North by Southeast Residency: Gustav Hellberg in Ravensthorpe #3

Gustav Hellberg is currently working with the community of Ravensthorpe, Western Australia, as part of the Spaced North by Southeast program.

The foundation of Gustav Hellberg’s artistic practice lies in the public sphere, where he aims for interaction between people, artwork and public space. The interventions he seeks play on memories and perceptions of a certain setting, creating a visual and poetic argument that draws attention to seemingly insignificant situations of the urban backdrop of everyday life.

Here, Gustav shares an update from Ravensthorpe.

It is now three weeks until I will board a plane bound for Perth and then Hopetoun, to continue the project I started in February 2017. It is getting hectic to get the last pieces together. The project has now been formed into a concrete plan. Some ideas and elements that I have been working with didn’t develop in a way I had hoped for. Others have developed and will be the solid backbone of the next session in Hopetoun and Ravensthorpe.

The video interview material I made with citizens of Hopetoun will probably not become a new version of Future Scanner, as was planned. The reason for putting this part on hold is that I need all focus on the main work, tracing human activities on the land. The interviews were not made in vain as the stories told have been used as resource in the development of the core intention.

During the autumn I have been gathering material around the Aboriginal history as it relates to the Ravensthorpe region. I have also connected to people who are now assisting me in finding people who are willing to participate and share their voice, telling their story(ies) about the land.

I will be landing in Perth on 17 January for some additional research as well as gathering equipment needed for the video shoots in Hopetoun.

In Hopetoun I am going to meet up with a group of primary school pupils. They are going to be actors in the film, or more correctly they are going to play in front of the camera. I am trusting the kid’s ability to use fantasy and their ability to play around with a topic presented to them in advance. The kids are going to play explorers. First, they are going to be exposed to how film industry has depicted explorers and their quests as heroic undertakings. At the same time, we will discuss what they know about the land surrounding their homes. That will be the foundation for their play. This party will then be moving through the surrounding landscapes, looking for traces of human activity, which they then will mark with flashing light units. All this will be filmed on the ground as well as from the sky.

During my stay in WA the plan is to record the voices of people whose ancestors once roamed freely over this region. The history of the displacement of Aboriginal people has marked this region hard. The 1880 massacre of local Aboriginal people is maybe the main reason why today there are so few people of Aboriginal Australian descent who live in the region.