live now? Or was it always about surviving? How do you survive with this hole?

[1] Quoted in Joan Didion, The Magical Year of Thinking, (New York:Vintage International,2007), p.25. Originally, Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (London: Allen Lane, 1983). [Adapted]

Joanne Choueiri (1986) is an architect, artist, and researcher from Beirut, Lebanon. Her work combines architecture with art, and fiction. By demonstrating her curiosity for the interstitial space between the different disciplines, Choueiri realizes much of her practice. Her interest in memory, space, politics, and the archive has motivated her various works.
https://joannechoueiri.cargo.site/

Lina Koleilat

Shattering

Bombs shatter. Bombs have regular violent appearances in the lives of some of us, and they shatter us. Bombs shatter. Those who experience the bomb; those who survive it and those who don’t, shatter. We collect and carry the shattering of the bodies of those who die in bombs: we bury them, their bodies shattered. Bombs shatter. For those who survive the bomb, you see the bomb, you feel it, you hear it, it shakes you, it shatters you, but you survive it, you carry the shatter. Bombs shatter. You feel lucky that you survived. You feel like you should be thankful that the bomb did not shatter your body, and you spend the rest of your life collecting your shattered self in pieces. Bombs shatter. For days, months and years, you regularly see the bomb in your dreams in your thoughts, in every brain process, you feel it, you hear it, it shakes you and shatters you. Then another bomb explodes, you experience it differently, this time you were at a café, at a friend’s, at home, at work, having lunch, dinner, a coffee. You feel it, you hear it, it shakes you, it shatters you, but you survive it and, you carry the shatter. Bombs shatter. 4^th of August 2020, that was not a bomb, just an explosion, you feel it, you hear it, it shakes you, it shatters you, but you survive it, you carry the shatter.

Live work eat struggle breath bomb live work eat sick study bomb live struggle travel eat drink bomb migrate work eat read bomb run hide cry live eat bomb love live read cry run bomb eat dream love cry bomb read sleep write sick eat bomb dream cry breath travel drink bomb study read write eat drink bomb travel meet sick eat write bomb bleed live eat travel drink bomb.

Lina Koleilat is a writer, editor, and an ethnographer from Beirut working and living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.

Lara Chamas

Born into chaos

This is Tommie. She’s been a mother four or five times. My aunties and uncle named her. She isn’t allowed in the house, or too close, but she hangs around. She lives nearby. They notice every time she gives birth. ‘She had four children this time,’ they told me, but I could only count three…
I named them. Samson, Zoe, and Noora. They were born into chaos, amongst the rubble and garbage, every passer-by a threat. They have only ever known thirst, heat, and hunger. I cleaned Tommie from the dust and blood that had dried onto her, her eyes infected, as best as I could. I bought for them cans of tuna daily; I poured for them water to drink. I wonder what they’re eating now, or if they’re eating at all. I wonder if Tommie has more kids two years on, are they all together? Have they been separated by circumstance? Are they still alive…?

I have been cooking traditional food Mama would make since the explosion happened. Being away from my parents is even more difficult now. My anchors to this world, my anchors to my homeland. What guilt I have for being here. What guilt I have, seeing the effects from afar, not feeling them like they did. What guilt I have, cooking and eating. Adas bi hamod. Makdoos. Selek. Faraket batata. Bamia…
I wonder what the people there are eating, what my family are eating now. Or if they’re eating at all. Are they all together? Were they separated by the explosion? Who will wipe the blood and dust off them, clean their eyes from the debris? Are they okay? Will they ever be okay? Are they still alive…?

Lara Chamas is a Lebanese, Australian artist, based in Birraranga (Melbourne). Her practice investigates postcolonial and migrant narratives within the context of her cultural identity. Through narrative and experience, storytelling, transgenerational memory and tacit knowledge; her research explores links between cultural practice, political/societal tensions, and the body as a political vessel.

Sherine Al Shallah

Sherine Al Shallah, Ritual of Resilience, 2020

Ritual of resilience

I call from Sydney my mother in Beirut. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh A little girl lost her home. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh A bullet pierced my home. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I could not see for two days. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I could not breathe for a week. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I saw my bullet pierced home for thirty years. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I breathed the soot for thirty years. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I never felt at home again. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I sleep with the light on. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I see my bullet pierced home in the pictures of Beirut. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I breathe the soot in the pictures. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh Beirut will rise like the bird of the phoenix. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh I repeat the words for the performance of the ritual of resilience. Lhamdilla, kilna mneh

The bird of the phoenix is a myth. I forget the steps for the ritual. I try to remember the word for ‘resilience’ in my mother tongue. I cannot. We expected resilience, we did not express it. I left my mother home. Is leaving resilience? Is isolation resilience? We immersed our pain and our grief in resilience. I see my bullet pierced home and I breathe the soot and I can no longer keep my pain and my grief from coming back up. My pain and my grief rise like the bird of the phoenix. Is pain resilient? Is pain more resilient than resilience? Is grief resilient? Is grief more resilient than resilience? Is the bird of the phoenix a myth? How long is the ceremony?

Sherine Al Shallah is an economist and law student with a deep interest in human and language rights. Sherine volunteers with the Asylum Seeker Centre, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Story Factory, and studies at UNSW. Sherine lives on unceded lands of the Tharawal people and has never left Beirut.

Hasib Hourani

This is a piece about yearning for home. I am a settler in this colony. The displacement of Indigenous communities is ongoing and we as migrants cannot talk about missing home without acknowledging that we were not welcomed into this one. I work, learn, and create on stolen Wurundjeri land. Sovereignty was never ceded, a treaty was never signed.

***

I don’t want to be here. For months I have been homesick for sounds, smells, places, and people. Homesick for Beirut. Homesick for things I can’t mention without sounding like the kind of writer I hate. Locking down has weighed the constructed against the birth-given and every sunset I sit and sigh, and ache for the latter. I am staying home in the life I built, not the one I inherited.

To pair a lockdown in the place I am, with a catastrophe in the place I want to be turns my bedroom into a box. If I can’t be home then I won’t be anywhere at all.

Last year I saw my Father’s Palestine for the first time and afterwards, I decided I could not go anywhere ever again. I lived 2019 within 200km of my house. You see the irony of where this is going. Of pitting a chosen stillness up against an enforced one. I don’t want to be here. I recite these words with the sunrise and the sunset like prayer: I don’t want to be here.

When I was nine I stayed home from school, vomiting into the sink because I couldn’t make it that extra meter to the toilet. My younger cousin lived across the road, he took the day off too. Jad was fine, he just wanted to watch TV with me. I puked up my cereal and Jad offered to do the same so that I wouldn’t feel bad about it. Perhaps the past fifteen years have dirtied my memory, I don’t know. I don’t know why a six-year-old boy would make himself vomit if there was nothing to gain from it.

The hardest thing about not doing well is when you’re required to do it alone. I want to be with family, I want to be with friends, I want to be with community. I want to rally and rebuild and stay home with a country that is sick.

Hasib is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, editor, and arts worker from Ras Beirut, now based in Naarm. Their work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Going Down Swinging, and Voiceworks, among others.

Thank you for taking the time to read these pieces. If you have the means, please consider donating to one of these organisations:

KAFA (meaning ‘enough’ in Arabic) is a frontline women’s rights organisation in Lebanon. They have undertaken an emergency response providing food, shelter and monetary relief for women and children impacted by the blast. https://connect.clickandpledge.com/w/Form/43db57fd-c04c-4b96-bef5-883c75b771c5

Nael Ogden Smith has set up a fund to provide full recovery programs for paraplegic victims of the blast. This fund will help disabled victims to access urgent medical rehabilitation and/or mobility equipment such as wheelchairs, prosthetics and others. https://www.gofundme.com/f/beirut-0408-long-term-injury-donations?utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link

Helem is a Beirut-based LGBTIQ organisation. Funds raised be used for the support of the LGBTIQ community, the center’s relief efforts, and any other urgent needs on the ground. https://outrightinternational.org/content/fundraiser-helem-beirut-based-lgbtiq-organization?fbclid=IwAR2-wyVsrHKY_WnGNxpYFLz0C98JcuC8yK19dIAbyVM5afGcvieR51Ygfrk

Beit el Baraka is a non-profit organization based in Beirut. They are providing medical, housing a food support for victims of the explosion. https://beitelbaraka.net/donation/pay/

ARM (Anti-Racism Movement) are currently responding to the immediate needs of migrant workers, refugees, and marginalized groups affected by the August 4th explosion in Beirut, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ever-worsening economic situation. https://www.givingloop.org/mcc/#impact

Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein

Inside the water tub…………..mass casualisation

The wood poles stood still in the salty water, separated by equal distances. They neither drowned nor did they float. Together they formed the ruins of a foundation, an old pier. They had no roots and were stranded in uncertain states. They could not unite. They seemed hanging with part of their bodies stuck in water; the other part dried up by the sun. They were probably aware of each other and yet helpless. What kind of collectivity are they a part of? In an attempt to speculate on their future, the poles knew they would stand in the sea forever.[1]

Many entrapped in casual positions
incapable of change
forced to absorb all fluid states
adaptable and resilient?
Yet stripped of all choices
Petty changes save budgets
Labelling matters.[2]
Are you teaching or consulting?
The manager asks.
A contact hour or its opportunity cost
its product or its intended benefit
The education sector is under managerial occupation
Mass casualisation
Mass incarceration
inside the cell of the volatile mind
The reforms are corporate
at the casualised university [3]

The etymology of the word precarious refers to being ‘dependent on the will of another’. [4]

The dependent can stay dependent
In uncertain times, they should carry the burden
So is the pronounced message
of the cost-effective response
The empathetic decision-maker
Nothing to worry
Take care of the students
Even if you cannot take care of your casual selves [5]
Collective action cannot exist in virtual rooms.
Collective action cannot exist underwater,
when individualistic survival seems at stake.
They neither drowned nor did they float.
Fungi grew on those wooden poles.

