Benjamin Cittadini

O M F G R O F L O L B T W (Happy Fucking Birthday God)

2011-02-28T03:22:00.000-08:00

performance by roarawar feartata (Craig Peade, Benjamin Cittadini & Nick Beer)

Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, 24/02/2011

performance by roarawar feartata (Craig Peade, Benjamin Cittadini & Nick Beer)

Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, 24/02/2011

roarawar feartata collective: I Luv Amanda Crowe 4 eva

2010-12-01T04:18:00.000-08:00

Liveworks, Performance Space, Carriageworks Sydney, 11/11/2010

Conceived and performed by roarawar feartata collective: Craig Peade, Benjamin Cittadini, Georgie Read & Brigid Jackson.

photo's by Lucy Parakhina

Global Mind Project - Federation Square, Melbourne, January 2010

2010-05-11T01:15:00.000-07:00

The Global Mind Project is a Media Arts and Brain Sciences initiative by artist Karen Casey, developed in partnership with computer software designer Harry Sokol.

Performance by Jill Orr & roarawar feartata collective (Craig Darryl Peade & Benjamin Cittadini)

Photo's by Ute Leiner & Nick Stephenson

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s2799320.htm

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300766065067&ref=ts

roarawar feartata collective: "cityman"

2009-10-18T04:52:00.000-07:00

Federation Square, Melbourne, 17/10/2009

(B.Cittadini&C.Peade)

roarawar feartata collective: Cityman and the Book of Questions - Interventionist Guide to Melbourne, 2009

2009-10-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

performed by Benjamin Cittadini & Craig Peade, Platform Art Space, Flinders St. Station, 02/10/2009

Do you belong here?

Do you feel safe?

What's the weather going to be like tomorrow?

Do you remember me?

Have I got everything I need?

Do you need anything?

Can I get you something?

Do you believe in magic?

How much longer do I have?

Is it for a good cause?

Where do I pay?

Where do I go?

Are the ice-caps really melting?

What happens in the end?

Which way does it go?

Are you listening?

When shall we meet?

Can I ask you a question?

What does it feel like?

Does it hurt?

What are my chances?

Do you have a moment?

What time is it?

Where is the bathroom?

Is there anything left?

Can we make a difference?

What's the difference?

What difference does it make?

Have I changed?

When will it all end?

Have you done something with your hair?

Will you be here when I get back?

When will you know?

How would I know?

Are you lost?

Do I deserve this?

Is there something out there?

How will you explain all this?

Where have you been?

Why should I ?

What do you recommend?

How will I go on?

Does it work?

What else will work?

What can I say?

How will I look when I am old?

Who you gonna call?

What just happened?

Can I rely on you?

Have I forgotten something?

Do you trust me?

Do you love me?

WHat does this button do?

Can you hear me?

Is there another way out?

What's that sound?

How could you?

roarawar feartata collective: PROSTRATIONS - Loose Connections, Dandenong, 2009

2009-10-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

performed by Benjamin CIttadini & Craig Peade, Dandenong, 01/10/2009

SHOW ME THE HEART-SHAPED BUTTON TO FLUSH THE SHIT FROM THE COLLECTIVE CORTEX OF VISUAL INFAMY - Mason St. Carpark

The forgotten yet enduring structures around this carpark exist despite the ‘progress’ enveloping it. They harbour necessarily dark echoes of things smashed, broken, passed-out, drunk, pornographic, raw meat carved, haphazard parking, violent altercations, creeping darkness and emptiness:

There is an aspirational sun,

whose amateur rays feather down,

barely shifting dark water molecules

from cold stones, calling softly

up the galvanized shine of metal to

warm the random corners, sullen angles,

faded parking bays, broken bottles,

afternoons turned to deep night

well before their time, tired,

alone, exposed to the wet tongues

of desolate conversations

lapping at ragged surfaces, hungry holes,

histrionic glass and other shattered moments.

Freemasons Hall

The facade of this building is covered by an intricate display of tags tracing the lines and crevices in the melodramatic structure of this probably not-so-important building. There are historical narratives in this building that cannot disappear fast enough for some people, and yet it is one of the few remaining traces of a suburb or place that may have existed before ‘revitalisation’.

