Olympic Doughnuts
2011
Commissioned by the Barkly Arts Centre in Footscray as part of the New Skin program, a 6 month residency and mentoring program where three artists worked with residents and locals who use the Barkly building as a community hub. It was originally exhibited there, along with works made by community participants, as part of the New Skin launch in 2011.
Since then, excerpts have been shown at Rogue Video and Performance in Brooklyn (USA), Blindside Gallery in 2012, and in 2013 as part of a curated screening by William Head for Digital Media Month at Colourbox Studio in Footscray.
In 2017, the full 20 minute video was shortlisted for the inaugural Footscray Art Prize, and exhibited at The Footscray Community Art Centre.
Olympic Doughnuts impassively records the comings and goings of a range of sites around Footscray which have either already been, or are in danger of being erased in coming months, years or even days.
It takes a moment to contemplate local civic treasures, both past and present, and the many simultaneous histories being written and re-written daily, as Footscray slowly groans towards gentrification. Created during a community arts residency at the Barkly Arts Centre, at the old Barkly Hotel site, this work emerged from the juncture between the history of the site as an old hard-drinkers pub, and it’s current uses as home to the fledgling, constantly threatened Lentil As Anything community restaurant, and as an innovative, low-rise social housing complex.
Artist Statement:
To give a complete history of the contents of my room would take a lifetime. You might like to consider what is involved in preparing a history of a large city.
From “A Tour of Footscray” By V F Bristow, 1981
Held at Footscray Historical Society
Guy Maddin’s surrealist personal narrative film, “My Winnipeg”, makes an impassioned case for the preservation and reverence of local culture via profiles of the great, lost buildings of his home town. Winnipeg, the film argues, may not be of any interest to anyone except the people who live there, but neither is it required to be. These mundane buildings are first activated by his personal memories and recollections, and their meaning metastasized by the implication that countless other individuals have been forming their own personal attachments & associations to these places, casting them in their own personal dramas (as back drop, central protagonist or bit-player) in much the same way for generations. The accretion of this type of cultural capital, it is concluded, can only happen over time; but so can be lost in an instant. Bricks and mortar can only be animated in the minds of the people to whom they mean something – and this meaning (or meanings) cannot be predicted or imposed by town planners or architects alone. They belong to the people. The people in effect, invent them.
When these types of places – be they town halls, local businesses or sports grounds, are lost – a part of the culture is lost forever. Every swimming pool, marketplace, café or public housing facility to be demolished, takes with it the intangible strands of local lore and tradition that a public place helps to focus and knit together into something coherent.
Despite our seemingly endless sprawl, you can’t actually rebuild Melbourne next to Melbourne- when a new building is erected, it must be written over what stood before. As such, Footscray is at an interesting cross-roads. Being the gateway to the expanding and gentrifying West, it is yet a very old town, with multiple layers of its various histories still exposed- which have not yet been written over by “progress”. It is facing a complex choice: the opportunity to shape a new future for itself, embracing visionary urban projects which define new ways of living in the city. But with this opportunity comes the risk (or certainty, in fact) of an equal amount of loss, and marginalization of what existed before.
“Olympic Doughnuts” impassively records the comings and goings of a range of sites around Footscray which have either already been, or are in danger of being erased in coming months, years or even days. It takes a moment to contemplate local civic treasures, both past and present, and the many simultaneous histories being written and re-written daily, as Footscray slowly groans towards gentrification. Placing it within the old Barkly Hotel site, now home to the constantly threatened Lentil As Anything, as well as an innovative, low-rise social housing complex, and the Barkly Arts Centre, puts it right at the heart of this juncture.