She was standing and taking pictures, a few days before the ‘state of disaster’ was announced. The casualisation of the education sector is a disaster.

‘Thirty years of the precarisation of labour and competition have jeopardised the very fabric of social solidarity, and workers’ psychic ability to share time, goods, and breath made fragile. The virtualisation of social communication has eroded the empathy between human bodies.’ [6]\

In response to the crisis, the graph in celebration shows no drop in the headcount.

The institutional diagram doesn’t need to show—it seems— the reduced wage bill.

They spoke of casualisation, labour market fluidity, immigrants’ mobility and refugees’ resettlement.

While looking at the poles in the sea, she recollected a memory. As a child playing on the floor, she and her sister noticed something odd on one of the legs of a sofa. Even the legs were to be regularly cleaned. While the city and public spaces were dumped with waste and rubbish, their mother made sure that the highest hygiene standards were maintained at home. They had to pay attention to all details and eradicate dust. Strangely that day, the sun hit the ground on a curfew afternoon, they noticed the shadow of a mushroom protruding from a still wooden leg. In this Beiruti apartment, that was unexpected. The fungus sprouted on the highly humid surface. To their amusement, they didn’t want it to be removed. They wished the whole apartment could transform into mushroom land.

It was fungi and wild mushroom season in Melbourne, around lockdown. The field was covered. They spread each separately. She dreamt of fungal forms of collectivities, what else would she propose for a wooden state? For isolated entities stuck in wavy conditions? For the impossibility of a digital strike?

‘The human input is contracted into the thinness of a click. With each click, we are hard at “work,” even in leisure, for the production of capitalist surplus-value, all the while absorbed in our real-life process and its intensifying relational reticulation through ever-densifying social media.’ [7]

In this digital condition with no clear line between work and leisure, with mass casualisation, how will we count the flows? In this economy of clicks, is the bathtub model relevant? [8]

The precariat mind is planning for all the non-available structures. [9] Despite the isolation, it will generate and disrupt.

I will clean my legs
I will clean the pillars
We will cleanse and disrupt
in hopes of fungal metaphors
Here live from the field
We will grow fungal words

There will be casual processions
to revalue those who have been deemed useless
in monetary terms
useful for an entire educational system
yet forced to work underwater.

[1] On Princes pier’s history in Melbourne https://heritage.portphillip.vic.gov.au/People_places/Significant_places_in_Port_Phillip/Princes_Pier While the pier’s structure felt like an appropriate metaphor of casual work, I subsequently found out that in 1928 it was the site of a workers’ strike and the shooting of Allan Whittaker a protester, a worker and former veteran. Silvester John; Rule, Andrew. “Truth Was First Casualty of 1928 War on the Waterfront.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November, 2010. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/truth-was-first-casualty-of-1928-war-on-the-waterfront-20101105-17hib.html.
[2] See recent cases, including labelling of tutorials as practice classes. Conor Duffy, “University of Melbourne to Repay Millions to Staff after Decade-Long Underpayment Practices – ABC News,” 5 August 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/university-of-melbourne-exposed-in-decade-long-wage-theft-case/12519588.
[3] ‘Some of Australia’s most prestigious and cashed-up universities are being accused of hypocrisy, as data reveals almost 70 per cent of staff are employed insecurely while “thousands” have been laid off as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.’
Conor Duffy, ‘Cashed-up University Sector Accused of Hypocrisy over Mass Casualisation of Workforce, Job Losses’, ABC News, 17 July, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-17/university-casual-workforce-redundancies-dirty-secret/12462030.
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/precarious
[5] See Lachlan Clohesy’s article on the history of casualisation and the ‘contradiction between the priorities for students and the effect of casualisation’ as well as the overall insecurity and exploitation under mass casualisation in Australia. Lachlan Clohesy, “Resisting the Casualised University ,” Demos Journal, 31 January, 2020, http://demosjournal.com/resisting-the-casualised-university/.
[6] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising on Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e), The MIT Press, 2012), p.54 www.semiotexte.com.
[7] Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto, Kindle edition (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), loc.430.
[8] The bathtub model of unemployment models the changes of the unemployment rate as dependent on the rate of seeking jobs for those who lost theirjobs (water inflows into a bathtub) and the rate of finding jobs (water drains out of bathtub). A quick summary is available in this link. Şahin Ayşegül; Christina, Patterson, “The Bathtub Model of Unemployment: The Importance of Labor Market Flow Dynamics -Liberty Street Economics,” 28 March 2012, https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/03/the-bathtub-model-of-unemployment-the-importance-of-labor-market-flow-dynamics.html.
[9] Guy Standing, What Is the Precariat, TEDxPrague – YouTube, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs;
Guy Standing, “Meet the Precariat, the New Global Class Fuelling the Rise of Populism,” World Economic Forum, 9 November 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/.

Lock Dispersal in Corner Solutions

A sea of hairballs, in her nightmare, invade her body and the ground. ‘Abject domesticity’?[1] The dream doesn’t last long. She needs to wake up for an overseas Zoom meeting. Her hair is messy. Perhaps the ideas in here are as wavy as the lines of hair I am part of.

Some make sense; some knot.

They are volatile and unpredictable. My body extends her body. Am I the extension? I protrude out of her body as an excess. Yes, indeed I am not a defined object. I move and make my carriers’ life difficult with my frizzy attitude. My curves can forcefully be flattened. Ideally, I prefer to knot. In my current indeterminate status—as a spool of hair—no one will use me to wipe tears and to repent.[2]

I exist as knots of lines. Hair is not an example in the book Life of Lines?

‘(…)in a world of life—knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence.’[3]

In my dark brown colour, and dense environment, it is not possible for me individually to assimilate into a straight line. With this state, I refuse to conform. How many times have I been misunderstood, and eventually plucked, eradicated, and shaved? I understand there are meanings for these rituals. Sometimes of punishment, sometimes to (re-)enter social spheres. I do have cycles of growth and haircuts help. In this obsession of standardising me, I often rebel and curve my edges, my endings, lock myself onto another in proximity. I have no other choice except a corner solution.[4]

I come here today, live from the field, to draw your attention: I have been isolated multiple times way before lockdown. How many of us (dark hair) were asked to stand in lines in airports waiting to be screened? How many recoloured to fit a fashionable trend? How strange is it that the harder lockdown fell upon the residents of public housing in Victoria? Doesn’t the system employ parallels among malign viruses, dark hair colours and social skins? Density and texture in hair-language seem to matter.

Crowd immunity
Isolation
Connectivity
Nodes of relations
Disappeared ecologies
Racist hypocrisies

Lockdown or anathema to interlocking conditions? How come in the moment we see the impact of our behaviour on the collective, we mark the moment of retreat? On behalf of hair, I follow clustering strategies—a form of crowd immunity from profiling—through group protesting in unwelcome corners. I know I have been growing horizontally, creeping around? Is that a sign of good domesticity?

Keep Keep Keep[5]
Preserve my anger
Let me stay locked in
Tangled into other worlds
Flowing out of bodies
In-between skin pores
In this restricted impermanence
I am too comfortable inside these coils
Free me from the solace of isolation
The warm edges of corners
The contingency of meetings

Why should I keep the rotten pre-pandemic order? Patriarchy? Or perhaps can I protect her body from unwelcome confrontations? Should I be buried as organic matter? Don’t I carry all her sins, everything she has touched and all forbidden acts? I am not here to speak of restrictions and permissions. Is that depassé? Let me be covered or uncovered. I speak of material identity markers in the inceptions of my cycle. Once I am on the ground, before I am skipped, I speak of invisible labour, domestic chores and hierarchies of economic distributions. With or without a haircut, I move on, I occupy the edges, in some form of autonomous zones. There I make dust visible. I hold it and roll it around the distended skirting.

Am I her most visible asset, valued in my unwanted growth? In the logic of markets, hair is a tradeable good. Haircuts are non-tradeables.[6] There are militant and non-militant haircuts apparently! Some styles are rebellious and others “enchant the world”.[7] Now that she knows how to cut her daughter’s hair, can she be a hairdresser, an auctioneer and a book dealer? The old news predicted a landscape of precarious labour conditions in the gig-economy.[8] The underground hair trade delineates a history of exploitation, slavery and human rights violation.

