Elizabeth Cowie: Community Treasure

Our President, Elizabeth Cowe, has been awarded the Griffith Australia Day Award by local member, Terri Butler.

This prize testifies to Elizbeth’s commitment to the Brisbane community through her work with House Conspiracy and Kurilpa Futures.

Elizabeth has managed her voluntary roles at House Conspiracy and Kurilpa Futures while working in Indigenous Schooling Support with students studying in Brisbane from remote communities.

She is a mother and grandmother, a friend and mentor to past students, and to many others in her community.

We feel so lucky to have Elizabeth as President of the House.

Read the full article on The Westender.

New Community Library

Enjoy House Conspiracy’s new community library, kindly offered by Sebastian and Rino Pierro. It was a pleasure to see them working together on this project!

Home - Home is where the heart is, but where is the heart?

Home was a massive effort that came together as a result of the collaboration between Tianze Sun and Fed. A post-pandemic catch-up turned into the vision of dream. The development of a friendship. This is what House Conspiracy does.

Tianze and Fed both have stories of migration in their hearts. Tianze is the daughter of Chinese parents, and Fed a restless globe-trotter. The pandemic prompted the question “Where is home?” and the expected answer “home is where the heart is!” followed by an awkward silence and a rebuttal “But where is the heart?” And there we had the title of the exhibition held at House Conspiracy on the 5th and 6th of December and which invited artists to explore how we leave, move, decorate, undo, re-do, design, dream, smash, and make a home. The exhibition gave a colourful picture of the experiences of rooting, uprooting, and rerooting, and the hopes and the traumas that come with them.

The exhibition featured 28 artists from Meanjin, Melbourne, Sydney, and Central Queensland.

Camryn Day

Elena Korotkaia

Emily Hanna

Eva Collins

Grace May

Hazel Coote

Jane Taylor

Leon Rhodes

Lili Mikami

Lucy Tuffley

Marc Pricop

Camila Quintero

Mary Olive

MJ O'Neill

Mei Liu

Michelle Wild

Nancy Lane

Pavle Banovic

Rachel Walker

Rute Chaves

Sebastian Pierro & Jemima Kang

Shannon Toth

Sophie Evans

Tess White

Tianze Sun

Federica Caso

Vismante Cai

Fundraiser for Frontier War Stories

Finally, we did the math regarding the fundraising for Fed's birthday. We raised $800 from the art sale that we donated to support the podcast project, Frontier War Stories, by Boe Spearim. If you haven't yet, check it out at https://boespearim.podbean.com/ And $500 from the art and bar that went to support House Conspiracy. Thank you for your generosity!

This was made possible by the kind hearts and talented hands of Mia Boe, Anna Carlson, Shelley Cheng, and Tianze Sun who donated their political art for the fundraiser.

Mutual Feelings

Eye Suriyanon - Still from Sonic Diaries

Mutual Feelings is Isabella Catanaro’s event production which brough together six local and international artists to explore personal journeys of suffering and the collectivisation of modes of resistance. We are wounded individually; collectively, we bear suffering.

The artists – six women and gender diverse people:

Ruaa Al-Rikabi

Zara Dudley

Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt

Kylie Spear

Eye Suriyanon

Kayla Tange

The artworks invited the audience to peek into the lives of the artists and the exhibition evoked a sense of public intimacy. I talked to Ruaa, Lucy, Kylie, and Zara (the Meanjin-based artists) about the meaning and message of their art and they brought me into their stories to show me a piece of themselves through their art.

