During the life of Adhocracy, a carbon price has been repealed, greenhouse gas emissions have increased, and a new colour – a luminous, extraterrestrial purple – has been added to the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature maps for heat of between 52 and 54C.
Is it like inviting the household of neighbours you don’t know into your kitchen, to peer curiously through your oven door at your half-baked banana bread, in hope that your mutual goodwill will make it rise?
It begins with a question
subsists in talk
inheres
in here
1976 and at the age of 22, the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide had just opened its doors and the then Director, Noel Sheridan, brought me on board to provide administrative support (on a salary of $20 per week - enough for petrol, cigarettes, rent and peanut butter sandwiches)
Consistently defying definition, and consistently maintaining a distinct atmosphere of wonder and possibility, it remains my favourite experience to try (and fail) to describe.
I reckon it began as an experiment.
In 2010 an idea occurred: to make an experimental art event where artists made work collaboratively while an audience looked on.
Day one, starting the weekend
thrown in the deep end, standing
on the boring side of a wine bottle.
Adhocracy reminds me that there are so many ways to make art and so many forms art can take
Adhocracy reminds me to keep making art
Adhocracy reminds me to go to Port Adelaide more often, and to wear extra layers
Adhocracy didn’t exist in 2009. Maybe it was percolating in someone’s brain, quite probably some grant applications and planning had happened. But the first Adhocracy didn’t come to life until 2010.
Ashton Malcolm draws herself over five Adocracies, tracing the event and how it changed her.
The last few years of participating in Adhocracy have been jetlagged or jetsetty, so it is apt that I am on a plane right now.
What makes a place? What is latitude and longitude, what is longing? What is geographic specificity? What makes you shipwreck in your lover’s thighs, what envelopes you?
I have been thinking a lot about love letters lately. I have been thinking a lot about loneliness in the face of the apocalypse. I have been thinking a lot about romantic comedies.
A decade of Adhocracy.
A decade of Australia.
A decade of Australian politics.
A decade of Australian political speeches.
A decade in decline.
Knowledge is not a fixed point in time. Just raw dusty space leading you right to where the darkness lurks. It might take two minutes or it might take ten years. How do we choose what will last forever?