Not only is it architecturally anomalous, but it is an isolated expression for the marginalised in Dandenong. Even the flora - climbing weeds and gum trees - are in contrast to the encroaching landscaped uniformity. There is defiance in the rusty roof, pastiche columns and skeletal fire escapes; one can sense that this building will not just disappear quietly one day, but it will rot, immovable like a beached whale, until its vital organs have been consumed by the elements, its bones whittled away by the flat winds across the surrounding plains.

And what of the people who use this decommissioned hulk as shelter, even a home? Will they emerge naked, startled by the ‘revitalised’ future, looking for a new shell?

There is an aesthetic depth, lines of focus framed by this building, that may have at one time defined the weary glance from homecomers walking from the trainstation - in certain shades of evening sunlight it may even have been comforting, a sign that one is finally home - how will homecomers glance upon the new structures, vistas and aesthetic fields?

Space is the Place

Space, one of the most treasured and rare commodities, here suddenly unfolds with a hazy, laconic disregard for its own worth. What it lacks in terms of use it more than compensates for in terms of the depth of vision it enables; a chance to gather one’s surroundings, to sample the sky, the ground and the phantasmagoria in between. This wide dirt and stone clearing fringed by almost pastoral grasses, suggests that perhaps hundreds, even thousands of people have stood somewhere within the bounds of this open space and taken stock of what and where they are.

There is a sense of ritual, mass ritual, in a space like this. Lines of bodies slowly reclaiming the space they first created, building a movement of consciousness, a rhythm of limbs, an impossibly seething stillness that reminds us of the deeper, intuitive and timeless mode of being. Even more than that: a memory that resides in our genome - a memory that we share and will ultimately be left with when we die.

SUBURBAN SIGHTLINES

Have we adequately memorialized our ragged suburban sight-lines? Or will they be remembered only as a rediscovered pastiche, photographed and captioned in glossy design books on inner suburban coffee tables?

On VicUrban shopfronts in Dandenong you will see two images of Dandenong:

1) Pre-suburban Dandneong

Black and white (somehow pixellated) images of wooded countryside and single buildings with horses and carriages and sturdy looking yeoman posing in the middle of empty dirt roads. This is the ‘historical’ Dandenong, after the unimaginable unfamiliarity of the indigenous culture and before the unspeakable ordinariness of the suburban culture.

2) Post-Suburban Dandenong

Somehow in the future climatic conditions have improved, providing for lush, landscaped greenery that is tastefully counterpointed by the ultra-modern building materials and bold primary colours. Young people, old people, men, women, people from ethnically diverse cultures – all are navigating these fresh, universally tasteful spaces with the kind of invigorated enthusiasm usually seen on the faces of children and holiday makers.

‘Post-Suburban’ Dandenong is no longer a suburb, but a neatly arranged one-stop transport and services shop for an ever widening desert of suburbs. This is ‘Post-suburban Dandenong , where the current residents emerge, blinking, from the oppressive aesthetic rabble of dark, utilitarian years, into the simulacra of the ‘new’ – the unobtrusive, inoffensive illusion of progress and prosperity.

TENSIONS

>The tension between a genuine desire to live in harmony with each other and to eliminate difference (hence fear) by assimilating others into one’s own ideology - this is what shadows everyday life for many people in Dandenong. There is a constant desire to remove this tension, dissolve it or just make it disappear. yet it is this very tension which provides the energy and impetus for all the vibrant and desirable aspects of daily life as well.

> Dandenong is also home to a large band of nomadic Government Services employees - a wary bureaucratic underclass striding around awkwardly on heeled shoes, slurping giant buckets of caffe latte, surveying their surroundings with the kind of contempt that authority and aspirational income engenders.

HOW TO UNDESIGN SPACE

You need to make a space feel special - comment on its vibrancy, it’s seemingly intractable permutations . . . solved. Its marrying of styles . . . successful. The its angles and sightlines complete the experience. Be gentle. Laugh conservatively at its quips and nod understandingly at its grand statements. Be obedient at first: sit in designated areas, move wherever the space leads you like an obedient child.