‘Working-class women’s hair is used to bedeck the head of those who are more privileged. It’s been going on for hundreds of years.’[9]

Protesters demand ‘haircuts for the rich’.[10]

In her Zoom meeting she is going with a casual hairstyle. In the corner of rooms, I cluster with dust. A form of sedentism in this small apartment. In isolation she imagines she has become expert in disease control.

‘As devastating new illnesses left humans not knowing what hit them, folk theories and remedies proliferated. Only one nostrum–“dispersal”–identified crowding as the basic cause.’[11]

Hair dispersal
Crowd dispersal
Protest dispersal
Seed dispersal

She is told she has iron deficiency. The GP explained that ‘as a feminist generation, we might be the generation of the highest iron-deficient due to fewer pregnancies and increased menstruation.’

As this takes root in her head,
I fall.

I move from one room to the next bringing the ghosts of collapse.

Yet she wishes to hold onto me as if I was a magical lock of fortunate luck.

[1] See the installation “Recollection” of Mona Hatoum where hair balls occupy the ground and hair is woven on a loom. Mona Hatoum, “Recollection,” Artworks,Collections, M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 1995, https://www.muhka.be/collections/artworks/r/item/3846-recollection.
[2] The hair of Mary Magdalene and her character is canonical in western culture to the dual symbol of Women’s hair as strength as well as a signal of domesticity. “Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.” In New International Version Luke:38, https://biblehub.com/niv/luke/7.htm
James Caroll, “Who Was Mary Magdalene?,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2006, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-was-mary-magdalene-119565482/.
[3] Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London, New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), p15.
[4] In economics, for an optimisation problem, there could be two types of solutions: 1. interior and 2. corner solutions.
[5] See Heather Hanna’s discussion of the contemporary Irish artist Alice Maher’s work Keep available on the artist website http://alicemaher.com/works/keep
Heather Hanna, “Women Framing Hair : Serial Strategies in Contemporary Art,” Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2015, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=3563608.
[6] In standard trade theory, haircut is given as an example of a non-tradeable service.
[7] See news articles around the impact of the pandemic on the haircut industry. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/6/10/21285542/hair-cut-protest-lockdown-culture-war
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zrjnt39
[8] In Britain in the 18th century, multiple casual work was common. One example: “He rented a small shop, shaved customers’ heads, bought and sold hair, and crafted wigs. In the hours unfilled by this he worked as a book dealer, and eventually as an auctioneer, selling various items in alehouses within Manchester and in outlying towns.” See Tawny Paul, “The Gig Economy Is Nothing New – It Was Standard Practice in the 18th Century,” The Conversation, July 18, 2017, https://theconversation.com/the-gig-economy-is-nothing-new-it-was-standard-practice-in-the-18th-century-81057.
[9] Homa Khaleeli, “The Hair Trade’s Dirty Secret ,” Life and style, The Guardian, October 29, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/28/hair-extension-global-trade-secrets.
Also see a recent news in the Guardian hair trade coming from Uighur Labour camps in China.
“US Seizes Items Thought to Be Made from Hair of Muslims in Chinese Labor Camps “, The Guardian, July 2, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/china-muslim-labor-camps-uighur-hair-products.
[10] The Lebanese economic and political crisis generated a debate over possible deposits haircuts, i.e. the forceful reduction of the value of depositors’ deposits. Against such policies targeting the poor and the middle class deposits, Lebanese protesters played on this pun in November 2019. See the image in this link “Lebanon Protesters Demand ‘Haircuts for the Rich”, Mena – Gulf News,accessed July 16, 2020, https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/lebanon-protesters-demand-haircuts-for-the-rich-1.68136529 .
[11] James C. Scott, Against the Grain : A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,Kindle edition 2017), p.105.

Live Updates From Lock Down: Aaron Claringbold

KINGS FINAL POST

I wanted to write a big post talking about (and linking) expansionism, land clearing and disease to wrap up these blog posts and collect my thinking around this virus. I kinda gave it a bit of a go, but to be honest it got too hard. There’s plenty of information out there and I have accessed and consumed a fair bit of it, but processing it on the page is a different task altogether. I’m not trained as a writer and that feels pretty obvious as I struggle to organise and sequence thoughts into paragraphs and points. There is a limit to how much stream of consciousness writing I can do while staying vaguely on track. I was going to talk about where Corona viruses come from and about Zoonotic diseases in general (disease caused by the transfer of viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi from other animals to humans). I was going talk about this as one of a three pronged threat to humanity—along with ecosystem collapse, and catastrophic climate change (and explain why I think they are quite distinct threats). I wanted to engage with modernity under capitalism and the constant extraction of ‘value’ from information, labour, and land—alongside the role of things like fractional banking and debt in this process of extraction—and how it necessitates expansion as we deplete particular finite resources, as it ‘needs’ to constantly grow… Or rather, how we have built a system around perpetual growth, which at its base just props up speculation, the finance industry, start up culture (and ask—are these necessities…??)….

I wanted to talk about how in the rush to condemn the naivety and eco-fascistic undertone of ‘nature is healing, we are the virus’ memes, the online commentariat seemingly derailed any kind of climate/environmental analysis of our current situation. I wanted to explore the situation in Australia, how our ‘COVID recovery’ task force—the NCCC—completely did away with any pretence of conflict of interest and is stacked with gas industry interests (including CEOs). I wanted to then highlight the national push for a gas-fired economic recovery… and to talk about the Victorian Labour governments use of misleading employment data and emissions figures to justify ending the state’s moratorium on onshore conventional gas, whilst granting further offshore gas development and drilling licenses.

I was going to talk about the renewal of Regional Forestry Agreements in Victoria under the cover of the COVID pandemic, locking in the harvesting of scant native forrest, primarily for woodchip to be Reflex paper. This is all happening in the aftermath of the unprecedented bushfire season which burnt through an estimated 18.6 million hectares. I wanted to talk about Bunnings corporate virtue signalling, and capitalising on sustained, ongoing protests from coalitions of Traditional Owners and protest groups against old growth and native timber harvesting across the south east, and specifically about how little Victorian native forest timber goes to hardwood. Clear felling forests here results in 60% ‘debris’ and 40% harvested wood. Of that 40% Harvested, only about 35% is suitable to be sawn into timber, of that 35% less than 40% goes into the kind of timber Bunnings purchases…. The real issue supply chain issue with Victorian forests is in paper and pallets. The other side of the problem is that Bunnings, and their contractors/suppliers, have limited options for acquiring appropriate wood, and are likely to rely much more heavily on Mirbeau from occupied West Papua. This is conflict timber with exploitation and violence weaved into it’s production line.

I managed to note all of this down, but then seriously ran out of steam. Overwhelmed by the ‘second wave’ of COVID-19 in Victoria, and the ongoing effects around the world (so many dead..) it’s becoming to hard to grapple with the amount of things going on. I wish I had it in me to talk about Rio Tinto and about Kimberly Granite Holdings, about the fight for accountability. About the postponing and cancelling of the democratic processes for fear of transmission, while the rest of the country works, left mostly unprotected by a lack of sufficient legislative framework for OHS in general, let alone under a pandemic, and further undermined by by an absence of any enforcement.

As such you get this rather lazy list. Feel free to use your own means to search these terms and learn more context if you have it in you.. right now I don’t. I’ve instead found a quite satisfying, yet unpaid production role in online made-to-order memes….

Thanks so much for having me KINGS!!! It was nice to vent, share, and process. 🙂

Surveillance / Governments

Who remembers the COVIDSAFE app?

There was a brief period when this smartphone application was being pushed as a kind of techno-utopian solution to the spread of a highly contagious virus, which causes a significant and novel respiratory disease and is so far without a vaccine. To phrase it like that points to the rather large leap of faith asked of the Australian population by the Federal Government when they publicised the app as their strongest weapon against COVID-19 during Australia’s early exposure to the virus. It also speaks to, and of, some of the central concerns of James Brindle’s book New Dark Age (also discussed by co-contributor to Live From the Field, Lia Dewey Morgan). In particular Brindle’s idea that ‘our existence is understandable through computation, and that more data is enough to help us build a better world’. This world view is what underpins Technological Solutionism—a term coined by Evgeny Morozov that describes the practice of viewing complex and intertwined social and political phenomena as ‘neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place’. Throughout the 1990s, Silicon Valley’s presence was becoming ubiquitous, and Technological Solutionism had found well suited host bodies in the various bureaucracies of both government and private institutions (and a particularly special place in the imagination of Defence budgets the world over). The same kid of thinking—or rather working—has endangered the world we live in today, and has played no small part in the election of Donald Trump and BREXIT (at least in name if not yet in nature).

So it is no surprise really, that the strongest ‘leadership’ we have received from our government in recent memory is the consistent and bipartisan message that ties a downloaded, fundamentally flawed and operationally inept application to real, physical safety from an unprecedented infectious disease. In a time when we face arguably the most urgent need for political leadership—in response to the dual existential threats of COVID-19 and impending climate crisis—we are campaigned by a series of moronic reductions from our elected members.