Ruaa Al-Rikabi - from See You Soon

I had the pleasure to hear about the journey of Lucy and Ruaa’s mothers as migrants to Australia. Every story of migration is unique, but they all resonate with a similar vibrancy, especially in the ears of a migrant herself. One of Ruaa’s artworks was a collage of her mom’s photos and her letters to her beloved sent while travelling. The old photos and the Arabic calligraphy created a strong sense of memory. One of Lucy’s artworks was a series of photos representing her mom. One of these was digitally manipulated and unexpectedly introduced Lucy next to her young mother. The juxtaposition of Lucy and her young mother was powerful in the ways that it collapsed time and two lives that are culturally distant yet deeply and physically connected. It was inspiring to see the gratitude and respect of Lucy and Ruaa towards their mothers and to witness these young women’s awareness of the challenges of mothering, especially those peculiar to migrant women.

Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt - Digital manipulation

Through the work of Kylie Spear, the audience was presented with a different perspective on mothering and family. Kylie is the mother of a beautiful young girl and explored the theme of family connection at a time when the pandemic keeps us apart. Kylie’s work was a video projection of patterns in soft colours. The perfect 22nd century house decoration, maybe the reinvention of wallpaper in the age of hyper-technology. While the visuals recalled the interior design of a 1950s suburban house inhabited by a raising middle-class American family, the metallic sound that accompanied it disturbed the idyll and anchored me back in the present. The cacophony and the dreamy visuals created an effective push and pull from dream to reality and vice-versa. Kyle produced Interior in 2020 to honour her family which has been kept apart by the global Covid pandemic. She sourced the colours appearing in the visual projection from her home and the houses of her family members. Interior is the token of a new family model: powered by digital technologies.   

Kylie Spear - Stills from Interior

Zara Dudley - Matrimony

Zara’s piece invited contemplation of the relation between romantic love and violence. A wedding dress rolled up and pressed by a lifeless and heavy brick was lying next to small white swords, axes, and daggers. The weapons of war and violence. Zara positioned every object of her installation with precision. Alignment, direction, and a few knots suggest that those objects are the leftover of a ritual. Zara confessed an infatuation for romantic love and that Matrimony was her way to come to terms with it, a practice to recalibrate and find a new balance. She looks young and already burnt by the modern construct of love, the indomitable feeling of longing for the other half of our avocado that will complete us. We fight for it, but we suffer when we have it.

Kayla Tange - Still from Sacred Wounds

The exhibition also spoke of the dislocated identity of people who sit on the hyphen: Ruaa is Iraqi-Syrian-Australian; Lucy is Vietnamese and Samoan/Cook Islander Australian; Kayla Tange is Korean and was adopted by a Japanese American family; Eye Suriyanon, born in Thailand, is now living in the UK. How do you make sense of yourself when a world of national citizenship and borders cannot make sense of you? In search of an answer, we ride the waves of isolation, yearn for connection, objectification, abjection, exoticisation, refusal, and , if we are lucky, self-love. Sometimes these waves are far apart and leave us steep in the waters of our own self-generated feelings amplified by loneliness. Some other times, they play tag, and mesh and merge without prior consent. Kayla unravels the complicated feelings of an adopted child looking for her own identity in a world that eroticise and exoticize the figure of the Asian woman. In an artistic video, she wears a traditional Korean gown worn by the royal women of the Goryeo and Joseon Dynasty for ceremonial occasions. This dress was a collaboration between Kayla herself and Cypress Corsetry. The use of non-traditional colors in the robe and shibari rope for the undergarment frame this very personal narrative of being a South Korean orphan adopted by a Japanese American family and the historical conflict between the two cultures. It also calls attention to the fetishization of Asian women and how the art of burlesque has been a healing catalyst for her acceptance of her origin.

Ruaa embarked on a journey of self-acceptance and self-love with a piece featuring her curly, dark, and unruly hair trapped in disks of resin. She confessed to have a complicated relation with her hair because it does not conform to the standards of feminine beauty. This piece helped her come to terms and finally accept what she called “the undesirable features of my self-identity.” 