Every now and then, ever so gently, give the space a nudge. Touch it in a place it’s not expecting, then apologise. Then do it again. One by one, drag your fingers over its proportioned surfaces. Dance across its determined lines, rub yourself against its angles, sing loudly in its dead corners.

Finally, lay down with it - put your whole body in it embrace. Melt its coy structures with the warmth of your skin. Undesign its naive facade with the fluid reality of your limbs. Re-integrate the space back into yourself. Be a loose collection of ideas.

HAVE AN INTERACTION

Go on

Take it slowly

Cross paths

Be surprised

Bump into someone

Don’t apologise

Say hello in an unfamiliar language

Say yes instead of no

Let go

Let yourself be drawn into a conversation you don’t want to have

Give in to the feeling you don’t want to feel

Be here

Be vulnerable

GO there

Listen, then talk, then listen again

Agree

Disagree

Explore other options

Take it all on board

Raise your eyes from your phone

Take your headphones off your ears

Give something for nothing

Take something

Don’t understand

Cross the line

Be afraid

Forget what to say

Meet someone with nothing but yourself, trembling.

PROSTRATIONS

As a performance ritual, this at once an act of humbling oneself before the real mysteries of place and removing the hard map-lines of space by placing one’s body into contact with it. The kernel of this performance came from the surveying process, in particular the response to the question “How often do you think about God?”, with the overwhelming response to this question being “All the time”. This now, the more I am distanced from it, makes perfect sense. However immediately it pierced my faithless paradigm and challenged me to look at my response to Dandenong in a different way.

Being brought up within the laconically secular structure of Australia, we are used to our religious symbols and spiritual needs being expressed in private (even our mass Christian festivals such as easter and christmas have assumed commercial figureheads that help to allay their religious specificity). However, sometimes religious ritual does make into our streets, such as an orthodox procession at easter or the Chinese Lunar new year. The effect of these highly stylized rituals on our secular public spaces is extra-ordinary, theatrical. (RE: BERNARD TSCHUMI & ARTAUD) Suddenly an ordinary street corner becomes a site for the profane, a battleground for angels and demons, a solemn thoroughfare for the veneration of gods, a portal to the limitless space of heaven. It is this gathering of people in space, whose purpose is to signify the presence of something above and beyond the ‘reality’ of streets and buildings, which is the essence of our experience as societal animals. Through the performance of ritual we can dissolve our everyday surroundings and inhabit, however briefly, unregulated and indefinable spaces.

roarawar feartata collective: The Re-enactment of a time that never happened - Loose Connections, Dandenong, 2009

2009-10-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

conceived and arranged by Benjamin Cittadini, with Colin and Iris Robinson from the Victorian Re-enactment Society, Hub Arcade Food Court, photographed by Nick Stevenson 30/09/2009

The Hub Arcade Food Court

Surely this is a museum piece – diorama of some time in the recent or the conservatively imagined future. Plastic tropical plants luxuriate in the mirrored fluorescence. Perhaps this was to be an experiment: a panopticon of food outlets for the self-moderating narcissist.

This is not an empty space which is evocative of something missing; you don’t hear the sugar-induced hyper-active screaming of children, nor do you envisage large, plump families in tight-fitting tracksuits nosing amongst a litter of various ethnically pastiche foods. No, everything is as it should be, unmoved, unused, on display – a kind of model Food Court that one may see at an international exhibition of Food Courts and Ethnically Pastiche Food Industries.

The pale pink, plastic and mirrored fluorescent ambience does suggest other service industry spaces: hospitals, megaplex cinema’s, retirement homes, modern churches, gaming venues. This is probably what Heaven looks like – an amalgation of semi-essential services, a place where you can take comfort in the knowledge that if you were to drop something on the ground, something you no longer wanted or needed, then it would reliably disappear, be gone the next day, removed forever.