What this particular kind of ‘leadership’ trades-off of is a kind of technological obfuscation; the positing of incomprehensible complexity as innately good, and the use of this to justify decisions and behaviour that might otherwise be unacceptable to the public. In many ways this is the backbone of contemporary ‘democratic’ governance. You can see this kind of governing at play all around the world when you look at defence/military, and particularly when you look at counter terrorism policing and legislation. This is the same kind of thinking that lets international arms manufacturers expand their profits and power by selling body cameras to police departments as a ‘solution’ to police brutality, and tasers as ‘less lethal’ weapons. It is also the same kind of thinking that sees large scale surveillance normalised in the public sphere as well as private. The technology and data analysis developed and trialled on the Uyghur people by the Chinese government is being exported and utilised around the world. Chinese government applications of these civilian surveillance programs has become a significant factor in the recent and ongoing uprising in Hong Kong, and the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a veil of legitimate use to these technologies outside of internal conflict.

Similarly the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in the US saw the large scale deployment of Stingray/CCS (cell-site simulator) devices and Geofence warrants. CCS devices mimic mobile phone towers and are used by police to locate and log what unique devices are present/operating in a specific location. They also facilitate the interception and recording of the contents and metadata of communication on some networks, and can disrupt network coverage at a specific location. Geofence warrants are basically location history data requests made to companies like google, and network/service providers. Instead of justifying the use of a warrant on an individual through establishing probable cause, the reporting of a crime is used to justify a dragnet of data moving in and out of the area of the reported crime during a specific timeframe. This is assisted in Australia by the recent Meta Data Retention Laws requiring all network and service providers to store data for 2 years.

Both the US and the Chinese governments’ technology is in domestic use by policing agencies in Australia. The exporting of these systems of control works as a kind of imperialism, allowing countries to exert influence over other countries through the provision and implementation of complex systems and technology. This is why 5G actually is something of concern— not because it creates COVID-19 or because of inflated fears around exposure to electromagnetic radiation, but rather because as a soon to be ubiquitous CCP owned and made mobile network technology, it will be integral to social, political, and business operations here in Australia. It is for this same reason that the connections between surveillance, analysis, bio-tech, and artificial intelligence company iFlytech (run by Daniel Andrew’s former China adviser, Mike Yang), the Victorian Labour Party, and the Chinese government are so concerning. Having legitimatised state relations with not just the Chinese government, but the company that facilitates their ongoing cultural genocide and violent oppression of the Indigenous Uyghur population seems a big step in the the wrong direction.

It is against this backdrop that we have smart phone apps pitched, funded, built, and pushed as solutions for contagious diseases, and major universities partnering with defence and weapons manufacturers to develop drones to monitor public interactions for physical proximity and sneezes, and interpreting heart rates through skin tones. Perhaps this also gives some context as to why/how we have counter terrorism police mismanaging health operations across Metropolitan Melbourne.

Control / Police

Australia is a country of jailers and jailhouse snitches. Or more specifically White Australia is.

It is hard to imagine another country whose population is so comfortable with the power relations between jailer and jailed, good guy and bad guy, or cop and robber, as a part of their national psyche. In America they sure do love police, power, and guns—but it seems to stem from a place of almost paralysing fear, and of extreme competition—rather than the complacency which permeates White Australia’s relationship to policing and control. At the same time, we return over and over again to a shared mythology of the larrikan, the battler, the bush ranger, the squatter—the aesthetics or idea of resistance seems to suﬃce. More than suﬃce, it also seems to scaﬀold a narrative identity that presupposes the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty, and bypasses direct engagement with this uncomfortable interruption to the dream of Australia. It is the pseudo-cultural underpinning of a national identity that appears to view terra nullius, not as a contrite back-dated doctrine of British legitimacy of possession, but as an operational tactic for the future of Australia. At the very least it is all too often invoked as such.

I just re-read an ABC fact check article responding to Scott Morrison’s comments claiming there was no slavery at the establishment of the NSW Penal colony. If not for the very real reverberations and reviving of inter-generational trauma it could generate, this article might be funny. Essentially the article employs a semantic interpretation in order to limit the PM’s comments to refer to the very moment of the establishment of the NSW colony. It goes on to use the language and processes of bureaucracy to acknowledge the proximity and adjacency of the practices employed during the establishment of the colony to slavery, then to decisively distance them from those particular labour relations. The article also includes sympathetic coverage of Scott’s reframing of his assertion as referring only to ‘lawful slavery’, and ‘hides’ this gesture of complicity underneath the veneer of the rational, fact-based, and unbiased language and framing of the article.

To presuppose that people sent to NSW leading up to, during, and after the oﬃcial founding of the colony were not slaves is to wilfully ignore the meaning of the word slavery. It also divorces the way convict populations treated Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people from the ways they were treated by the State. By denying or removing parts of the history of their motivation, the ground is laid to deny and/or forget the behaviours they then engaged in. These were people who faced a lack of work, severe overcrowding, and no government support in England. They faced transportation to NSW and a sentence of years of hard labour as punishment for stealing bread, livestock, fruit, or other items of low value; cutting down a tree they didn’t own, and similar such acts in the pursuit of survival. These convicts endured a horrific master/slave or jailer/jailed dynamic throughout their sentence. If they survived the transport ships they worked 10 hours non stop a day, survived oﬀ meager rations, and faced a selection of painful and often deadly diseases. The fact that they were allowed to give evidence in court to support the claim of their jailers does nothing to absolve the situation of it’s true descriptor. Nor does the fact that there was, for some, an end date to this experience. Notably, emancipated convicts were heavily incentivised to stay on in the colony, and were moved up the ladder to a position where they would hire their own convict labour. This dynamic, and the replication of it year after year, is integral to anything considered an Australian identity or value. Importantly this dynamic, or power relation, mutated into new forms that began to represent the complexity of the society that was being established, and their relation with the societies they were trying to destroy. To be blunt the compulsion to repeat trauma and behavioural patters of control and domination is a very potent unconscious force. When combined with the real material gains available to those who targeted this behaviour to line up with the aims of their colonial overlords — most specifically embodied in the theft of land, labour, and later culture from First Nations people — it’s not all that surprising we ended up as we did.

Police statistics are a deep dark hole to go down, but yield some interesting evidence. Looking through recent Vic Pol data sheets, I couldn’t find an clear numerical break up of victim based policing information; but back in 2013 information was organised into a category called ‘crime against a person’. This category of crimes, where a person was the victim of a criminal act, accounted for just under 1/7th of all crime in Victoria. Just over 41 percent of those were Family Violence incidents.

What do the police do? It’s a good question and one to spend some time with. Part of me wants to leave you to seek your own answer, the other part wants to point out they primarily seem to fill out paper work to legitimise theft, in order for insurance to be claimed.

Despite my assumption that most if not all people reading this are familiar with the racialised nature of policing in Australia, it is paramount to note that control of Indigenous populations is spear headed by criminal justice policing that sees them as the most incarcerated group in the world (notably while living in their ancestral homelands of 80,000 plus years). In the south of the US the criminal justice system is literally the evolution of slave patrols—a similar lineage of control also exists in Australian policing. Here in Australia, much of our current regime of policing, including the ‘soft’ or ‘benevolent’ policing of Services Australia and DHHS (particularly Child Protection Services), is directly born of mission management strategies, and attempts by the state to instigate and maintain a radicalised hierarchy. This is something we share with the US. Though unfortunately overlooked in much contemporary public discourse surrounding police and prison abolition, and police killings, First Nations people across Turtle Island face a very similar relationship to the armed forces of the settler states who occupy their land as First Nations people do here; one of violent control and oppression.

The current acceptability of notions of Police and Prison Abolition within both mainstream media and social commentary is heartening. It also means I can tell you to google those terms and avoid having to try to explain them holistically myself. Importantly, both these terms mean exactly what they sound like they mean—the abolition of those institutions. So, imagining and working towards a world where police and prison don’t exist. But beyond the very real walls of prisons and very real weapons of oﬃcers of the law, the ideas of policing and punishment permeate almost all facets of our society. Settler-colonisation, colonisation, and white-supremacy are all social systems that rely on these urges — discipline and the desire for control — to produce and maintain subjugation and diﬀerence as organising principles.

‘Police carry the name, but don’t monopolize the practice. Rather, policing is structurally integral to all of our institutions, and is carried out both “benevolently” and violently.’

This is a quote from a really insightful and easy to follow article by Khadijah Kanji called The ‘benevolent’ policing of social work and mental health.

kill the cop that’s inside your head…

RESPITE

For those of us in Victoria, we are returning to a period of state enforced lockdown in response to the rapidly spreading ‘second-wave’ of COVID-19. A number of postcodes have already been put into lock down (given 4 reasons to leave the house).

The number of new infections each day makes clear the need for decisive action. As does the recent positive test of a returning traveler who picked up COVID-19 when passing through Melbourne and brought it back with them to the Northern Territory. This was the first new case in the NT since April 6. This person spent two weeks in quarantine in a CBD hotel, then a few days visiting family in a Melbourne suburb⁠—there has so far been no suggestion they didn’t follow health protocols. I live a little outside one of the locked down postcodes at the time of writing, but can quite easily see the lockdown spreading in the coming days or weeks. In reflecting on time spent inside and at home, I am trying to make myself look at and think about the positives a bit more.