Self-acceptance and the difficult relationship that we have with ourselves and with others because of our identity are also the themes of Lucy’s second artwork, When you deny me my liberation I have no choice but to set myself free. This is a powerful and witty artwork that expressed a yearning for authenticity and a desire to stop being someone we are not. This is a poem printed red on red, only a few words are readable. The last line of the poem is the most readable, “In an effort to reach for sanity.” The audience dances back and forth looking for the words that can reveal Lucy’s story. This artwork is about Lucy’s experience of coming out as queer to her mother.

Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt - When you deny me my liberation I have no choice but to set myself free

In organising Mutual Feelings, Isabella, a non-binary emerging artist and curator in Meanjin, showed great sensibility towards the human experience, awareness of diversity of being and expression, and impressive organisational skills. House Conspiracy is also pleased that Mutual Feelings offered the opportunity to the Meanjin artists to re-emerge from the sleepiness of the pandemic and to the international artists to forge new connections overseas.

4zzz Exist Stage Zed

Film Night

We screen independent films and documentaries in our backyard garden. Entry is by donation. We recommend a monetary donation of $10 to help us cover the cost of our rent. We welcome any other donation you feel appropriate. We already value your presence!

16/10/20 Kaneshatake

270 Years of Resistance

2/10/20 Baraka

Katie Rasch

Katie Rasch is opening House Conspiracy new Garden Residency program. We are really pleased to have Katie who is using our garden to explore the Samoan concept of Va. Va is a word that describes sacred relationships, be it those between people or those between objects. It can be used to describe the relationship between a person and their community, where they sit in relation to other individuals and how they move and behave in that space.

Katie is a New Zealand born, Australian/Samoan woman living here in Meanjin on unceded Yuggera and Turrbul lands. She is an artist and filmmaker and most of her work up until this point has been in a video or photographic medium. Katie is now exploring the medium of nature, ideas of culture and belonging, and making art that is tactile and engages your senses.

“My residency at House Conspiracy is my first work in a physical medium and I am excited to create a space that fosters storytelling and community in the garden.”

About the work in the words of the artist

My work in the garden of House Conspiracy is primarily exploring the Samoan concept of Va. Va is a word that describes sacred relationships, be it those between people or those between objects. It can be used to describe the relationship between a person and their community, where they sit in relation to other individuals and how they move and behave in that space.

It can also refer to the physical space between objects. The night sky between the stars, or the ocean between our many many islands. It describes this space as not empty or void, but as a thing of its own that connects the objects that it surrounds. Practically this shows its self in the view of our ocean as a highway that connects islands and carries people, as opposed to an obstacle that needs to be overcome in order to travel.

I want to explore this concept in two ways, firstly through the physical space in the garden. I will be using traditional Pacifica tattooing patterns in the pathing through out the garden, as well as in the planting. I will also be using plants native to the tropics to help ground the space in a pacific identity. Lastly I hope to have a mural that uses more traditional patterns to depict the night sky on the back wall.

Secondly I will use this physical space to explore the relationship between my heritages and my space within the Pacifica community. Like myself, the space will have a clear pacific identity within a very Australian context. Just as the space will be grounded in the islands, it’s location and its history ground it firmly in Meanjin. I will be inviting other artists, weavers and story tellers to use the space and to build on its identity.

A Bed of Roses

Arbour Theatre Company has been rehearsing at the House for four weeks and will be doing an intensive this coming week. It is a pleasure to see the energy that the artists of Arbour bring to the house.

Arbour has been working to A Bed of Roses .

A Bed of Roses is the product of feelings and reflections originated by being in lockdown during a global pandemic. It asks what does it feel to be ‘in bed’ with people you'd really rather not be embedded with? It explores human connection as a way out of uncertainty, and towards a more positive community that is future- oeriented.

A Bed of Roses belongs to the tradition of devised theatre. It is an audience-focused show that examines what it feels like to co-exist for extended periods of time with people in extreme circumstances. Created with verbatim people’s stories of lockdown in the Covid-19 pandemic, the show will engage audiences in a house-party like environment, letting the audience become guests as they move through the show, watching action in different rooms.