This place exists beyond the burden for change. It is neither life nor death, but the plateau of CLEAN and SAFE (monitored). It is almost as though the protective plastic wrapping has just been removed and everybody is standing around (shredded wrapping unobtrusively being removed from the ground), shaking their heads, wishing they hadn’t removed the wrapping, trying to imagine it as it used to be.

roarawar feartata collective: Loose Connections Dandenong Phase 1: April 2009

2009-05-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

Aligned to the principles of the Melbourne 2030 Strategic Planning Policy, Dandenong is undergoing a process of “urban regeneration”, which will apparently result in substantive functional-aesthetic changes as well as changes in the ways it is utilised by the various publics of Dandenong. Amidst the conventional inevitability of ‘progress’ (as defined by abstract sources) lies a concern to take stock of what this urban regeneration might mean for the people who call Dandenong ‘home’.

Is “Dandenong” a lucid identity in itself? Or is it a histrionic succession of architectural, socio-political and geo-physical states (processional rather than cumulative), each state erasing the previous one with the grand gesture of progress?

>MULTI-CULTURAL WONDERLAND >TRANSPORT HUB >WASTELAND

What is the identity of Dandenong? Can it be defined by the quality of infrastructure that bi-sects it physically or is it a fluid, unpredictable quality whose definition will not always be desirable? Depending on the documentation one reads, Dandenong is: 1) a vibrant, ‘multicultural’ community at the centre of a rapidly expanding suburbia, 2) a vital convergence of transport infrastructure or 3) (from urbandictionary.com, the internet being the most reliable source for adverse opinion) “ Australia's Equivalent to the USA City, Compton, located in the South-east suburbs of Melbourne, it is the central to all negative stereotypes, these being: Violence, drugs, weirdo's, public drunkardness and gangs.”

It is ofcourse inclusive of all these descriptions, which are ostensibly myths, but most myths have their roots in some aspect of reality, and it would be equally fallacious to promote one whilst denying the other. Indeed, these descriptions most likely represent the extreme points of the simplified panorama: at one end an aspirational and multicultural wonderland, in the middle an intersection of busy highways and at the other end, a low socio-economic ‘wasteland’. In between these points lies the indefinable movement of cultures, attitudes, demographics and beliefs that are taken for granted and posited as the ‘general public’. Clearly also within the extremes there is a fluidity between perception and reality. The multicultural ‘wonderland’ and the low socio-economic ‘wasteland’ are fundamentally interdependent, therefor what may be perceived to be a ‘general public’ may just be a moment of transition from one to the other. So what constitutes a ‘public’ then, and can a ‘general public’ be used as a blueprint for identity (or is it more expedient, less problematic, to use physical aspects of site, landmarks, architecture etc.) ?

FROM STRANGERS TO PUBLIC

How does one make the transition from being a private individual to a member of a ‘public’? One must be a stranger who is addressed and introduced to a discourse. When addressed, we are revealed as strangers and immediately transformed into a member of the public (Warner, 2005, p67). It requires our attention, even participation to become actively involved in a discourse. Once we inhabit this discourse, we perform this transition, from stranger to public, continually (Warner, 2005, p77). The word ‘perform’ here has particular relevance to the act of being ‘public’, which I will discuss later. The notion here is that a ‘public’ is fundamentally a “space for discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself.”(Warner, 2005, p67) A discourse usually relies on people having different or contrasting views, therefor a ‘public’ is a space where people with contrasting views are engaged in a discourse, where the discourse itself is what defines the space as ‘public’, rather than just “ a more or less arbitrary, context-dependent sampling of private individuals abstracted from their privacy.”(Hannay, 2005, p22)

PUBLIC OPINION AND THE ‘PUBLIC GOOD’

