Amy Perejuan-Capone is currently working with the community of Melville. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Know Thy Neighbour #3. 

Amy Perejuan-Capone works between Fremantle, the Perth hills, and international residencies. With a background in art and design, Perejuan-Capone’s practice is underpinned by an enquiry into the systems of exchange that are present through the acquisition and application of craft.

Here, Amy shares her progress on the project.

My engagement with the City of Melville has been pretty passive and low-key so far. That’s been my mind-set for a while now due to some burn-out from big projects and a series of family stresses. It’s been a time. But since my first Reflection for Know Thy Neighbour I’ve also smashed out getting a drivers license at the sensible age of 35! This project actually precipitated that process. Surprising to absolutely no one, it is really quite difficult to navigate space in Perth without a car, especially with a dog. Though if Shelly was allowed on busses or trains like dogs are in other parts of the world I don’t think I would have ever got my license.

Not being able to drive, or learning well into adulthood, seems to be quite common in the arts community around me. For me it’s been about anxiety, trust issues, sensory sensitivities, and moving out of home really young. And it costs A LOT if you don’t have willing parents to do the hours with you. I can mostly deal with the slow inconvenience of lugging shit around in the heat or rain on public transport, plus it’s greener. But the equation of ‘too anxious/busy/skint to learn how to drive’ vs ‘too old for this shit’ finally tipped over.

Leaving Shelly at home or frequently paying big money to a reluctant UberPet driver to get around for this project was my hard limit. Travelling for my Know Thy Neighbour residency to the dog friendly spaces of the City of Melville was becoming very tax-deductable and emotionally taxing. Being at the park with Shelly and all the other dogs and folk for research was enriching but always clouded by the usually arduous prospect of getting home. UberPet is an excellent service, but understandably many drivers are not keen on hosting dogs for a myriad of practical, personal, or cultural reasons.

In the months of this project I’ve had a fair few interestingly fraught trips. In March I met a young driver who agreed to take us after I promised Shelly was cool. We got talking and he admitted he has a phobia of dogs because he’d witnessed his mum get badly mauled when he was a kid. The guy had been so stressed when he arrived and saw me with Shelly, and I was his first ride with a dog. His honesty about something so traumatic during our brief exchange was unexpected, but I felt grateful he’d kept the ride and a little guilty about the discomfort it caused him. It was mutually awkward, but we chatted and I learned a little about a dog phobic perspective and he learned that Shelly was indeed very cool (from the safe distance of the back seat). Far from an ideal situation, at least our brief confined interaction yielded something of a positive connection.

By virtue of these tricky journeys my residency with the City of Melville has til now been more about gaining an intimate familiarity with material reality of the streets than interacting with the community per se. I could say I have now done precisely 21 expensive hours of a mobile residency whilst learning to drive, repeatedly crunching my instructors poor car around the S.O.R. suburbs of Canning and Leach Highways. My instructor lives in Applecross so I unofficially made him my first resident-participant. We endlessly discussed the mutual obligation of drivers on the road to trust each other and be responsible, and I reflected that that’s much like obligations of dog owners in public space. I kind of miss him now our temporary relationship doesn’t have its reason anymore.

Now Shelly rides shotgun while I ferry us around those streets from park to park and home like we own the place. It’s too too easy, we have to remember to stay humble. We have joined the 70% of dog owners who drive their pups to exercise areas. I owe it to her to make her world bigger and more varied than what I can regularly walk to from our house, and this in turn has lifted a lot of stress and given me more energy. What I see myself loosing in this process though is the millions of incidental interpersonal interactions of moving through space in a publicly accessible way (either walking/riding or transport). Exposure to these interactions humanises us, rather than stepping out of our moving bubbles a completely fresh stranger.

The fleeting nature of public space often means both verbal and non-verbal negotiations occur constantly, quickly and are easily derailed. This is quite the cognitive load for me, the lifting of which I think is partly responsible for me having more energy now. But I have to be wary of this inclination; less exposure may weaken my fragile resilience. Shelly has been essential for making this arduous process more tolerable, and a vector for brief positive human encounters that help with buoyancy and trust.

I guess how all this relates to my time in the City of Melville is this: Perth is famously a place for cars and this reliance is both infrastructural and cultural. Ideally I’d like to be able to traverse the scattered islands of dog parks (and other amenities) without having to resort to a private car, further entrenching personal isolation. But changing this is more than just local government policy of maintaining adequately connected dog-friendly areas, its a slow cultural negotiation at a wild frontier of misunderstanding. And trust building. If we barely trust the faceless yobbo in a car, how do we trust that the dog owner in front of us is a responsible chap? That his dog too is cool? For the most part we are decent, and repeated exposure to that in public and semi-public space helps. Perth is a long way from accepting dogs on public transport, but it is possible, and strengthening mutual trust is part of the process I think.

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