Like many people I’ve spoken to, I experienced a pretty severe lack of motivation that eﬀected most parts of my life. It is a strange counterpoint, to have a large increase in free time and little desire to do much to fill it. That was my experience at least, having quite a few things cancelled and postponed, and work pretty much stopped. In my mind having the drive to do this project, and pursue a few other things that have come up, is very much tied to housing security, financial security for the duration of the Job Keeper payments, along with the support of family and friends
⁠—with the financial safety net implicit in those networks (in my situation).

During the times when I was feeling most restricted from living life the way I was used to⁠—particularly in terms of reduced access to friends and family ⁠—I found a lot of comfort in small scale creative production. I was consuming news and entertainment media at a close to sickening level, and despite wanting to curtail the extent of this engagement, I didn’t want to completely cut oﬀ. I think I realised I was missing making things, and perhaps feeling a lot of frustration at the lack of control I experienced regarding interruptions to outcomes on larger scale creative projects. I had lots and lots coming in and basically nothing going out. During one of many nights spent at home with my partner Rebecca, we starting playing exquisite corpse. For those who might not be familiar with it, this is a drawing game played with 3 people (ideally, but you can adapt). You simply fold a piece of paper into three sections, with the idea being you draw the bottom, middle, or top of a figure, fold the paper over, and pass it on⁠—each person draws one segment without seeing any of the others, then you unfold it together and hopefully laugh and marvel at your strange collective creation. It’s simple but it works. Additionally you usually put some kind of agreed upon mark that intrudes into the next section – say, two lines for a neck or waist, or maybe four lines for legs. Doing so gives you a set of basic rules to follow or break. Acting creatively within these simple and clearly defined parameters provided such great entertainment and creative autonomy in a time of restricted movement. More than that though, it brought joy, silliness, and brevity.

Perhaps the most disturbing and interesting thing about this selection of these two person Exquisite Corpses by myself and Rebecca McCauley, is the striking consistency of aligned or complimentary thinking⁠—what a weird world we live in eh.

The joy of simple and humble drawing/sketching was quite infectious. Rebecca and I had, at a similar time, just began planning for a series of science classes we were going to run for a friends child over Zoom. We are not scientists, or teachers⁠—but this was while the schools were closed, and parents are not necessarily school teachers either, so why not? We decided to focus on life in the ocean, and to look at creatures living close to where our new student lives, and in another part of the world with a very diﬀerent climate. As well as a chance to brush up on our marine biology skills, these classes were an opportunity to structure, plan, and realise a creative project with an outcome. Our student had a great time over the 4 classes we ran over a few weeks and we had a really great time. Highlights include drawing some of the favourite animals for each class. The last two images are screen grabs of a seal drawn and ‘animated’ through zoom by our student. 🙂

***
I wrote this post on Thursday last week. I was away from reception over the weekend and have come back to the news that residence of nine public housing tower blocks in North Melbourne and Flemington have been put into what has been termed ‘hard lockdown’ by the Victoria state government. This was done with no consultation and almost no warning and is being enforced by Victoria Police and lead by counter terrorism commander Mick Hermans. The law of the instrument⁠—as in if you have a hammer, everything is a nail⁠—comes to mind as a best case interpretation of the situation. Police are not an eﬀect health response, particularly to people who are already over policed. About 7 years ago a case against Victoria police was settled out of court – the case was a civil case alleging racial profiling by Victoria police against 6 young African- Australian men who experienced racial discrimination by VICPOL in Flemington and North Melbourne between 2005 – 2009. Four individual police oﬃcers, the police commissioner of the time, and the state of Victoria were to be help legally accountable had the case moved forward. The six men, fronted by claimant Daniel Haile-Michael, represented pro-bono by Arnold Bloch Leibler, and supported by the Flemington Kensington Legal Centre, opted to settle out of court on terms that included the first ever inquiry into racial bias in VICPOL and ongoing cross-cultural training. An analysis of data from VICPOL’s LEAP (Law Enforcement Assistance Program) database by Melbourne University professor Ian Gordan, found that African Men around Flemington and North Melbourne were approximately 2.5 times more likely to have their interaction recorded by police than the rest of the population; of those on the LEAP database, African men from that area committed significantly fewer crimes than men of any other ethnicity; and when dealing with African men, police were more likely to use terms like ‘gang’, ‘no reason’ and ‘move on’. Since then the relationship between the State and African-Australian men has continued to be put into the spotlight, with Vic Pol participating in the negative politicisation of Black populations in Melbourne⁠—thinking most specifically about the ‘African Gangs’ fantasy pushed by media and politicians. There are currently hundreds and hundreds of police at these 9 towers, stopping people from leaving (even to get medicine or belongings from their cars), stopping mutual aid donations coming in, and even stopping language specific public health information form Greens politicians getting in. The last time there were this number of police at these housing blocks was a ‘riot’ of sorts that was initiated by Vic Pol in the aftermath of a protest against right wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous. The ‘talks’ that Milo held were essentially live shock jock radio spots in which he berated feminism, political correctness, and Islam⁠—a religion shared by many residents of the flats across from his event. The end result of this event was Vic Pol spending hours that evening chasing mostly residents around the base of their tower blocks, and maintaining a highly militarised, violent, and hyperactive presence at that location.

There is currently a change to how public housing waiting lists are managed and how people apply to get public housing⁠—one result of this is there are no complete reports available on demand and waiting list sizes. As of April 2019 there were 84,000 people on the housing waiting lists, with public housing making up just 4 percent of total housing stock in the state of Victoria. It is very safe to assume that number is a lot higher now⁠—at that time there were about 500 new requests a month. Part of Daniel Andrews election campaign was a promise to build 1000 new public housing units⁠—a dodgy slight of hand that actually involves the demolishing of 2500 units and their replacement by private developments with limited social housing under its Public Housing Renewal Programme. This plan involves demolishing 11 public housing estates around inner Melbourne, and despite opposition from community and small political organisations, its has been underway for some time now. In Carlton we have recently seen the knocking down of public housing and rebuilding of public-private developments, which see a net loss of public housing availability and a gain in profit for the Victorian government, along with reduced responsibilities for DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services). Currently in Clifton Hill a whole suit of flats sits empty⁠—its residents evicted and its doors nailed up, waiting to be demolished and rebuilt. All housing experts agree that this process is hugely flawed and will only exacerbate the extent of Melbourne’s housing crisis⁠—already one of the worst in the developed world. Importantly you can’t undo public land sell oﬀs. Nevertheless, the Andrews government has pushed ahead with this privatisation and anti-public housing agenda, often using a chronic neglect on the part of its own DHHS for the upkeep and maintenance of these buildings as justification for their demolition. One of the public housing estates in line to be ‘renewed’ is the Debneys park precinct, which consists of 4 locked down towers in Flemington.

As for these current lockdowns. Paternalism is a favourite behavioural trait of the State apparatus the world over, and has certainly played a huge role in shaping the Australian government, both Federal and State. The insulting and demeaning idea that this lockdown is for the good of the residents is probably a partial motivation for its enactment. It seems from the numbers today that the government believes there is likely to be significant transmission within these premises, which leads to the interpretation that these people are being kept inside to ‘protect’ the rest of the population. Another side of that is protecting the appearance of political competency for the DHHS and the Andrews government. DHHS is the land holder, and is tasked with managing these towers. DHHS was also tasked with managing the Quarantine hotels in the CBD, along with Emergency Management Victoria, and the Department of Jobs, Precinct, and Regions; which resulted in obvious failures leading to a series of outbreaks that then began moving through the community. It is also of note that equivalently dense private tower blocks literally across the road from the Debneys park precinct are not in hard lockdown.

As it stands, people are still being denied access to much needed supplies and surrounded with an aggressive and punitive police presence.

Below are a list of demands from residents from the locked down towers that has been circulating online.

– We demand we aren’t stopped form leaving our homes for four reasons: work or education, exercise, medical care or caregiving, or shopping for supplies

– We demand the removal of all police oﬃcers from the buildings and a maximum 2 police oﬃcers present in our community

– We demand rent bringing 5 July be suspended until further notice and any residence who have automated pay be refunded immediately

– We demand testing station without police presence within walking distance of all locked down buildings

– We demand transparency and immediate transfer of funds to residence raised by other entities namely Victorian Trades Hall

Please contact the politicians listed below, as well as your local member to let them know that it is not ok. Please take the time to write a short email or have a short phone conversation⁠—if you use a template it will be filtered out.

The Hon Daniel Andrews MP (03) 9651 5000
daniel.andrews@parliament.vic.gov.au

The Hon. Richard Wynne (03) 8683 0964
richard.wynne@parliament.vic.gov.au

The Hon. Lisa Neville MP (03) 5250 1987
lisa.neville@parliament.vic.gov.au

Donations are being requested through SE Mutal Aid
BSB 013125 Account No. 640384575
&
AMSSA Centre BSB 063132 Account No. 10771863

There has been a fundraiser through Trades Hall. I’d urge you not to use this one as there is a lack of clarity about how and when it will be distributed. I’m sure people remember the huge amount of money raised by the Salvation Army for Bush Fire victims that is still sitting in their coﬀers for use as they see fit. Furthermore Trades Hall have been staunch in their protection and accommodation of Victoria’s Police Union within their organisation⁠—something which goes strongly against support in this, and most situations. Here is an open letter to Trades Hall urging them to speak out against the police presence and to disaﬃliate The Police Association Victoria (police union).
https://firebasehostingproxy.page.link/198886819888/forms.gle/fbbC3FweBQC5JkVj6?_imcp=1

B e l l M a n t r a B e l l C i t y P r e s t o n

On visibility and the politics of being seen..