Immediately it would seem a travesty that any one public could have a defining or consensual opinion; if a public is a discourse of contrasting views then a public of one opinion is no public at all. Whose opinion, then, becomes known as ‘public opinion’? Are the public aware of this deception? No, but it is the public that authorises it, even though it may not have generated it. Public opinion is an idea formed by individuals making a judgement on general, moral issues, based on what they imagine our society to be sustained by(Hannay, 2005, p53). The key to identifying certain judgemental ideas as ‘public opinion’ is to have them registered by a ‘public’; to feed these ideas to a particular public in such a way that this public registers itself as THE public and the opinion as ITS OWN opinion, then have it fed back, thus authenticated by the public. One way to elicit this authorisation is through the use of polls and surveys, the graphic and quantitative results of which represent the ‘truth’ of their speculations. For this reason public opinion is an important political device. However, because it is only semi-consciously supported by the public it purports to represent, it is fickle, easily manipulated and abused, misled and ultimately self-defeating. The idea of a ‘public good’ is equally opposed to its intentions. Although as a notion it seemingly represents a desire to ensure the ‘well being’ of a whole, this ‘well being’ is itself the maintenance of the basic right of an individual’s privacy (Hannay, 2005, p72). Again we see then that this notion of ‘public’ relies heavily on there being a fluid and contrasting collection of private individuals. The ‘public’ is often an extension of our private selves, rather than the expression of a shared or communal interest (Hannay, 2005, p78).

PRIVACY AND IDENTITY

Privacy is the most treasured right of contemporary society. It is a way in which we can be relieved from a public existence which is always only a “mouse click away” (Hannay, 2005, p111). Yet it is in the immediacy and profligacy of todays public sphere that we now furnish ourselves with private personalities, or identities. In today’s proliferation and access to public spaces (not just physical, media, internet etc.) we may acquire, beget or shed identities that in previous times would have taken a lifetime of association with a particular profession or class just to define - where the life-experience would have been enough (Hannay, 2005, p80). In today’s identity vacuum, public space becomes a market place for the appropriation of identity - a place in which almost anybody can create their very own public, a captive audience to which one may try out, or perform various forms of personality and identity. Everyone can participate as part of the audience, or as the performer. It is this performative nature of an individual’s private existence that most radically defines contemporary public existence. Yet this definition is itself increasingly distorted by its own nature - the immediacy and access to media (internet) creates an almost hyperactive creation and dissolution of publics. The Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña calls this notion of public space the “Mainstream Bizarre”:

The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop-culture, performance and “reality”. The new placement of other borders, between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends is still unclear.(Gómez-Peña, 2005, p51)

Where there were marginal ‘publics’ or discourses that maintained a strong sense of identity because of their alienation from the dominant public discourse (Warner, 2005, p118), now we see that “the insatiable mass of the so-called ‘mainstream’ . . . has finally devoured all ‘margins’, and the more dangerous, thorny and exotic these ‘margins’, the better.”(Gómez-Peña, 2005, p51) Individuals can parade around in public spaces festooned with the vestiges of the most radical identities, like fake moustaches, without forgoing their membership of the dominant, or mainstream public. How does one engage with a public/s whose identity is no longer necessarily defined by profession, class or income, but by whatever desire can be fulfilled by the ”mainstream bizarre”?

DISSOLUBLE STRUCTURES AND CONTRASTING OUTCOMES - ART IN PUBLIC SPACE

How can art become a true member of the discourses that are public spaces? I am speaking of the public spaces that bloom in unpredictable places and occasions through the simple yet powerful act of people involved in discourse; how can art become involved - celebrate, change and be changed, provoke and respond, construct and dissolve - in the constant but not necessarily continual conflagrations of these public spaces?

There are precedents to engaging with this dilemma - the ‘Situationist’ ideals of Guy Debord, the study of ritual and the relationship of performance to society by ‘theatre anthropologists’ such as Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and ultimately the growth of ‘happenings’ and ‘performance art’ beyond the exclusive walls of galleries and theaters. Indeed, through the theatricalization of the visual arts and the detheatricalization of theatre, a mixed-media artistic process has developed that can indeed involve itself with a certain amount of fluidity in public spaces. Both Debord and Turner acknowledge the necessary polymorphic nature of ‘public’ events: “rituals, dramas and other performative genres are often orchestrations of media, not expressions in a single medium.”(Turner, 1988, p23) Debord foresees that in order to create ‘situations’ that can explore the intermittent, dispersed nature of public spaces, the modern idea of ‘theatre’, as well as ‘painter’ or ‘sculptor’ must collapse, leaving only ‘situationists’(Debord, 2002, p46).

