Tina Stefanou is currently working with the community of Carnamah. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.

Tina Stefanou is an Australian-Greek artist based on Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field.  Informed by diasporic experiences, Stefanou engages in sound as social practice and explores with and beyond the all-too-human and more-than-human voice.

Here, Tina shares an update from Carnamah.

What is an artist supposed to do with all this?

Lots of Agro-economical-structural oddities happening, like the local tip, where locals leave their unwanted things, recycling, and rubbish. It’s an amphitheatre for the discarded. It’s too expensive for the council to send the recycling to Perth, so it builds up in local landfill creating mini mountains, sculpting the land into a Mad Max scene. I am thinking of a trash orchestra.

Of course, the peculiarities of waste exist in the city too, it’s just out here with the expansiveness of the landscape and the beauty of the salt lakes in the distance, the tip screams louder.

The Scribes is a local writing group, who get together at the Exchange (community centre) every fortnight. I attend their meet-up, and they share the stories they have been collecting and transcribing from conversations with local community members, farmers, nurses, and veterans. They want to interview younger people but find themselves drawn to the eighty and ninety-year-olds. These stories are making their way into a large book, a gift to the community, a way to pass on stories before the next generation depart.

After each meet-up, Marcelle the main facilitator of the group sets writing tasks, this week the task is to write about what each member learns from younger or older generations. They each share their written reflections. From the youth they receive technological literacy, climate change awareness and an openness to change. From the older generation they receive stories, ways to live, and pre-digital skills. Their writing is not convoluted or performative in an academic or art writing sense, where one gets caught in the tightly woven knots of demonstrating one’s intellect and position. The writing shared at Scribes is an extension of talking-out-loud and personal expression; it is very honest, a type of write-speak, where the grain of one’s situatedness is present.  One member in his sixties puts on his cap sideways and does a slam poetry rendition of his reflections on youth. He is bombastic and playful and enjoys performing his words.

The book Scribes is gifting to the community is co-funded by the CBH Group, one of Australia’s largest grain producers and distributers. You can see its transport network throughout the Midlands and their monumental silos hum at the edge of town. Around the table, the consensus is that companies like this should be investing their profits into the rural towns they benefit from. The grain of the town are the voices that fill it, the collectives of volunteers who give their time to one another and create spaces for building relation.

I notice there is no singing group in Carnamah, perhaps starting one is a way to be of service? I wonder if it will take.

Images courtesy of the artist.

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