By Tracy Sorensen
SYDNEY — An empty shop in Cabramatta has become a hive of artistic activity. With the help of artists from either side of the US-Mexican border (the "Border Art Workshop" — BAW), young people are being taught a range of image-making and story-telling techniques.
The BAW currently has an exhibition at the Bond Store at the Rocks, as part of the ninth Biennale exhibition.
The young people are learning, for example, to take polaroid photos from distorted video screen images, which they then project onto the wall with an opaque projector. The outline of this image is traced and painted to give an instant mural effect.
The aim is to create a multimedia installation piece in the shop, with the walls full of photography, painting, drawing, video monitors showing continuous images and so on. Written material — in exercise books or painted on the walls — may also be on display.
The intention isn't simply to practise some showy techniques. The aim of this project is to capture some of the smaller, unknown threads of the "big picture" of geography and social history.
The story of how people came to live, work and trade in Cabramatta touches on such events as the Vietnam War, detention centres in Hong Kong, precarious sea journeys in small boats and migrant hostels. Despite the politicians' talk about multiculturalism, these stories still need ferreting out and sharing, or they risk being lost in the picture of Australia served up in the mainstream media.
Yvonne, a year 11 student from Vietnam, told me she had spent 10 of her 17 years in a Hong Kong camp as her family waited to migrate. "You get used to it", she said.
The Border Art Workshop is a group of six San Diego-based artists who work on either side of the Mexico-US border. Their art, mainly performance and installation pieces, involves refugees, school students, farmers: ordinary people from the poor and sometimes war-torn countries of the south, whose yearning for a better life has caused them to take unbelievable risks.
The artists' commitment to involving others gives their work a rough and ready feel. A couple of years ago, they made it into
the pages of Time magazine when they stood along the US side of the border with enormous mirrors. Some citizens of San Diego were on a push to "clean up our border" and stop illegal trespassers. When they switched on their headlights to create security lights on the border, the BAW was there to shine the lights straight back into their eyes.
The BAW argues — and this comes across in the installation piece in the Bond Store — that a nasty double standard is at play. Illegal immigrants are very useful to the US economy, working for pittance wages in factories and orchards and as nannies for the middle class.
Is this art? It's a subject for debate. But those who have seen the BAW's Biennale piece could hardly dispute that standing in their decked-out room is a powerful experience.
In Cabramatta, they have gone to great lengths to share what they know about the gathering and artistic presentation of peoples' stories. While the group is clearly committed to social justice, the approach in Cabramatta has been inquiring, never didactic.
"We could have just worked with some hip art students", says BAW member Michael Schnorr. "But we wanted to do something more than that."
The four visiting artists — Schnorr, Carmela Castrejon, Susan Yamagata and Narciso Arguelles — will be going home before the Cabramatta project finishes. The project will probably continue until mid-April, when, if all goes to plan, a public viewing of the space will be held. (Meanwhile, work in progress can be seen through the shopfront window in the arcade in the new International Centre in Hughes Street, Cabramatta.)
The shop has been temporarily donated to the project by Cabramatta business woman Alice Lu. Funding for the project is from an Australia Council grant provided to bring young people of Indochinese background into contact with multicultural community arts. (The money is to pay for local arts workers and materials — the BAW is supported during its time here by the Readers Digest Foundation.)
The Cabramatta shop project is administered by the Fairfield Community Arts Network. New participants are welcome — contact me on (02) 727 8629.