It is in the notion of dissoluble structures and an acceptance of the unpredictability of outcomes that art can best approach an active participation within public spaces. The inherent vitality of ‘life’ will always guarantee an aesthetic outcome, but in the end it is the manner of engagement that will validate this aesthetic.

COLOURFUL, CLEAN, SAFE

Which brings us back to Dandenong. Taking their lead from other aesthetically dubious projects such as Docklands, Vicurban have deduced, from their community consultation and subsequent identification of public opinion, that the Dandenong public desire a space that is “colourful, clean, safe and enjoyable”. The reverberating emptiness of these words will no doubt extend to their resulting constructions. The issue here is the mediocrity of a places ambition to explore space and identity.

Therefor, a parting set of questions: Is “colourful, clean and safe” a valid aesthetic outcome for a public space? Does Dandenong really just want to be known as “colourful, clean, safe and enjoyable”? If this were true then would it be prepared to relinquish its “multi-cultural” identity, it’s other ‘publics’ that are both it’s ‘wonderland’ and its ‘wasteland’? Can the physical spaces that already exist in Dandenong still provide meaningful and vibrant discourse; does discourse need a “ colourful, clean, safe and enjoyable” space to be neaningful, vibrant and necessary to the identity of a place?

REFERENCES

Debord, G., (ed. McDonough, T.), 2002, Guy Debord and the SItuationist International: Texts and Documents, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Hannay, A., 2005, On the Public, Abingdon & New York: Routledge

Gómez-Peña, G., 2005, ethno-techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, London: Routledge

Turner, V., 1988, The Antropology of Performance, John Hopkins University Press

Warner, M., 2005, Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books

1. ART

The majority of people surveyed expressed a desire for “a lot” of art in Dandenong. More encouraging is their preference for only “some” art to provide “a lot”; this would suggest that while the majority of people are happy for spaces to be filled with art, they are concerned with the quality and value of this art. While there are many artists and many non-artists in Dandenong, there is only a minority who believed they “could be” artists.

2. CRIME

Of those surveyed, most identified the shopping centre in the Palm Plaza mall as one of the safest places to be in Dandenong. Many people also chose the “stay home” option as the best for “avoiding trouble”. This would suggest that the ideal way to enjoy a safe and peaceful time in Dandenong would be to stay home or go shopping. Most people surveyed were not aware of the quality of lighting at night in Dandenong, which would also suggest that few people venture out to Dandenong at night.

3. DREAMS

A lot of people think about God “all the time” in Dandenong. If they could be anywhere at this particular moment in time, overwhelmingly they would choose heaven over any earthly paradise (an equal amount of people chose “Dandenong”, assuming that it was not important where they are right now because after this life they will hopefully go to heaven). The question is: how does the City of Greater Dandenong accommodate for the mass transcendental preoccupations of its community? If most of its inhabitants are preoccupied with God, does the City of Greater Dandenong need to change anything materially, or is it all a futile diversion? Many people could not remember a recent dream they had because they worked too hard and therefor slept- and dreamt- very little.

4. Housing

Many people were uncertain as to whether their house was “old” or “new”. This may be indicative of a more general uncertainty about one’s identity as a suburb, city, state and country. While many people identified items of furniture as essential to the “comfort” of a home, an equal amount stated that a an “outlook”, “feeling” or “vibe” was just as important. The majority of people surveyed identified “four to six” people as the ideal amount of people living in a house at any one time.

5. Geography

Most people surveyed believed Dandenong to be between twenty and forty-five minutes away from anywhere. While most people could illustrate where Dandenong was in relation to the City, few seemed aware or interested in what lay in between (see Appendix (B)).

6. IDENTITY

It is clear from the majority of responses that ‘culture’ is a disputed asset in Dandenong. Disturbingly, the assertion that ‘housing’ was Dandenenong’s worst asset was supported by the majority of those surveyed. That shopping is Dandenong’s best asset is supported by most people nominating the Palm Plaza Shopping Centre as their favourite place to be in Dandenong.