This upscale, modern hotel is a 3-minute walk from the closest tram stop, a 10-minute walk from Bell train station, and 11 km from the stalls and shops of the historic 1878 Queen Victoria Market.

The chic, contemporary rooms have flat-screen TVs and Wi-Fi access, plus microwaves, minibars and desks. Upgraded rooms and suites have additional kitchenettes, dining tables and sitting areas.

There’s an outdoor pool, a sauna and a fitness centre. Other amenities include a sleek restaurant, a casual poolside diner/bar and a relaxed cafe, plus a games room, a business centre and a BBQ area.

How many men are here, transferred from an off-shore-out-of-sight-out-of-mind ‘processing facility’ to this peri-urban hotel, seemingly frequented by conference attendees and people visiting family or friends in Melbourne’s north (I guess..)? To be quite honest, it looks like a place that is as well suited to a night, or a weekend on the gear as a conference. But I guess business is business…

The answer to the initial question is that there are 65 refugees illegally held by the Australian Government in indefinite detention in a commercial hotel in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. They are there on the orders of the Australian government, interpreting and interrupting both their legal right to seek asylum under international law (along with our implicit obligation to provide it), and the legislated medical directive to transfer these people to the Australian mainland for the express purpose of receiving medical treatment.

Since Paul Keating’s labour government of 1992 we (as a country, and as its eligible to vote citizens—and then the majority of the high court of Australia in Al-Kateb v Godwin) have enforced a policy of mandatory indefinite detention, enacted on the bodies of those seeking refuge.

In addition to the hyper vigilance with which we police their movement and their access to life, we have added hyper-visibility to the baggage we force them to carry. Jonnie Howard told a big lie. He made a public allegation that asylum-seekers (not yet allowed to wear the descriptor refugees) had thrown their children off the side of the boat they were traveling on, and he managed to get the obliging media to frame this as an attempt to gain safe passage to Australian citizenship. Since then the issue of refugees and asylum seekers — that is people who come to Australia either without a valid travel visa, or overstay one, in an attempt to flee their country of origin (for whatever reason) — has been a dirty rag, much like the idea of crime, with which a political party or operative can smear their opposition, marking them as ‘weak’. To be clear, in both cases this is a matter of calling for harsher and more punitive responses as a way to signify political strength, which has worked time and time again for both sides of Australia’s two party system.

Since then, there has been an inverse relationship between the visibility of distraught refugee bodies, and the ‘compassion’ extended to the people who inhabit those bodies in the form of potential policy changes enabling access to a ‘normal’ life in Australia. That being, one free from punitive visa and working regulations, with access to health care and human rights, and not within the confines of a prison.

At the same time as images of their trauma and suffering have come faster and more regularly to our screens, their actual bodies have become more and more removed from the Australian people. This has happened both through access and visitation restrictions, and through the establishment of a policy known as the ‘pacific solution’—a bipartisan leveraging of Australia’s economic and strategic position within the Pacific to outsource the incarceration of people seeking refuge here, to remote islands with little to no infrastructure. So, as much as we were consuming images of their suffering, we were becoming further removed from actually seeing them. The suffering and victimhood enacted on people we render as ‘other’ and outside is an ontological blow; the very meaning of being a refugee within an Australian context is to have the spectre of your body (that is both the image of it and the idea) projected throughout the media, political, and social landscape while you remain restricted from accessing these spaces, and largely restricted from accessing the land and life to which you fled.

Promoting extensive conferencing facilities, whether you’re holding a small intimate business meeting or you’re hosting a large scale conference, Mantra Bell City’s corporate event centre is a great choice. It’s the largest event facility in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and has everything you need to make your next event successful. With a variety of sleek and stylish conference and event spaces fitted with the latest in technology, Mantra Bell City can accommodate functions of between 2-500 guests in a variety of layouts. Conference venues are spread across 2300 sqm of indoor and outdoor space, allowing you to choose from a range of layouts including an indoor cocktail style event, to seminar or theatre style seating. From all-inclusive conference packages to packages tailored to suit your needs, conference organisers can rest assured their event will go off with a success.

This group of men, along with the 120 others in the same situation in the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel, in Queensland, were transferred to the Australian Mainland from Nauru and Manus as a result of the Medivac laws passed in early 2019. These are sick people, so sick that in each individual case two independent treating doctors have submitted that that person is unable to access the medical care they need in PNG or Nauru. Legislation to allow these medical transfers was passed in February 2019 and came into effect in March 2019, when people started being transferred to Australia. We are now in June 2020. Some of these men have been keep locked in a commercial hotel under 24 hour observation for over a year. They are watched and harassed by a very large number of Serco guards/staff on behalf of the Australia Federal Government. There is no outside space accessible to these men. They have still not been able to access the appropriate medical care. This seems partially due to the callousness of the Australian Border Force and their ministerial oversight, partially due to the parliamentary repealing of the legislation that brought them here, and partially due to the reality that the medical needs of these 185 men are complex and being put through a slow moving system not built for their needs.

In a broader and altogether more rational and reasonable sense; the ill physical and mental health of people illegally and indefinitely detained in off-shore and on-shore detention facilities and ‘alternative places of accomodation (detention)’ is rather obviously intertwined in that very state and nature of their indefinite detention. To be more explicit, these people are sick precisely because of the situation we have put them in. A situation that does not meet Australia’s own minimum standards of incarceration as observed in the prison system. This fact might go some way to explain the ominous and dystopian use of terms like ‘reception and processing’, ‘immigration housing’,’ and ‘transit accommodation’ in the names of many detention centres, and the absence of the word ‘prison’ in any.

In order to go for a walk the men detained in the Mantra hotel must submit a formal request. Should it be accepted, they will at some point be transferred under guard to Broadmeadows detention centre (Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation) which is run by the Australian Border Force in a former military base. Here they will be allowed to walk the perimeter of a multi stage barbed wire fence, set significantly back from the road, under the close watch of more Serco guards/staff. Many of the men suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. The litany of small to large acts of torture and dehumanisation enacted on these people by the Australian government is a large one, and any further attempt at engagement with it here is at this point beyond both my emotional and research capacities.

This blog post, like the others, has been written across time in a way that combined with the turbidity of our present moment, makes it hard to construct meaning that can be interpreted in a sequential and linear fashion.

At the time of writing this particular sentence there has been a multi-day blockade of the Kangaroo Point detention hotel by Meanjin based activists trying to halt the removal of people detained as refugees inside. The Australian government is attempting to move them to the more punitive environment of a custom built detention centre, and possibly manoeuvring towards ‘returning’ them to off shore processing centres (typing and saying that makes me think of livestock).

It is of note that neither in Mantra Bell City or Kangaroo Point Central Hotel is there the capacity to socially isolate, or even maintain physical distancing. This is on top of what is a very high turnover of staff, guards, and surprisingly enough other ‘guests’— including airline crews, within a sealed indoor environment with recycled air.

I write this at the start of Refugee Week 2020…

In December 2019 (just before Australia’s east coast set on fire, just before COVID hit the global population) the Medivac legislation was repealed. Jacqui Lambie cried, centred herself, and told the senate it was a ‘really hard decision’ as she joined One Nation Senators and the Liberal National Coalition Government in supporting the legislations repeal. Additionally, she parroted some lines about people dying at sea, and referenced ‘stopping boats’, before saying she had ‘worked to an outcome in which sick people aren’t dying waiting for treatment’—despite voting to re-institute that exact situation.

These men are locked in a prison of representation and re-presentation. Their visibility, along with their access to the world and the freedoms within it, are granted and restricted by largely unnamed overlords in the executive branch, and legitimised by the legislative power holders, emboldened by the reactive perpetual middle class of Australia.

As physical access to people held in refugee detention has been steadily withdrawn over the years, artists and collaborators have worked with detained people to produce media telling their stories and reaching out to the Australian and international community. Notable in these pursuits is Behrouz Boochani who authored a multi award winning book from within detention on Manus Island. This is a large and significant act of autonomy and self expression—two of the human faculties that the Australian government seeks to deny those detained as asylum seekers / refugees. A smaller, though perhaps not so much less significant behaviour that flaunts these attempted restrictions is the communication between detainees and the outside community. This is enabled through visits (via navigating the increasingly draconian and punitive bureaucracies of on-shore facilities), letters (observed and filtered), and perhaps most subversively, the use of social media via smart phones to communicate with a potentially unrestricted online audience.

