Know Thy Neighbour #1
Dates: 2015-17
Know Thy Neighbour #1 was a pilot series of Perth-based temporary context responsive art projects presented throughout 2015 – 2017. The program brought together West Australian artists Janet Carter & Elizabeth Pedler; Simone Johnston & Tanya Lee (the ST Team); Loren Kronemyer & Mike Bianco; Dan McCabe; and Perdita Phillips; who were each commissioned to create new projects that involved and engaged a variety of micro-communities in the suburbs surrounding metropolitan Perth.
Taking the diverse social make-up of Perth as a starting point, artists employed interventionist strategies and collaborative measures to stimulate conversations around shared issues, reveal hidden communities, explore urban living systems and create new forms of social interaction.
The outcomes of each project were presented in public locations across Perth.
Catalogue →
Case study: Mike Bianco & Loren Kronemyer, Brackish Rising (2015-17)
Artists: Mike Bianco & Loren Kronemeyer
Work: Brackish Rising (2015-17)
Partner: City of Kwinana
Location: Kwinana, Western Australia
Brackish Rising is an ongoing multi-faceted project by artists Mike Bianco and Loren Kronemyer which engages with issues of salt, water, desalination, ecology, and water sovereignty around Kwinana. Presented as a part of the 2017 Perth International Arts Festival, the project called attention to the past, present and future of water in Southwest Australia, including the role of the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant, a facility that has provided over 20% of all potable water in the Perth metropolitan area for the past decade.
Based in Kwinana, Bianco and Kronemyer followed the path of water in the Brackish Rising Mobile Research Lab, engaging local stakeholders, Kwinana residents and Perth festival audiences in a three-week long program of workshops, public tours, interviews, and water tastings. Brackish Rising shed new light on Perth’s water systems, producing an array of visual documentation in addition to a Brackish Radio podcast, and an internet-based archive of the unseen sights and sounds that define our relationship to water in the Perth metropolitan area.
Case study: Janet Carter & Elizabeth Pedler, Eat the City (2015-17)
Artists: Janet Carter & Elizabeth Pedler
Work: Eat the City (2015-17)
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Imagine a world where urban food supply chains have collapsed. Where and how will we find food in order to survive? Eat the City poses this dystopic hypothesis and explores the possibilities it raises for generating a community-activated artwork based in the Perth CBD.
Eat the City is an ongoing social experiment based on the principles of food and knowledge sharing, theoretically underpinned by ideas around increased global precarity and building resilience. For Know Thy Neighbour, artists Janet Carter and Elizabeth Pedler undertook a research residency, working with a number of collaborators with expert knowledge of urban survival, native and foraged foodstuffs. Learning about food precarity from multiple viewpoints, the artists collected stories and mapped contemporary and historical free food resources in the CBD.
Janet Carter and Elizabeth Pedler are continuing to use this data to build an interactive map and wiki, charting the wild and free food available in Perth. The research residency culminated in three participatory city walks, each tracing, mapping and storytelling food and survival in the city. They were led by guides Brooke ‘Sparkles’ Murphy, Dale Tilbrook, Malcolm Kaui and Len, each with varying specialisation, from indigenous food cultivation to wild and foraged food.
Explore all Know Thy Neighbour #1 art projects:
Explore other Spaced programs:
Future Recall (2013-15). Future Recall artists, with support from Western Australian Museum staff, looked to reinterpret aspects of local heritage through the creation of new works that reflect the synthesis of community, artistic, historical and scientific perspective
North by Southeast (2015-18). North by Southeast was a program centred on an exchange between Nordic and Australian visual artists, concluding with an ambitious group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.