Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Future Histories is an action research project examining recent cultural & political movements in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia. Conducted under the auspices of BURN Arts Inc, a community arts organization, the project comprised a series of experimental events taking place across several weeks and multiple locations, combining set design, audio-visual installation, performance and documentary to depict a fictional world in which an unspecified cataclysm has caused a collective loss of memory. Taking the production of these events as a scale model for processes of planning and development, this paper outlines a novel approach to design in which creative agency is devolved through collective story-telling. ‘Place-making’ has been described as a neoliberal phenomenon that strategically co-opts arts and culture in order to aid the expansion of property markets and fuel gentrification. However, this paper argues that place-making can also act as a pre-figurative practice of community self-empowerment. Like architecture, theatrical performances modify physical space in order to set out shared imaginaries of past and future; their production serves as a form of ritual by which our narratives of place and identity are both constructed and contested. Thus it is proposed that active participation in the creation of such performances makes visible the ‘infrastructures of ritual’ – that is, the underlying material, social and spatial processes that support collective myth-making – and that, when scaled up, this ultimately has the potential to unsettle current approaches to urban development that are unsustainable and inequitable. This research was conceived and conducted on unceded Jagera and Turrbal Countries. I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of these lands, their elders past, present and emerging.