Centre for Cultural Partnerships - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Aesthetics of change: multiculturalism and the street art of Footscray
    Widiarto, Christie ( 2018)
    This practice-based research investigates the relationship between street art and multiculturalism in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray. The aim of this research is to prove the value of incorporating multicultural theory in the development of street art projects. The practice component of the research is the creation of a documentary entitled, Who made that? which looks at five case studies of artists that have created a street art piece during the research period 2014 – 2018. This film is created using techniques of collaborative filmmaking through a reflexive practice, based on Sarah Pink’s approach to visual ethnography. Street art is also examined as a cultural practice. There are varied opinions about what constitutes street art and how to define a street artist. In order to contain our research, the documentary focuses on artists who create murals. Through an exploration of their work, techniques and intent behind their art, the documentary presents an understanding of the diversity that exists within the street art community. Culture and multiculturalism have broad interpretations and this research suggests understanding multiple perspectives from a lived experience to political forms of management and integration. Theoretical literature, from Kymlicka’s liberal theories of ‘multicultural citizenship to modern day Islamaphobia, are reviewed to explore how they are at work in contemporary discourses of government, arts and community. The setting for the documentary, Footscray, is known as a culturally diverse inner city suburb, that has been reportedly going through the process of gentrification. We examine gentrifications impact on social diversity and also explore the role of street artists as both gentrifiers and activists against gentrification. Through this research, we investigate street art as a manifestation of the cultural diversity of the community. As such, its demonstrates how an understanding of multiculturalism from different perspectives can provide a framework for the development of future street art projects by artists, communities and organisations.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Apmere Angkentye-kenhe: language as a music playing us
    Sometimes, Beth ( 2018)
    Apmere Angkentye-kenhe: Language as a music playing us describes a practice based research project that examines and actively attends to the valuing of particular local knowledges and forms of knowing. Alongside a shadow ‘un-knowing’ it considers these forms of knowing in their function as critical apparatus in this moment of globalised imagination and movement. The research was materialised through an artist-led social project Apmere Angkentye-kenhe (which translates from Central/Eastern Arrernte to English as ‘A Place for Language’) which was produced and designed collaboratively with Central/Eastern Arrernte people in Alice Springs, the town built on Mparntwe in Australia. The project created a language learning and exchange site in the centre of the Alice Springs CBD, designed for and accessed by both settlers and Arrernte families, which was advertised publicly and open for three weeks. Open-invitation events and activities that promoted and generated resources for engaging with the first language of Mparntwe were promoted at the site. The space was also open certain days over the three-week period for casual visits to engage with the tactile, visual and aural content contained within. Apmere Angkentye-kenhe sought to create situations that expose certain colonial ideologies in action both in the public work and in the interactions within its making; within my own research and within the practice. Methodologically the research prioritised the politics of listening over the politics of voice. The project materialised various questions of political responsibility and created situations for listening across alterity, both within its collaborative structure, and with and for a public. In writing about this work, I question the possibility for this type of practice to realise arts great emancipatory promises, illuminating where it can function as a neo-colonial force. Where awareness for the potential for harm must be held in tension in throughout many stages of the work are examined. The research interrogates what the vocabulary of art could affect in Mparntwe, when multiple campaigns in that context appear to require urgency? How can art, in this context, generate alternative temporal or spatial economies of exchange? Here I look at the implications of the research for relationships of local responsibility and listening on behalf of settlers – intimating the complications and philosophical double-binds into which we are tethered.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Bridging the unseen in art writing
    Heagney, Denis ( 2017)
    This project asks how blindness can inform art writing practice to bridge an experiential gap between sighted and non-sighted art audiences. Initially focussed on reducing cultural isolation and increasing inclusion in visual culture for people with low or no vision, this project later shifted into practice-led research. Based on the Vislan concept devised by Brisbane linguist Geoffrey Munck, the work is directly informed by the lived experience of blindness, and aims to translate visual objects and spaces to assist in comprehension. The context of project explores my own practice in art writing as a form of critique and ongoing learning. After experimenting with ekphrasis, didactics and visual literacy, the methodology settled on formal observation and dialogic learning. The outcomes of a pilot project, iC2, created text translations of public art works in Melbourne and a custom built website (vislan.net), made with the support of City of Melbourne Arts Projects. The pilot was presented at the Performing Mobilities symposium in 2015 and tested in public spaces with various participants on a walking tour, before being published online for testing. The full texts from the pilot project are included here as the creative component of this work. The final discussion suggests a generative language system as an adaptive tool for observing, verifying and writing about visual objects.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Aesthetic Systems of Participatory Painting: communicating in Third Space and mental wellbeing in Tonga
