Arrivals and Departures
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Dr. Sarah Barns gave a presentation at the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference about her postdoctoral research on negotiating geographies of displacement at Barangaroo in Sydney, Australia. She discussed the meaning of place for a city, people, and ideas. She also explored how public collections can function as digital public spaces and the archive as an active, experiential platform. Additionally, she examined how access to the city is negotiated and the right to the city as well as participatory place-making. Her research considered the relational possibilities between informational and physical places using sound, spatial media, and responsive environments. She analyzed Barangaroo Headland in Sydney as a site of spatial practice.
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Arrivals and Departures
- 1. Arrivals and Departures: Negotiating geographies of displacement at Barangaroo Sydney, Australia Dr. Sarah Barns Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow Western Sydney University American Association of Geographers Annual Conference San Francisco, March 29 2016
- 2. Meaning of place What is the meaning or contribution of a particular place – to a city, to a person, to an idea? Archives Public collections as ‘digital public spaces’ The archive as an active, experiential platform. Film, TV, sound, image Public space How do we negotiate access to the city? The right to the city Participatory place- making Digital Relational possibilities between informational and physical places Sound, spatial media, responsive environments Sites of spatial practice
- 3. Site-writing as spatial practice “Space is not a static slice orthagonal to time, it has time/times within it” Doreen Massey
- 6. The city has been viewed as an arena for consumerism. Political and commercial expediency has shifted the emphasis of urban development from meeting the broad social needs of the community to meeting the circumscribed needs of individuals. The pursuit of this narrow objective has sapped the city of its vitality. Richard Rogers
- 7. 1820s
- 8. c1925
- 11. Pre 1961 finger wharves
- 13. Living heritage: generations of families on the waterfront
- 16. Arrivals and Departures Welcome Celebrations, The Cutaway October 2015
- 18. Arrivals and Departures Welcome Celebrations, The Cutaway October 2015
- 19. Arrivals and Departures Welcome Celebrations, The Cutaway October 2015
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for having me here today. The work I’m presenting relates to a temporary public art initiative I co-produced and launched last October through my art practice Esem Projects. It concerned one of the most hotly contested urban development sites in Sydney. The installation– called ‘Arrivals and Departures’ - was a major commission by the site owners to mark the launch of new public headland and major cultural facility called ‘The Cutaway’ that sits underneath the park. It developed a public archive of the site drawing on public and community collections, and re-inscribed these into the landscape using digital storytelling and installation techniques. In sharing this project as part of the session today, my intention is to show how a practice-led story-telling response addressed the complexity of its historical context, and the contests around its positioning today. By drawing on both the conventions of collaborative digital storytelling using community and institutional archives, and the resources of cultural geographers as they understand place, the installation presented the history of the site in an experiential way, engaging multiple communities, institutions and custodians. While it doesn’t pretend to resolve the many thorny issues currently surrounding the site’s use, I hope to show that the methods and tactics used for engagement promoted a more open, inclusive and engaging approach to place-based interpretation.
- Backgrounder Before I introduce the project, its worth clarifying my background and position here. I am currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, funded by a Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the Urban Studies Foundation in the UK. This Fellowship primarily supports research on the impact of digital platforms in shaping the experience and governance of cities Before my Fellowship I have worked as a curator, a public artist and producer, and creative industries adviser, among other things. In 2011 I established Esem Projects with visual artist Michael Killalea as a vehicle for exhibiting and presenting site-specific interpretation work. My practice-led work within public spaces over the past decade was acknowledged by the Urban Studies Foundation as an important direction for urban and cultural geographers. Working not only about but also in public spaces I have developed these core domains of spatial practice for my work. Public space, Digital, Meanings of place to a city, and re-imagining the place of the archive.
- Esem Projects …. I have found collaborations with artists, designers & technical specialists essential to the delivery of work in the public domain Launched in 2011 with a digital projection project developed with the residents of Millers Point, adjacent to this site, today Esem Projects continues to work with communities across Australia and New Zealand, to produce temporary programming and events in public spaces. In working in the public domain, the intention has always been to embed experiential encounters within a community’s recorded geography within the built fabric. Both large and small scale digital projection is used as a tool for site-writing. This draws on Doreen Massey’s conception of spatiality, not simply as an ‘empty container’ within which events occur. As Massey has put it space is not “a static slice orthogonal to time” but has “time/times within it. This is not the static simultaneity of a closed system but a simultaneity of movements” (Massey 2003: 108). Massey has been a major inspiration for my work and with her passing this year I wanted to acknowledge her major influence.
- Mixed with other spatial interventions and performances, from silent discos, audio tours to vintage typewriting, these events build new collective experiences of place as a simultaneity of moments, a kind of historical topography of events and encounters. The connection between theory and practice is vital, in the attempt to enlargen the imaginative possibilities of place-based encounter. Archives are not simply media artefacts, they offer a resource of the different time-spaces of the city through which to disrupt established practices of place branding, and place marketing.
- How, then, did these ideas inform our approach to place-making at Barangaroo? To give you some basic facts: This is a 22 hectare site, with a 150 year history as Sydney’s premier maritime shipping site. For years the spectacle of Barangaroo has graced the front pages of Sydney newspapers, as successive state governments determine a course for the future development of this prime waterfront landmark.
