A 10th birthday speech

I’d like to acknowledge that we’re on Kaurna Country: country that was never ceded, and pay my respects to Kaurna elders past, present and future.

Thank you to Emma Webb and the Vitals team for giving me the honour of speaking tonight at this truly wonderful occasion: Adhocracy’s 10th birthday. I’m not sure that I was here for the very first Adhocracy, but I have certainly been coming since its early days, and for me (aside from the fact that this makes me reflect on my advancing years with both melancholy and hope as youth slips away) it’s always been one of the most exciting events on the national creative development calendar. To exchange with artists and witness works at these early stages of development is a privilege. And Adhocracy’s combination of compressed time, collective artistic effort, creative risk and audience participation is such a strange and rare phenomenon in our artistic climate, that I struggle to find the right metaphor to do it justice. 

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? 

Or is it like voyaging to the bottom of the ocean—like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in James Cameron’s 1989 movie The Abyss—only to discover a bunch of weird glowy things that are way smarter than you??

All of my bad metaphors are clearly failing, and perhaps this points to the fact that sometimes when something is a good idea, it just works. And not only does it work, it endures. Watching the national reach of Adhocracy grow as more artists from diverse disciplines, cultural and geographic locations seek it out as a creative wellspring (you only have to look at this year’s extraordinary artistic lineup to see this happening); and watching the projects from Adhocracy flourish into some of the most complex, visionary and in-demand works on our stages and in our public spaces, is a testament to the nourishing and stimulating effect this platform has on our national ecology. Artists, audiences, curators, funders, institutions: all touched, all transformed.

Maybe what I’ve learned over the years is that in fact we are all those weird glowy things, shining our alien light on each other in an attempt to make sense of the void?

Nope. That metaphor still sucks.

I also want to use this opportunity to pay tribute to Vitalstatix’s extraordinary Director, Emma Webb (the supreme weird glowy thing of Ahocracy who presides over us all tonight). Emma’s vision for Vitals and Adhocracy has been the bedrock of this program and her ingenuity in balancing the very particular needs of creative development—where artists sail out into the void of process and the unknown—and the rigours of discourse and engagement—when audiences come to experience the beginnings of the artists’ work and offer their presence, participation, or witness—has been pivotal to the success and longevity of Adocracy. Thank you Emma for your collegiality, your tenacity, your rigour, your humour, and your belief. Shine on, you weird glowy thing.

For the last few days, I’ve been with my colleagues at the Experimental Art Exchange, just down the road in Hart’s Mill. And being there, discussing the state of experimental practice in Australia on the eve of Adhocracy, has made me reflect on the role of art in what could be described as a turbulent moment of history: in the arts here in Australia, and of culture and politics nationally and globally. 

And all of it has reminded me that experimentation is one of the greatest acts of optimism. Because in order to experiment, you must believe that there is something yet to be discovered. That there is a better way. That you can make a fucking mess and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed. That if you do fail, it’s still valuable and precious and important. That we’re all in this mess together: artists, organisations, audiences, funders, ring-ins, loved ones and glowy things, because we believe that this strange and unlikely alchemy we are about to experience over the next three days makes a difference in a way we have yet to even imagine.

Thank you Vitals, and thank you Adhocracy, for a decade of dreams: ten years of insistence on the speculative role of art, and a celebration of all the art we are yet to see.