It is notable that the capacity to visit and provide relief to detained people has been steadily reduced, and there is a concerted campaign to ban mobile phones in immigration detention (which has been both successful and successfully over-turned already, but which continues). Further to that, detainees who gain too much attention are clearly punished, with isolation and increased acts of control practiced upon them. Farhad Bandesh, a 38-year-old Kurdish man detained at the Mantra Hotel appeared on ABC’s Q&A COVID-19 special via video link to ask the panelists about the safety of his fellow detainees during the pandemic. In the following days, Farhad was taken by force to MITA detention centre where he remains. There have been similar attempts of punitive removals in Brisbane at the Kangaroo Point hotel, which has lead to a community blockade. Farhad Rahmati was handcuffed and transferred to Brisbane Immigration Transport Accomodation during this blockade due to being an outspoken instigator of detainee protests at the hotel. Neither of these two men were given any offical reason for their forced transfers.

Due to the pandemic, all visits have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. The actions of protestors and community response outside these new detention facilities serves to provide support directly to those detained as well as further the campaign to have them freed. Unfortunately, the state of emergency enacted in Victoria, combined with Victoria Police’s notoriously heavy handed and politicised response (enabled and supported by both Labour and Liberal State governments), has resulted in about $43,000 in public health breach fines for protesters at one event outside the Mantra Hotel. The organiser of that event, and a key organiser involved in the Victorian campaign to end indefinite detention, Chris Breen, was arrested at his house the morning of the protest and has been charged with incitement and had his phone and computers seized. It is worth noting the protest consisted of people driving inside their own vehicles on the roads surrounding the hotel, with signage supporting the detained men.

In immigration detention in Australia, whether in APOA or ITA, there are people sleeping up to 6 or 7 a room, no masks, no hand sanitiser, and a high turn over of staff and guards who also don’t have masks. In the context of state and territory specific public health orders, and the requisite ‘state’s of emergency’ needed to enforce them, the non-enacting of bare minimum precautions (beyond the cessation of visitation rights) constitutes a rather blatant systemic failure in the Australian Government’s duty of care. Hopefully this can be the basis of yet another class action taken against the government and against the immigration department. At the time of writing we are 5 days beyond a recent Federal Court judgement that found ministers Peter Dutton, Alan Tudge, and Jason Wood to be in ongoing contempt of the law resulting from intentionally not complying with the law. This stems from a failure to make a decision on an individuals application for a particular type of visa (Safe Haven Enterprise -Class XE visa) lodged on the 19th of December 2016. The judgement gives these parties until 4pm on the 26th of June to come to a decision on the matter. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly new chapter in Australia’s history of quietly and vigorously defending against and avoiding the judiciaries attempts to hold our governments accountable to both their own and international law and obligations regarding the treatment of people seeking asylum.

I don’t know what more I can say about this and feel I need to try to wrap up this writing somehow. Why I am writing about it? Because it matters an awful lot, because the hidden has come briefly into view (if you know where to look), because for whatever complicated reasons people have seemingly increased their level of — and capacity for — engagement with the world they live in, and across a whole suite of issues people are seeming to become a little more actively aware of their own complicity and perhaps even open to their power to change.

Thanks to Katie Ryan for helping shape this piece.

Some links to refugee organisations. Useful if you are in a place to help, or make contact, and/or follow the progression of events at these APOA.

http://riserefugee.org

https://www.facebook.com/RefugeesSurvivorsAndExdetainees

https://tamilrefugeecouncil.org.au

https://www.facebook.com/refugeesolidaritybris/

https://www.facebook.com/racvic/ https://rac-vic.org

https://www.facebook.com/Close-the-Camps-Action-Collective-1741130979474102

I’d like to imagine that for the many Quiet Australians this current moment is unprecedented.

Quiet Australians; an amorphous group that can be semi-covertly defined in relation to a nationalist urge or undercurrent and act as a referent to any particular grouping that helps illustrate your point and/ or is the desired recipient of your point.

They are now faced, possibly for the first time, with a more palpable sense of unease than the one provided by the mostly unnamed ontological threat of Indigenous Sovereignty.
Perhaps this could be a time of increased consciousness. Firstly, the destabilising effects of the virus, the very real confrontation of the unknown…

Conscious Brain: Will I be ok? Will my loved ones be ok? What about my investments?

Unconscious Brain: This won’t effect me, surely? If they come to the gate I’ll feed the first few, but there has to be a line..

And now, some months on, they are faced with the very real possibility that within their assumed fatherland, one of the primary pillars of (state) control might be on its way out. The police force, and one of its key operational drivers, White Supremacy, is being seriously confronted — collectively, concurrently, and rather comprehensively — by people the world over. One of the many reverberations of this movement is that here in our own country the campaigns lead by First Nations people against deaths in custody and against the deployment of our criminal justice system in the pursuit of their demise are building on significant gains made over the past few years. At the time of writing, the ‘Free Her’ fundraiser organised by Debbie Kilroy on behalf of Sisters Inside has raised just shy of
$40,000 AUD over the 1 Million Dollar mark. This is a fundraiser that has been running for around a year and a half, raising money to pay the fines of Aboriginal Women imprisoned in WA due to their inability to pay said fines. The financial success of this fundraiser is pitted against the unfulfilled promise of the Western Australian government to legislate in such a way that people with no criminal convictions will not be imprisoned for unpaid fines. This seems to be an effective analogy for the effort at large – the gains are significant, largely unprecedented, and very promising. In the meantime, however, the losses continue to be felt.

Thoughts and notes, to explore further or just sit with..

on the difference between saying and doing in politics, political process as Centrelink waiting line, police, police, police – a slow dawning that Small Business and Small Business Owners, ever the poster child for neo-liberalism and late-stage H U S T L E capitalism, are small to medium sized houses of cards (adorned with all the faces of every politician to have served in Australia, or at least enough to fill a few decks)

*in the states they would all be pictures of Trump, who’s
greatest service to his country may just be engendering the greatest of great forgettings.. how did we get here?

**Joan Baez’s cover of Bob Dylans’s ‘I Shall be released’ plays in my head; Rebecca and I have been listening to Any Day Now a lot, it was a very good find

At this point I wanted to include a video of an Instagram advertisement that came up on my feed in May. Unfortunately, I either didn’t take a screen grab or a screen recording of it, or I misplaced them. Either way, the advertisement and any trace of the product it advertised are now gone. It was called FACE FIT and had the sub heading of ‘simply put it in your mouth’. It was, I assume, somewhat of a scam. The product was basically a resistance band for inside your mouth, like a very large malleable mouth guard. Its intended purpose was to work your jaw muscles thereby helping you to attain a more chiseled and defined jaw line. The video included close up, selfie-looking shots of cookie cutter young white men and women (the type who feature heavily in IG advertisements) placing this thing in their mouths and biting down. They also demonstrated the repetitive open close movements used to engage the muscles, as well as sharing information points on the product. It was very weird and felt like an appropriate marker of both this time of heightened social media use, engagement, and presence — and of the associated attempts at capitalising on the massive boost in commerce and screen time. It is a shame I can only describe it for you.

To end this post I thought I’d share with you a small bit of writing. I think it sits somewhere between a poem and my notes (keeping in mind I know little about poetry).

All cricket nets now structures for private gyms
and hanging rings hung not for gymnasts (in the way we mean it)

but for analysts, receptionists, managers, consultants (or so I imagine)

All ovals now dotted with clusters of two adults
writhing close to rhythmically a few feet apart
dressed like some sort of elongated, emancipated seals
while shopping centre and workout music pumps from a
remote speaker beside them, and one instructional voice
competes with all the others;

great job, keep it up, just a few more, your doing amazing’

YouTube yoga in the park

One positive byproduct — no team or spectator
sports meaning no one needs to sit in the bleachers
means the people who need to live in the bleachers
can still live there.

I guess that’s worthy of a thank you, Yarra City Council*

—

Its a great time to wash your boat

Small teams of yellow fluorescent people meander down Southbank
along the river, and down the main roads, leisurely cruising the
sidewalk and dotting the council infrastructure with little halfhearted
sprays of cleaning solution

signing off their work with a quiet and quick rub here and there

—

The people who wear uniforms to exercise / living in Fitzroy North

The people who took a human like kickboxing doll to the park
to hit open palmed in the face
increasing precision with each blow / living in Brunswick East

The wind blowing unbearable on this beautiful, clear, still day
along the Yarra river corridor (nee Birrarung)
lined with overburden (waste rock) from a Tasmanian mine
the heavy metal smothering all that came down the river from
upstream already confused by this different route, the lack of banks
and nourishment (where did my swamp go?).

We were never meant to live this close to the water, and I don’t
and I can’t.

We all take some solace in knowing the people who can afford
the multimilliondollar waterfront penthouses have a panoramic view
forcing on them the aesthetic wonder of docklands, and the port of
Melbourne;

and that no matter how clean their boat is, it will always be
too windy to enjoy a walk in their front yard promenade.

– yes, fuck you.

* They are now empty, fenced off and adorned with backdated signage making it clear no one is to live there. I was informed that Yarra are often proactive in a good way about managing homelessness in their local area, and that it is possible these people were no longer staying safe and hygienic…

** Letter from the author **

I was asked to write these posts quite a few weeks ago. At the time I was thinking about how quickly we forgot about the past summer bushfires, now I am thinking about how quickly COVID-19 is being moved aside or moved passed as the most urgent matter.

