Bunker Rulz 4: Pacify despair. The desire for comfort diminishes our ability to feel for others and act in solidarity. The Colony needs us to lack empathy for the people and things it exploits, and offers comfort and pain relief to ensure our compliance in the face of ongoing injustice.
Despair is frowned upon, taboo, don’t talk about it. Depression is often seen as contagious, something to hide and to lift yourself out of, a personal responsibility, a shameful trait, a human defect, not the symptom of a societal root cause. We medicate despair, opt for comfort to smother it. But comfort is corrosive, it eats away at our ability to feel empathy when we pacify our deeper, less comfortable emotions.
How do we smother our grief?
What happens to our empathy when we pacify our emotions? How do we debunk the myth that comfort is safe? Who benefits from collective hopelessness? How do we embrace despair?
What can't we afford to feel, think or say?
Fabricated Emotions
Fabricated Emotions are emotional beings crafted from textiles, blankets and discarded clothing to explore how we really feel. Curated as a series of sculptural installations, Fabricated Emotions will be made with artists and communities in response to despair and anger arising from climate crises, inter-sectional violence and systemic injustice.
Lost Flock (On the Consequences of Comfort)
Lost Flock offers a sneak preview of a larger work by textile artist Deborah Prior to be launched at Fabrik Arts & Heritage Lobethal. Collaborating with Jen and Carl on Fabricated Emotions, the woollen shelter installation explores the suppression of despair, the numbing of pain and avoidance of feelings in the name of comfort. How do we celebrate comfort as quicksilver?
Can you see me now?
Can you see me now? is an update on the 2018-19 collaboration between Ngarrindjeri poet Clyde Rigney Jnr, Jen Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell. The sculpture uses poetry and Ngarrindjeri archival images of Clyde’s ancestors Grace and Daniel Gollan, printed on mirrors, to explore despair, identity and numbness. How do we embrace our despair in solidarity?
Provocateurs corner: The installations explore the suppression of despair, the numbing of pain and avoidance of feelings in the name of comfort. Comfort for whom? How comfortable are we with injustice, with the ongoing deaths in custody, the over-representation of Aboriginal people in our prisons, with refugees rotting in offshore camps? We can be comfortable because our privilege protects us, but this desire for comfort diminishes all our experiences and our willingness to fight selflessly for the rights of everyone to live a dignified life.
Curators: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell
Creative development, creation and sculpture/ installation: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell, Clyde Rigney Jnr, Deborah Prior, Cedric Varcoe, Felix Weber
Projection art: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell, Clyde Rigney Jnr
Provocations, text and cartoons: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell
Poetry: Poets tba
Photos: Change Media
Venues: FabriK Arts Lobethal, Nov 7 - Dec 6 - and you can find some of the works across all our venues. https://fabrik.org.au/contact/