The Writing Project

Exhibition launch:

6pm Wednesday 9 January 2013

Gallery floor talk:

5pm Wednesday 9 January 2013

Project discussion panel:

6pm Friday 11 January 2013

Exhibition open:

Wednesday 9 January - Saturday 26 January 2013

The Writing Project is a rare opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaborative critical arts writing projects to be produced throughout Australia and launched in Adelaide ARI, FELTspace. This project brings together sixteen significant arts practices to produce and publish four unique outcomes.

FELTspace, with the generous support of the Australia Council for the Arts is thrilled to support the development of emergent arts making, writing, design and curatorial practices in the four successful projects.

We would like to congratulate the four teams, of artists, writers, designers and curators, chosen to take part in The Writing Project:

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE (VIC): Jacqui Shelton / Therese Keogh / Tim Royall / Vivien Hollingsworth

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE is a collaborative motion towards the overlapping principles of art-writing and town-planning. Through investigative processes of navigation, we analyse the gridded forms of Melbourne and Adelaide, employing systems of inscription and reflexion as methods of engaging with site. Writing is used as a collaborative tool, a research method and a way of extending production and dissemination. The project explores the 'grid', apparent in the streetscape of both cities, as a way of organising space and circumscribing routes of movement. BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE looks to art-historical investigations of space in order to study the potential of spatial intervention as well as the act of intervening in pre-existing interventions.

CRAZY IN LOVE (VIC): Brennan Olver / Holly Childs / Rohan Whiteley / Oliver van der Lugt

CRAZY IN LOVE (CIL) is a collaborative publishing project representing young, emerging and experimental creatives working across art, design, music, fashion, and written practices. Each issue is an edition of 1000 double-sided A2 posters distributed nationally and internationally for FREE. A key curatorial concern is to explore the relevance of printed publication within post-internet culture, acknowledging the analogue/digital hybridity of contemporary discourse. CIL bridges the gap between local and international contexts by having no geographical restriction on the contribution of content. The publication is innovatively designed, making use of the potentials offered by an object that can be printed, folded, overlapped, turned, flipped, hung, seen from afar and up close. CIL will also be available online at: crazyinlovemagazine.com with supplementary digital content. It is edited, designed and curated by Holly Childs, Brennan Olver, Oliver van der Lugt and Rohan Whiteley. The first issue of Crazy in Love is supported by the 2012 FELTspace Writing Project.

NUCLEI (TAS): Laura Hindmarsh / Claire Krouzecky / Alex Nielsen / Fernando do Campo

On a small island floating somewhere between mainland Australia and the Antarctic…

… four emerging creatives choose four sites to visit over four days as a way of introducing their practices to one another. Places of social, political and historical significance are framed and focused through the lenses of four diverse artistic practices.

Exchanges between artist, writer, curator and architect are documented, mapped and contextualised collectively, offering an intimate and immediate insight into the way each practitioner engages with the Tasmanian locale. The resulting publication will function as an expanded form of critique, its content unfolding via circumnavigation around the island state, as hidden or remote sites are uncovered and the expanse of Tasmania explored. Nuclei documents a journey around this myriad landscape.

SAME (NSW): Marian Tubbs / Jack Jeweller / Robert Milne / Eleanor Weber

Semio-collector publishing

We experience everything without going on holiday, without actually having the experience, a semio-fictive reality. Virtual fantasies are translated into tangible representations of the real in the 'art book', and the experience of the real in the art space. Like an assemblage it provides a correct record of our time, by way of collecting the whirlwind of jpegs, pngs and tifs available, SAME masticates and vomits them back out. It articulates a desire to distort and reflect the world cloaked in itself; the apparent ideal of itself? The blogging and reblogging of someone else's moment, ruminates on a 'grass is always greener' mentality and a Semiocapitalist experience-economy. The image of the cool refreshing drink on the beach, or view from a Greek island - no disenfranchised citizens in sight - only the chic holiday ideal. When an image is selected from the duration of an experience, it shows the moment of affection, distilling duration to the frame of affect. The blogger expects the audience to be affected also, leaning on the culture machine already in place, to have sculpted a collective consciousness. It is the sublime brochure of a surreal dreamlike meshing of things experienced online. One is in control of this experience as much as she is in control of the direction of a dream. Surfing a labyrinth. This is an ultimate simulation: reflecting only on the screen, SAME appropriates anonymous memories to construct new experiences.

While the four projects are running concurrently, some have websites and project updates viewable online. There will be continuous activity throughout the project period (June 2012 - February 2013), some with the intention of kick-starting publications that will be ongoing after the project period, however all four projects will be launched collectively at FELTspace.

The Writing Project is a FELTspace initiative. Facilitated by the FELTspace directorial committee, coordinated by Polly Dance and administrated by an external team of Adelaide-based emerging arts writers, Jemima Kemp and Alex Tuffin. For more information please contact Project Coordinator, Polly Dance at: feltspace@gmail.com

The Writing Project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.