In here:
- Your next speakers’ circuit is on February 9 (Sunday evening)
2. Membership renewals are coming up
3. A quiet summer
Your Next Speakers’ Circuit is on February 9 (Sunday Evening)
Expect an email for this free (ticketed) event during the week and book out your (Feb 9) Sunday evening.
If you’d like to share a short story of your process or share something with the audience during that evening (there is another main speaker) please let me know.
Membership Renewals are Coming Up
Membership renewals are synced for all members whether you are a member because of:
- public liability insurance
- or for future connections in the community (events, meetups and collaborations)
- or you want to see more art and creativity happening in this area
You will get an email in the coming fortnight on how to renew online.
A Quiet Summer
Perth comes alive during Summer. Longer days, warm nights, beaches. Many people shut themselves up for winter, emerging only when the days heat up. But this Summer something different has happened in Bassendean. So very little action. Some might say: dead. Even the Bassendean Arts December newsletter remains in draft and unreleased.
In the November newsletter I (re)introduced the idea of options for the revitalisation of Bassendean. In this newsletter I reveal the biggest mistake people make when thinking of community, economics and growth. It starts with your schooling. I bet you made many friends at school and can’t even recall how this happened. You saw a bunch of people everyday for years and built trust and friendship. Yet when school ended different interests took people in different directions. This is because regular contact with people builds trust (and why teams in the workplace can form strong bonds). Many of you will keep friends from prior workplaces, in most cases the friendship deepens once you are no longer in the workplace.
When thinking of community we are encouraged to think of built forms. In many cases the built form is drafted and presented to communities as “complete”. It’s what I call spreadsheet thinking (or feature thinking) and is often in the form of a master plan.
In the last newsletter I teased the release of a strategy for Bassendean. But since then I have reconsidered when and how this may occur. For now, it’s important to explain what is happening to people (which can be categorised in three ways):
1. The daily touch. Daily familiarity being conflated with “community” – for those who want a better workplace (ToB admin and Swan Districts football club admin) they can find value in the corner office. This is because they have daily, frequent interactions with each other and occasional interactions with community. This creates familiarity and trust with daily acquaintances. It’s how “clubs” are formed but it is not genuine community.
2. National Park(ing). This way of thinking values things that are not experienced everyday but give you the feeling of being important even if you don’t visit or use them. National parks can be like that. The river in Bassendean can be like that. Most people will say they value the river “being there” whether they use it or not. A football oval and grandstands can also bring out this feeling. So can a library, a town hall or a park.
3. The Something-is-better-than-nothing myth. People can think this way when they feel they don’t know what is going on, they don’t think they care and/or they want any form of change no matter what happens.
Setting aside the “moving the goalposts” [oval redevelopment] we can apply these themes to our own lives and to the future of Bassendean Arts.
Firstly, almost all artists strongly connect with National Park(ing). We sense and feel the world around us and our reaction to our own creations. We at once recognise our work is communicating and the result of communication, regardless of who sees it. We feel the value in our practice and work even if this is not witnessed by others. This sense inside us can be vast and enlivening, like a national park. We know other artists can feel this way and knowing there are other artists in the community can be enough to grow this feeling. It also means when we get together there is a strong familiarity (and trust) from this sensibility, even if the expression of that sensibility (or the logic of the situation) differs.
Most artists are catalysts for change. It’s harder work to be an artist who repeats themselves like a factory (worse than boring it’s damaging to the artist). We know in our practice that something-is-better-than-nothing because the something is a (re)start. It’s the catalyst for change. We recognise it is the practice that matters and the outcome can be discarded or changed. By starting we remove locks and certainty and reconnect with sensibility.
This brings me to the daily touch. It’s in our nature to express our creativity daily. But in Bassendean this feeling and practice is rarely collaborative. In fact, very few people in Bassendean connect as a community daily. I play football (soccer) and train a lot and seeing people once a week is very slow for building trust because familiarity is fleeting with too large a time gap. We see this daily familiarity in schools and school drop offs. There is very clearly a difference in Bassendean between those with pre/primary-school-age children and everyone else. This is because the design of Bassendean and vitality of Bassendean has never been about daily interactions for the community. Most people would be embarassed to not think of this as the starting point. But it is.
When Bassendean Arts has a space for artists and informal daily interactions, everything changes. Until then we will enjoy National Park(ing).
This reminds me of a Youtuber named Casey Neistat who became extremely popular through a daily VLOG filmed in New York. After a few years he decided to start a physical space, perhaps not realising he had already surpassed that step. In other words, not all communities are physical but almost all communities have a daily component (or more than twice a week). Some communities are about familiarity+possibility.
Bassendean Arts’ Platform in an Election Year?
State elections are in March, federal elections will happen before June and Bassendean council elections are in October. It’s a year of change and renewal. If you would like to be involved in drafting a platform for Bassendean Arts to take to the October council elections then let me know.