REVIEW: Sleepers Awake, MCA C3West Project, Bungaribee

Last night I went out to Blacktown to experience the MCA’s latest C3West commission, Heather and Ivan Morison’s Sleepers Awake. The C3West initiative has been running since 2006 and is a partnership project connecting artists with non-arts government organisations and businesses around Greater Sydney.

Which is why projects like this are compelling in the ways they seem to authentically connect local audiences, communities and artists, but also in the ways they uncouple ideas about where art can be made or expected, who that art is for and what function it serves. So I was excited to experience it.

In truth I also had a vested interest in the work of Ivan and Heather Morison, and this work in particular. At one stage Sleepers Awake was slated for installation in Peckham as part of the South London Gallery’s consistently brilliant SLG Local program. For reasons that now make sense (large, illuminated hot air balloon in densely residential, busy, occasionally unsafe, corner of London…) the work was never realised there but out in Blacktown, set amongst the expanse of Bungaribee at Western Sydney Parkland, it has all the room it needs to breathe and exist.

Over the course of the last two weekends this illuminated beacon has risen at dusk and kept extraordinary company with a community performance festival. Last night we saw a short film and spoken word performance by a local Sudanese poet reflecting on his experiences as a refugee in Australia. It was raw and honest and incredibly powerful to hear these awful experiences articulated so poetically. Then there was a performance by two young musicians from Minto and a “neo-burlesque” dance troupe taking on Picnic at Hanging Rock. We left before the end of the programme but there was B-boying and an Indonesian dance demonstrations to come after that.

It really did feel like a community festival – and I don’t mean that derivatively. I say it because the Western Sydney artists, performers and musicians who featured on the stage were joined by obviously local families who turned up with picnic blankets and pillows and small children in pajamas. Their voices, their neighbours, their territory. Us blow-ins were the novelty really.

Reflecting on the way Sleepers Awake existed within this incredibly unpretentious environment – which was also literally expansive and increasingly cold and dark – I keep coming back to the idea of the google map pin. Except here the pin is enormous and illuminated – shining this mesmerising, benevolent, warm light on the parkland and the performance space and the picnic area. It said: this is somewhere, this is worth knowing/exploring/visiting, this place and these experiences and these people exist. Maybe that’s heavy-handed and emotional or naive but I think it’s a testament to the way a great work of public art – even or especially a temporary one – can provoke a new way of thinking about and negotiating a space, geographically or intellectually.

Mark Wallinger, Zone, Munster Skulptur Projekt, 2007.

In some ways it reminds me of Mark Wallinger’s work at the 2007 Munster Sculpture Project in Germany. Zone was a three-mile long, fishing line-thin, taut cord that traced the route of the old city walls that once encompassed this ancient German town. The cord though, was strung meters in the air – cutting through buildings and around lamp posts and trees – and was only visible if you really looked for it – and even then you wouldn’t always see it. But knowing it was there, there was a conscious sense of realising you were either inside or outside this demarcated zone and not knowing what the difference was either way. It was an exercise in spatial awareness, in moving through space, in the act of marking one space out as different from another and moving fluidly and unknowingly between the two. A collapse of boundaries you know to be fundamentally invisible.

Well, anyway – those were my impressions. I’m just incredibly glad we made the effort to go and applaud the MCA on the ambition and success of this latest C3West project.

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I acknowledge the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the unceded land on which I live and work and I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.