CREATED+CREMATED

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Presented by Footscray Community Arts Centre and JOLT Arts.

Footscray Community Arts Centre, Smorgon Gallery and Centre Grounds.
1–23  September  2017

Lead Community participants

Uncle Larry Walsh
Barthélémy Malacquis
Morgan Brady
Khalid Warsame

The first iteration of this project was presented under the title Swarmlings at Brauveiller Abbey outside the city of Cologne in Germany 2010 for the Streams Music Festival. For that project I scavenged items from the hard-rubbish collection of the town of Brauveiller. Local residents took much delight in seeing their hard-rubbish items reused to create an evolving artwork. For the project Hullick used little purpose built tapping machines to make sound with the installation that was created.

With the new project, Created+Cremated at Footscray Community Arts Centre, the project has found new life – largely through the participants who contributed their items and video interviews to the project.

The work in this installation has been created in a rapid improvised manner (since Monday before opening night on Friday), mindful that many items in the exhibition with be burnt in a ritual on 23 September, replaced back to the gallery, and then most of it ultimately taken to the tip at the exhibition’s close.

Nearly all of the items in the exhibition are second hand and reused, or excess material from some other project — right down to small things like screws and so on.

Unlike Swarmlings, Created+Cremated has become much more of a meditation on people and their attachments to material things. In contemplating this I have found myself thinking my own attachments — artists gather ‘materials’ and artworks. Are they really worth keeping?

One final comment is that many people have contributed to the work that you see. It has been a delight to share the making process with people entering the space and being responsive and inclusive about imagining their voices into a shared, improvised, gleeful rubbish-filled experience.