By Jonathon O'Brian - 2017
1.
In a time when every new restaurant, eatery, or small artisanal store is plastered with feature walls and street art, and you're sitting in that store and your phone is buzzing at 90 second intervals, and Triple J is playing over the store radio while you have a podcast in one ear as you make the next six hours' to-do list—perhaps in a time such as this, the more radical thing to do is to leave a blank space, to let your environment breathe and have a simple life of its own. We do not need more noise. We need instead wider spaces between things, larger calms and smaller storms. House Conspiracy cannot simply be another loud thing competing for attention; we have enough of that already. Instead, let's make a place where we want to be—a place that is considered, and which understands perhaps the importance of breath.
2.
House Conspiracy is a place for art and it has six categorical spaces:
The Front Deck
The Yard
The Galley
The Upstairs & Studios
The Apartment Walls
The House Exterior
3.
House Conspiracy’s priority is to enable our chosen artists to create their art both individually and collaboratively, and to make any contribution to the space that they wish, in the way they feel will be most meaningful, with as much freedom as we can grant them (i.e. do not destroy structural walls) (n.b. all walls are structural walls). We want this House, with its long history of steadfast surliness, to be given a new and fluid life by a series of talented humans leaving their marks upon it, building with each other’s help some warm sort of scaffold across the course of a year. In this way, the House itself is the artwork.
Our Residencies are curated by application, are based on trust, and are shot towards nurturing House Conspiracy as a living artwork in and of itself. Artists should create change within the House which is thoughtful, and which allows space for things, and which builds upon what came before. Work for yourself, work with others, work on the house. We are here to create relationships, to facilitate multidisciplinary arts, and to help people cast their lines further out into the sea of Brisbane’s broader arts community.
4.
There are at this moment these large avocado things wrapped around 42 Mollison Street, a triad of massive four or ten metre walls that have kept the sun out of this house for almost twenty years. Aside from the inset canvasses and the cinema screen to be painted up the back, these walls are to be spaces for public art. These walls can and should be loud, preposterous, colourful things—an expression of whatever politics (liberal, conservative, alt-right, control-left, hopeful, pessimistic) or beauties (sunsets, gazes, corpses, bushfires, constellations, mountains) that can be imagined. These spaces are for you. Treat them well.
5.
But the wooden outside of the House must remain untouched. This home we call House Conspiracy must remain a home in its full exteriority—the space should continue on as an anomaly in its unassuming quiet amid the large rushes of corporate noise and development going on in this crucible we call West End.
This does not mean the exterior walls will not have a life of their own—it just means that any changes undertaken should be done carefully, and should be done only by the curated Resident artists, or by express application. Softness is the key.
6.
The Deck will be the only 24/7 publically accessible space. The Yard and The Galley will be available for hire and by booking, and The Studios will be exclusively for curated artists’ use. Everything will open up every three weeks at the end of each Residency cycle, during a recurring event we will call Open House. We will keep you posted.
7.
The Yard and The Galley will be kept otherwise private, we reason, out of respect to those hiring these spaces, and to the artists upstairs—so that those who have coordinated their time within House Conspiracy can know that they will have uninterrupted privacy when they need it, except when informed otherwise. This is a respectful place. Here, we do not want unwanted things.
8.
We launch on February 3rd, and to mark the occasion we’re gonna have a party no one will soon forget.
Everything that has happened so far has been exciting. 2017, we hope, will always be like this. A whole year of excitement on this property, this delicate epicentre of an evolving West End—a small and hardy house that has stayed still despite the noise.
9.
Thank you.
Jonathan O’Brien
Founding Creative Director
on behalf of House Conspiracy.