7. COMPLAINTS

The list of complaints below are selection of the complete amount we received, chosen to illustrate the array and individual-specific nature of complaints. Not represented here are the significant number of people who stopped to express that they had ‘nothing’ to complain about.

> Police don’t have an understanding of young people. They come with force, this makes the kids go crazy. Bad Communication.

> New world (dis)order

> Brianwashed idiots preaching in the mall.

> Racism. Police don’t understand African people - the system is confused.

> Need more money.

> Only two more puffs left on my cigarette. Overworked.

> Too many stabbings.

> Youth with nothing to do. Anti-social behaviour: spitting and graffiti. A disregard for disability services. Racism, need more education. Lack of good movies at the cinema.

> Too many foreign trees planted instead of natives. They lose their leaves.

> Someone who believes and non-believers: there’s no answer, they just can’t get along.

> Myer’s hasn’t changed its stock since 1984.

> All the institutions of this country are useless, except for undertakers.

> Not enough time to complain.

> Christians that preach in the mall - too loud.

> Too many people carrying knives.

> The senior manager of the Commonwealth Bank was very rude, confusing people.

> Grenda’s Bus Company office - no disabled access and was refused use of their toilet. Kidney problems.

> The ABC should refer to Kevin Rudd as the ‘Prime Minister’ rather than just calling him ‘Mr.Rudd’.

> Instead of government spending on broadband, invest in piping water down from the Ord river Scheme. Water rates should go up.

> Health - why do we have to get sick when we get older? Spending money like water.

> Annoying to pay for parking on main street - dissuades shopping, not conducive to ambience, not attractive for cafe culture.

> Street sweepers in Doveton come around between 9:45 and 11:45 at night, wake us up, going round and round and round.

> Why does the government swear on the Bible? Hypocrisy. People are not afraid of the law because there is none. Scientists take the easy way out and are bloody stupid.

roarawar feartata collective: Confess: Why Design?

2009-01-11T20:06:00.000-08:00

created & performed by craig peade & benjamin cittadini

RMIT Melbourne, 15/12/08

photo's by Julia Cole

Prato, 30/10/2008

2008-10-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

Six-seat compartment in a tourist-class carriage on a regional train

from Padova to Arezzo

The door opens. Sound rushes in like a sudden gust of wind. The door closes. There is a man and a woman sitting opposite each other next to the window. We all want what they have but must be contented with stealing furrowed searches of the rushing countryside over and around their heads. They begin to become a little self-conscious, as if just for a second they believe that we are looking at them, at their choice of attire, reading material or the appropriateness of their conversation. They know, ofcourse, that it isn’t them we are looking at - indeed it would be ideal if they were transparent - and they are a little jealous of their possession, so they become more animated, talking seriously with each other, leaning over to make a point: blocking the view.

The man who just entered stands for a while with his slightly revealed belly-button about a tongues’ length from my face. He is moving my rucksack on the shelf above my head and I am growing concerned about three things (in no particular order):

1) His belly button (which is black and has no end) is a tongues’ length from my face.

2) He is handling my luggage without so much as a nod, a raised eye or a mumbled request for consent.

3) He is on tip-toes (revealing his belly-button) and has barely a fingetips purchase on my rucksack which is almost the same size as him.

He‘s determined. He feathers my pack to one side, releasing small purses of air from his lips, then begins to haul up an extraordinary array of packages which must have followed him in to our compartment silently and obediently without any of us noticing.

The air is stagnant and I am conscious of my breath. I decide the best strategy to avoid any problems is to inhale like a whale swallowing krill and exhale like a fairy dying slowly. This makes me a little nauseous so I try to look out the window but the man and woman are unwrapping bread rolls and arranging fruit drinks on the table beneath the window; this makes me hungry. They’re curling their lips into knowing smiles. “How do you like the view now?” They’re saying this with their suddenly delicate fingers unfolding each corner of their napkins as if their making beds for their grandchildren.