This seems to be a reflection on Australia’s cultural proximity to the USA, and more broadly on the *distance* between capital ‘W’ Western media and life outside of that web of relations. It is also a reflection, an insight ⁠— and I would say a rather potent indictment ⁠— of the hegemony and normalisation of the 24hr media landscape. News as content, content as drug. Voyeurism as experience… Beyond criticisms on the mediation of this moment, it is one of huge and I hope ongoing significance to all people. Black people in the US and all those who support their struggle are in the midst of an uprising against some of the foundational institutions of AmeriKKKa — and the potential of this moment to positively change peoples access to a happy, healthy and secure life is unprecedented.

The world moves fast, but our comprehension cannot necessarily keep up. Resisting the urge to react as a response is challenging, and there are obviously many situations in which an immediate response or reaction is a necessity. But immediate action (particularly in the form of amplification of compact messaging, and reductive appeals) cannot and should not take the place of ongoing reflection, consideration, and more sustained actions. It’s not necessarily my place to tell people how, or what to do or think, but given I have this platform, and a presumed audience reflective of Melbourne’s arts community, it feels important to offer something.

I will share something of what I was intending to share prior to the massive and unprecedented uprising in Turtle Island, and I will come back to the present in the near future.

The specific project we would like to invite you to contribute to is Live from the Field, a blog-style page to be updated frequently over a two week period, which will be published through the KINGS website and Instagram account. This project is designed as a way to track personal responses to the crisis in a responsive, subjective and critical way. Live From The Field is intended to provide an alternative take on the rolling media style updates regarding the pandemic. We feel that you could provide politically engaged critical feedback on the pandemic and its associated social and economic impacts. This could be in the form of a series of short critical texts or might draw from past works and ongoing concerns within your photographic practice.

My first thought for these blog pieces was to structure them in the same way I make notes for ideas and processes within my art practice, and to a degree, day to day life. These take the form of short, scattered, and abrupt musings, with both an over reliance on, and a misuse of capitalisation and grammar symbols.

Essentially it is a semiprivate lexicon based largely on the organisation of meaning around unwritten feelings, states of mind, habitual processes, and reoccurring ideas. I gave it a go and realised slower than I should have that it was more than a little obstructive to the intended goal of communication. Instead I will have a go at expanding on and reiterating the ideas I notated in a more traditional and verbose style of writing. I generally have a very short attention span, so I may give up on this at various points…

Below are a few thoughts and ideas for my contribution to Live from the Field organised into groupings and reflecting my experience of March, April, and early May 2020.

…..

I have a bad back; multiple herniated disks, a ‘free fragment’ disk, and congenital stenosis of the lumbar spine. This came to prominence in 2009 and has remained a problem for me since. Thankfully, I have lived most of that time with little or no pain and minimum restrictions on movement and lifestyle. However, when it gets bad it can get quite bad. Over this recent summer and new year’s my back flared up significantly and consequently my pain increased and my movement reduced. My regular physiotherapist of the past few years is on maternity leave and I had quite a difficult time finding an appropriate practitioner to help me with this round of rehab. I was starting to make real progress when the clinics, gyms, and pools started closing. This significantly compounded my anxiety about recovery and about the general state of the world.

Prior to the announcement of a State of Emergency in Victoria, and the enforcement of the associated ‘lockdown’, I was in an in-between place regarding employment. I am a sole-trader who works as a photographer in a few different capacities. I have also begun to turn over some money through artistic practice. During the last few years my main source of income has been sub-contracting for a booking agency; shooting the final (public facing) stages of outdoor advertising campaigns. That means basically driving around and photographing audiences passing by advertising on bus shelters, roadside billboards, inside shopping centres and train stations. This has been ongoing and mostly reliable work. However, the volume of work has been steadily declining and at the start of this year it became clear I wouldn’t be able to rely on it long term.

My partner and regular artistic collaborator Rebecca McCauley and I have/had been working towards a large project that was going to be shown as part of Next Wave 2020. The festival was launched on a Thursday and by Sunday it had become clear it wouldn’t be going ahead in its intended form. This was obviously hard for everyone involved, and mirrors the interruptions to life, work, art, health etc. experienced the world over. At the time I really didn’t care that much, it felt like a drop in the ocean. Not the biggest problem, and not a direct threat to my health or those around me.

The political dimension of the COVID-19 crisis is huge, amorphous, and hard to recall. Even focusing in on Victoria, an analysis of flows of power, support, and state/federal responses requires much more knowledge and capacity than I have. I am happy to share my observations, with the caveat that they are both personal and partial. It is important to note that the way this has played out in Australia is such that the lockdown, economic downturn and governmental response has had, and likely will continue to have a more significant effect on the population that the virus itself. I do not mean that in a careless or callous way, but the loss of life, and other health effects of this crisis are not going to necessarily be the primary drivers of suffering throughout this period, at least not in a direct sense.

We imagined that in line with the concerns of your ongoing practice you might want to address the political, social and environmental impacts of the pandemic. This could include the response of our current liberal government, use of surveillance technology, increased police powers and the many changes to unemployment payments and conditions. The blog is aimed at providing a sense of support and community, while also helping to cut through the overload of information and statistics available about the progression of the pandemic. As we are all experiencing the effects of the pandemic in an immediate and personal fashion, an autobiographical approach has seemed appropriate, however, the tone and content of each participant takes is totally up to them.

Despite my initial anxiety and concern, I have actually fared very well physically during these past few months. Having little creative drive, basically no social interaction and almost no work meant that I had lots of time to undertake exercise, stretching routines, and general rehab. Given that this was a requirement in order to limit my pain and increase my mobility, it actually became quite easy to dedicate the necessary time and effort to it. So, like many other inner city, upper middle class, yo-pros, my life became structured around physical exertion. As my mobility increased, I had to undertake longer and longer walks, and eventually bike rides. I quite quickly became fed up with my surroundings ⁠—and legitimately concerned about the spread of a potential outbreak due to the proximity between, and density of runners and walkers throughout the inner north of Melbourne. I started driving a little out of the city and taking regular long walks in semi-forested areas with a good friend. We spent a lot of time picking mushrooms on these walks, which served as such a sweet respite from the problems of the world delivered direct via media saturation on small computers you sit down at, and even smaller ones you hold onto.

I have acted as a photographer documenting many different creative activities, and pre-COVID I was hoping to move into more regular work shooting theatre, live art, and performances. Obviously this move had to have the brakes slammed on it. One benefit I derived from my subcontracted ‘advertising’ work was the painfully slow invoice and payment cycle. I would often wait 6 weeks from working to getting paid ⁠—it used to be quite annoying. As lock down set in, however, this meant that I was able to weather the original period of no work and no government support with some financial certainty. Interestingly, my art practice became my primary income earner for the first time ever during this period. It was great to have things to work towards (even if I didn’t actually want to do them at that point) and to have organisations making funds available to artists.

By the time this post goes up online, I would have been nearing the end of a residency in Bodø, inside the arctic circle in Norway. This has a weird feeling associated with it, filtered through a lack of urgency or immediacy ⁠—a kind of diffuse, almost unfelt disappointment. What strikes me most about these unrealised artistic endeavours now, is the sheer amount of effort and time that would have been dedicated to making them happen. It feels very hard trying to imagine going through those motions.

More soon..

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Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein and Sarah Rudledge

In Correspondence

Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein

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[1] Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time ,” e-flux Journal #11, December 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/.

Live Updates From Lock Down: Dispatch For Beirut

Facilitated by Azza Zein with contributions from Joanne Choueiri, Lina Koleilat, Lara Chamas, Sherine Al Shallah and Lujayn Hourani

Azza Zein

Azza Zein is an installation artist and writer from Beirut. She lives and works in Narrm/Melbourne. Her research explores how artworks can comment on the dematerialisation of the economy and invisibility of labour.

Joanne Choueiri

[1] Quoted in Joan Didion, The Magical Year of Thinking, (New York:Vintage International,2007), p.25. Originally, Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (London: Allen Lane, 1983). [Adapted]

Lina Koleilat

Shattering

Lina Koleilat is a writer, editor, and an ethnographer from Beirut working and living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.

Lara Chamas

Born into chaos

Sherine Al Shallah

Ritual of resilience

Hasib Hourani

Hasib is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, editor, and arts worker from Ras Beirut, now based in Naarm. Their work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Going Down Swinging, and Voiceworks, among others.

Thank you for taking the time to read these pieces. If you have the means, please consider donating to one of these organisations:

Beit el Baraka is a non-profit organization based in Beirut. They are providing medical, housing a food support for victims of the explosion. https://beitelbaraka.net/donation/pay/

ARM (Anti-Racism Movement) are currently responding to the immediate needs of migrant workers, refugees, and marginalized groups affected by the August 4th explosion in Beirut, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ever-worsening economic situation. https://www.givingloop.org/mcc/#impact

Live Updates From Lock Down: Azza Zein

Inside the water tub…………..mass casualisation

Lock Dispersal in Corner Solutions

Live Updates From Lock Down: Aaron Claringbold

KINGS FINAL POST

Surveillance / Governments

Control / Police

RESPITE

B e l l M a n t r a B e l l C i t y P r e s t o n

On visibility and the politics of being seen..

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