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A place in the nation: locality, governmentality and inhabiting the weaving lands

2009; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14443050903308675

1835-6419

Danielle Wyatt,

Crafts, Textile, and Design

Abstract In 2003 the local council of Hume initiated a community art project, The Weaving Lands, a sculpture woven from native and exotic grasses by a multi-ethnic group of weavers from and beyond the ethnically diverse, historically stigmatised neighbourhood of Broadmeadows, Victoria. The sculpture depicts a tree, 'The Galgi-gnarrak Yirranboi Tree' or, the Backbone of Tomorrow, named by Norm Hunter, a Wurundjeri elder. It is currently located in the foyer of Broadmeadow's Global Learning Centre, a public library and information hub, intended to revitalise this marginal locality. Beyond its local articulation of people to place, The Weaving Lands can be interpreted within a national register, as one amongst many cultural forms which perform national belonging. In shifting the interpretative framework of the project between local and national registers, this article considers the complex lived and symbolic experiences of belonging mobilised through the local address of community art. I am interested in the way community art's vernacular expressions of place relate to dominant conceptions of the nation, offering alternate imaginings of what it means to feel at home in the nation. Keywords: the localthe nationalcommunity artplacegovernancepostcoloniality Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 2006, p. 4. 2. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 4. 3. Doreen Massey, For Space, Sage, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 2005, p. 63. 4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 149. 5. Sally Warhaft (ed.), Well May We Say. The Speeches That Made Australia, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004, p. 169. 6. Mark Peel, The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 44. 7. Peel, The Lowest Rung, p. 3. 8. Peel, The Lowest Rung, p. 44. 9. Lateline, 4 September, 2008. 10. Martin Mulligan, Kim Humphrey, Paul James, Christopher Scanlon, Pia Smith and Nicky Welch, Creating Community Supplement: Social Profiles of Local Communities, The Globalism Institute, Melbourne, 2006, p. 17. 11. Gillian Cowlishaw, Blackfellas Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, p. 5. 12. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage London, 1999, p. 11. 13. Taken from an interview with Anne Kershaw, transcribed in 2006, p. 163. 14. Anne Kershaw interview transcript, p. 167. 15. Anne Kershaw interview transcript, p. 163. 16. Anne Kershaw interview transcript, p. 169. 17. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, Sage, London, 1995. 18. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 140. 19. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 140. 20. Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society, New Press, New York, 1997, p. 263.