    Douglass, Adam ( 2017)
    This thesis builds upon Homi Bhabha’s concept of Third Space to frame social connection and self-determination in a socially-engaged collaborative painting practice. Developed in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga with On the Spot Arts Initiative (OTS) and involving diverse groups including patients from the Vaiola Hospital Psychiatric Ward, this research offers a new approach to collaborative painting and provides a framework to support mental health and wellbeing. I have theorised this methodology and titled it the Aesthetic System of Participatory Painting (ASOPP). Integrating mental health and contemporary art frameworks, this hybrid model promotes individual autonomy and critical thinking by supporting both harmony and difference, creating a generative space. This research argues that by expanding modernist, individualised aesthetic systems to accommodate a social application, ASOPP projects provide opportunities for local communities to critique social structures and self-represent. This can assist in empowering participants and destabilising pre-established cultural hierarchies that hold power and often determine cultural standards. ASOPP has also informed the accompanying documentary video used to account for the research, providing an accessible research outcome and an opportunity to self-represent for collaborative partners and participants.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Material matters at the coalface: a socially-engaged art enquiry into the politics of coal, space and place
    Veit, Hartmut ( 2017)
    “Material Matters at the Coalface” questions our human relationships with geological matter through a socially-engaged art enquiry into the politics of coal, space and place. Activating coal as “vibrant matter”, this project works with brown coal as a medium to investigate the role that coal plays in Latrobe Valley mining communities. This project combined socially-engaged, participatory practice and practice-led artistic research with an ethnographic sensibility to investigate the community’s response to living in, and among coal. It aimed to create dialogue and better understand the complex web of changes affecting communities, who are in transition and impacted by the closure of coal-fired power stations and sweeping changes in power generation. The research findings are presented through a written dissertation and durable records of the “COAL” graduate exhibition, which was staged at the VCA Art Space in Melbourne in February 2017. Unearthing coal’s performative material qualities, this exhibition put the gritty materiality of locally collected brown coal to work as an aesthetic medium in a series of visual artworks, performances and installations encompassing three interconnected galleries and 210sm2 of space. Questioning the physical, psychic and social relationships humans have with non-human matter coal, the “COAL” exhibition also included documentation of performative acts of labour, such as sweeping and cleaning, which were originally performed in public spaces, neglected historical buildings and empty deserted shops in Morwell. The resultant body of artefacts, performances and installations reflect a sustained material engagement with brown coal and socially-engaged arts practice with Latrobe Valley communities over the last three years. The creative works are analysed and contextualised by drawing on a lineage of artists, writers and philosophers from the intersecting fields of social practice, art and anthropology, who have explored the political ecology of geological matter and the environment. This investigation of coal’s role in the local community of Morwell demonstrates the increasing ecological impact of human beings’ commodified relationships to nature, place and matter. Departing from these site-responsive concerns and the context of peri-urban Victoria, coal’s political ecology acts as a microcosm, an allegory and visual metaphor for much larger political and cultural situations. Moving beyond the impact of globalisation on local conditions, the project scrutinises deeply entrenched thinking, which “places man-as-subject at the centre of all relations.”1 The research adopts a New Materialist lens to frame the project and foreground the agency of matter to questions such pre-conceived human-centric biases. As a heterogeneous, emerging cultural theory, New Materialism pays renewed attention to the central importance of matter in cultural discourse as a pathway to re-orientate human beings’ relationality with the material world. Responding to, and building on existing scholarship, debates and critiques of New Materialism, this research challenges binary perceptions, that coal is an inert resource to demonstrate coal’s vibrancy as an active agent in shaping experience and discourse. Contesting anthropocentric definitions of temporality, performance and authorship this research endeavours to act as a cultural agent of change and assist the local community to make the long-term transition to a sustainable local economy and cleaner energy future that better supports jobs, communities and their long-term health. The complex web of changes facing coal and communities in the Latrobe Valley are brought to the attention of a wider audience through art. The project was driven by a sense of optimism, that contemporary art and culture can create genuine dialogue, engagement and common ground between opposing and polarized views regarding climate change, so that communities can work together and re-orientate currently destructive social relationality with coal, to globally make the vital transition to renewable energy sources. 1 Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge: Towards A'new Materialism'through the Arts (Ib tauris, 2013).1z