- Controversy has centred around the $2bn, 75-story Crown Casino to be developed on the site by media and gambling magnate Jamie Packer. Opposed by the City of Sydney, who has been overruled by State Government, the site breaks height of buildings regulations and process of public participation have been poor. As one critic has said: “Like a giant finger given to Sydney, everything about it is selfish and narcissistic: its excessive height, public exclusion, and monopolisation of harbour views for a wealthy few.” The local architect community feels particularly let down by the site’s master planner, Lord Richard Rogers. The feeling here is that he appears to have forgotten the principles that set him apart as such an impressive and articulate champion of the architect as an agent of social capital: As said by The city has been viewed as an arena for consumerism. Political and commercial expediency has shifted the emphasis of urban development from meeting the broad social needs of the community to meeting the circumscribed needs of individuals. The pursuit of this narrow objective has sapped the city of its vitality.3
- Part of the dismay reflects the importance of the site to the city’s historical development. As a key site for maritime trade, which in turn saw Sydney emerge as a significant South Pacific port, what happened here shaped the formation of the city’s identity over time.
- Reflecting the interrelationships between maritime trades and urban identity through time, the site was drawn and redrawn to accommodate changing maritime technologies.
- This saw a very literal reshaping of the headland: from the natural contours of the harbour, to the construction of finger wharves, to containerisation and the introduction of a ‘concrete ribbon’.
- The site has been fundamental to the growth of the maritime union and, in turn, the growth of organised labour in Australia. The ‘Hungry Mile’ remains emblematic of the suffering of depression era workers, forced to look for labour on a daily basis using the ‘Bull pitt’ where men competed for a day’s wage based on their size and strength. Peter Garret speaks.
- Post-war immigration and travel
- The housing in the area was managed by the Maritime Services Board after an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1903. Today there residents who five generations of families
- The redevelopment of the Barangaroo headland has resulted in the wholesale removal of any traces of maritime history and its social expression. Even the name is new: Barangaroo is the name given to the partner of one of the most respected Eora elders encountered by the first settlers to Sydney cove in 1788; she came from Manly and was not associated with the area.
- While the community have fought against eviction notices, the architectural community decried the urban design and the historians have criticised the lack of respect to the industrial archeology of the site. In many respects, this is an experience familiar in many port-based cities subjected to gentrification. Its just that the residents in this area have been lucky enough to hold on for this long. As it is, we have tragic stories of people in their eighties with five generations of family having grown up here, now being forced out.
- Turning to the site-specific response to this environment, Arrivals and Departures embedded the arrival of Barangaroo headland within a dynamic history of arrivals and departures at the site: of comings and goings, of embracing new futures, of letting go. Rather than a standardised historical timeline of events clipped together like mangets, the installation re-instated a geography of multiple time/spaces, using the device of the shipping container as ‘storyboxes’. We worked closely with local residents past and present to build a new cross-institutional archive of arrivals and departures.
- Each story box incorporated photographic, filmic, documentary and other sources to create emotive spaces for connection with these time spaces. From children, to workers, to life at sea, to moments of letter writing, to reflective conversation. Each of these represented approaches to the navigation and experience of memory – like a kind of memory palace, perhaps.
- Using filmic resources, we emphased the way geographies of time-spaces adhere to notions of rhythmic movement and process, which are always, in their spatial constitutions, multiple and heterogeneous (May and Thrift: 3). MUA collections, Sydney Harbour Foreshore, SLNSW, etc Many of the institutions are in fact actively at war with each other.
- Drawing from the work of Thrift and others, the practice-based response to this site incorporated non-representational geographies of temporality to promote “relational rather than representational understandings. We interrogated this as an emotional landscape. How has the experience of loss and departure shaped the historical resonances of the site? At that moment of departure, how did you feel? How long could you see my face, distinctively, before it became one of a sea of faces, waving arms, tiny men? Did you stay to watch the outlines of the ship as it departed the harbour? How long did you linger there, after it was gone? Did you rush home, to get on with life and laundry, or stay awhile, to drift within a space you imagined might still hold my breath within it? Would you long for me daily, or, with strict rationing, think of me only long enough ‘til the first tear was plucked from your eyes?
- How might those returning to this site after a long absence respond? I We interviewed many people for the project, a number of whom returned with great emotion to see their moments of arrival recognised as part of the site’s living history.
- In one container we offered a space for letter writing using vintage typewriting, responding to the arts of letter writing – letters tether distant souls
- Listening stations accompanied each storybox, offering different personal narratives, poetry, reflections and conversations about the site. One story shared by a former resident told of a woman who would sing goodbye to the soldiers departing the war by singing ‘Now is the Hour’ a maori farewell song. We played this song throughout the cavernous space of the Cutaway. People cried, those familiar with its importance during WW2.
- What were, ultimately, the outcomes? I’ll play a short video of the work shot outside of visiting hours. You can see online images of the launch which attracted some 12,000 people on the day. The installation was temporary, it was ephemeral, and it won’t do a damn thing to save the residents of Millers Point or reduce the size of Jamie Packer’s casino. But for the 60,000 estimated people who visited the exhibition over the course of the month, it offered different insights into the stories of a Sydney headland they likely hadn’t been to before. Many pleaded with us to keep it up longer, but the site owners are caught in long term battles over how best to use this space. Being temporary gave us more freedom. Many pleaded with us to keep it up longer, but the site owners are caught in long term battles over how best to use this space. Being temporary gave us more freedom. As a practice-led geographer, I hope it articulated the possibilities of connecting affective geographies of place with the tools of installation practice. Using community engagement, archive research and digital storytelling helped to extend the possibilities of experiential spatial encounter. This, in turn, helped to cultivate conditions of public participation and help to affirm and give voice to Massey has called “the simultaneity of stories so far”