Residency and exhibition with Angus Webb at Watch This Space gallery, Alice Springs.

This was a chance to experiment with making work to be presented in a gallery setting, and to explore themes of the banal ways in which lines of private property are drawn and rituals of home ownership are uneasily enacted, on the still contested land of settler colonial Australia.

Installation, light box, drawing and video works. Materials included concrete, windows, prints, paper, transfer paper, charcoal, buffel grass and Todd River sand.

For complete documentation of process and works see: https://debatableestates.tumblr.com/

Lhere Mparntwe or the Todd River, is often referred to as an “ephemeral” river. This points to its nature as a river that rarely flows, yet it also indicates the riverbed’s relation to the surrounding built environment and to the world of planners, architects, and engineers; those who codify space. It is a space that can be managed, but which resists subjugation to the planner’s instruments. Walking south along the riverbed, the dislodged and eroded concrete pillars and pipes jutting out of the sand are a testament to this. A sort of no-man’s land for planners, the river remains somewhat outside the cycle of clearing, construction and settlement that has otherwise occurred in Alice Springs. In conjunction with its status as a geological force, the river is also a thoroughly cultural entity for local Arrernte people, and its relative autonomy from the geometry of the planner’s marks is due in large part to the recurrent political struggles of traditional owners, inhabitants, and others. This relative autonomy enables the Todd River within the vicinity of Alice Springs to function as a site for differentiated modes of settlement, public place dwelling, and mobility.

At night the river forms a ribbon of darkness cutting through the cluster of lights that mark the town’s presence. It attracts more transitory forms of inhabitation, and is used by day and by night as a place to retreat from the sun, to socialise, to drink, and as a camp-site for visitors from surrounding remote communities, as well as for the local homeless population. This marginal position in relation to the surrounding urban environment creates a sense that the Todd is unruly/unresolved, and out of conformity with the spatial discipline of the surrounding urban environment. Periodic calls to tame the river into a productive public space befitting its urban position trigger cycles of renewed attempts to discipline the space of the riverbed, and the behaviour of those who use it. As a contact point between conflictual, yet mutually implicated modes of inhabiting space, the Todd River acts a site where marginalised individuals can assert a fragile spatial dominion and non-conformity to the dominant settlement project within Alice Springs.