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Re: Marks from East Timor: a field guide to East Timor's graffiti
    PARKINSON, CHRIS ( 2017)
    This thesis investigates the specific conflicts and contexts that produced East Timor’s fledgling graffiti between 2004-2008 to demonstrate links between its local lineage and a globally contextualised backdrop. It is a work that is advanced through the epistemological propositions of Southern theory. Primarily, it is concepts of the centre and the periphery and how graffiti negotiates movement between these positions that are the thesis’ main concerns. With this in mind, the central question of how East Timor’s graffiti contributed to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict is framed. In demonstrating graffiti’s contribution to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict, its location at the nexus of resistance and transformation is revealed. This thesis presents graffiti in East Timor as a hermeneutic, validating the expressions of marginalized actors in geo-political contexts of conflict, reconstruction and social relationships.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Hurdy-gurdy: new articulations
    Nowotnik, Piotr ( 2016)
    The purpose of this thesis is to expand existing literature concerning the hurdy-gurdy as a contemporary musical instrument. Notably, it addresses the lack of hurdy-gurdy literature in the context of contemporary composition and performance. Research into this subject has been triggered by the author’s experience as a hurdy-gurdy performer and composer and the importance of investigating and documenting the hurdy-gurdy as an instrument capable of performing well outside the idioms of traditional music. This thesis consists of a collection of new works for hurdy-gurdy and investigation of existing literature including reference to the author’s personal experience as a hurdy-gurdy composer and performer. It will catalogue and systematically document a selection of hurdy-gurdy techniques and extended performance techniques, and demonstrate these within the practical context of new music compositions created by the author. This creative work and technique investigation and documentation is a valuable resource for those seeking deeper practical and academic understanding of the hurdy-gurdy within the context of contemporary music making.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    A non-predefined outcome (ANPO)
    Martinez Mendoza, Ramon ( 2015)
    This practice-led research is a methodological enquiry into my community-based art practice A Non-Predefined Outcome (ANPO). This was originally developed as a participatory art project to generate culturally safe spaces for people to engage in artistic and critical thinking. It was by generating these spaces of interaction (to challenge mainstream or personal cultural prejudices) that the practice became more defined and led to the development of ANPO as a methodology. The final presentation of this thesis contains two units: Unit One offers an overview of the theoretical framework that helped inform the practice and Unit Two represents the practice as methodology of this research and includes a handbook and four appendices that explain how the methodology works. The methodology is based on dialectical games where participants interact with each other as a means of developing connection and the potential for mutual understanding. The methodological enquiry consists of four task-propositions, where every task has a specific function and generates a sequence that connects participants with language and its expression through the senses in an artistic way. The first task is ‘This is not a chair’, a warm-up exercise informed by Gottlob Frege’s theory on sense and denotation. The second is ‘The Topic’, informed by Paulo Freire’s concept of generative themes and which is the proposal of the theme that will be explored during the experience. The next task, ‘Vis-á-Vis-á-Vis’, is a dialectical game designed from the three-dimensional dialectic of ‘Definition – Dialectic – Hidden Message’. This game is informed by Hegel’s dialectic, and the structuralist language theory of Saussure and Michel Foucault. The potential of overcoming the contradiction with ‘Hidden Message’ offers a critical reflexivity in three different forms, depending on the participants’ enquiry: through the exploration of the senses; through the generation of a new discourse; or through a psychological reflexivity. In the final task, ‘Dialectical Representations’, participants reflect on different possibilities to comprehend the ‘Hidden Message’ employing visual, aural, performative and gustatory tools, informed by sensory ethnography methodology. Drawing on the reflexivity of Doreen Massey’s For Space philosophy it was possible to conclude that the ANPO methodology generates spaces of interactions that are the product of interrelations wherein multiplicities and heterogeneities are negotiated. These spaces are open and constantly under construction due to their interrelations.