I turn away and glance over the man whose belly-button I almost tasted. He has a large face with a black trucker’s cap balancing on the top of his surprised-looking forehead. He sits on the edge of his seat and his eyes - which are small and look lost in the vast ocean that is his face - are fixed on his collection of bags on the shelf above. I can smell the crunching of pannini with prosciutto from the man and woman next to the window and I notice that I’m breathing quite heavily now.

Once again I’m worried about my breath so I take some mints out of the bag that I’m clutching sweatily in my lap. Suddenly the man with the ocean-face looks directly at me. He is staring at me, then at the mints in my hand, then back up at me again. His eyes are burning and his face is swelling as though my seemingly innocuous act has suddenly created a conflicting storm of desire and regret. I stare back at him. The rushing countryside, the zealous lunchers and the stuffy compartment all suddenly drain into a whirlpool suspended between my apprehension about my bad breath, the mints in my hand, and the man whose ocean-face is seething with emotions that I can’t identify. I continue to stare back at him and his eyes are almost drowning in his cheeks, small white-caps forming and dissipating in the fine hairs on his top lip. I’m not sure if this moment has an end, if I have to offer him a mint, if that will calm the storm. I tack and turn towards the window and the man with a half eaten pannini is also looking at us, engrossed by the struggle but unconcerned about the consequences.

I turn back and the ocean-face man has stilled, his small eyes fixed back up on his luggage. I pop a mint and take a long, searching look out the window. I study the distant, smog-obscured landscape, looking straight through the heads of the man and woman, straight through their gesticulating hands and profiled noses.

There is a muted commotion in the passageway outside our compartment. Three very tall men with large backpacks have sat down in the corridor and have to get up and press themselves against the side of the train to let people through. The ticket inspector comes down and tells them they can’t sit in the passageway. They tell him, in broken english, that they can’t find a seat. He replies, in broken english, that this is because there are no seats and that they should have taken the next train and that now he will have to fine them fifty euro each. One of the tall men apologises and as he wearily peels a fifty from his wallet says: “We don’t have trains in Brazil.”

We all take comfort in other peoples misfortune. Our stagnant, cramped, socially sensitive compartment is suddenly a privilege. I only have two more hours to enjoy it. Pity is Rubbish

PRATO, ITALY, September 2008

2008-09-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Pity is rubbish

La pieta’ è spazzatura

Inside my eye there is another

and another, and another

colouring the intangible

hiding behind each other

Inside my ear there is another eye

stealing sounds and sending them down

to sweatshops of swollen eyes

conquering the senses

This may not be the most beautiful place in the world, but I have decided to stay right where I am, probably because she is looking directly at me. Maybe I would move but I want to know what she is looking at. If she looks away then I’ll know that it’s not me, or if she blinks then I know that she has seen enough.

She doesn’t look away, she never blinks. She has a pair of eyes that never stop looking at me. She is recording everything she sees, but does she see everything? I don’t doubt it. Perhaps She is God, appearing now to look me up and down and pass judgement. But who am I to warrant judgement before anyone else? Anyway, I’m not sure God needs eyes, or any other anthropomorphic feature. If you could be a whisper, a broken leaf, a hundred-million grains of sand, a knife in the dark, blood that shames my cheeks, an atomic blast of sunset or uncanny harmonies plucked from a tightrope across the abyss, why would you need eyes? No, She is not God.

But if She’s not God and She is always looking at me, then what does She see? Her eyes don’t look through, around or into me; they are looking all over me. I’ve seen myself in a mirror, in a photo, even in the expression on someone’s face. I know I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two arms, two legs and feet that can take me away from here. I also know that there is a certain fullness to my lips that makes me feel exposed, as if my mouth were turning inside out, revealing words I never wanted spoken. These things are well documented, so what else does She see?

I see nothing of myself in the expression on her face, only the intense - but calm - apprehension of characteristics I will never know. She’s taking them in and noting them all down; She’s stealing myself from myself. But what can she be stealing? If She were to ask I would give it to her, or if She needed it and were too shy to ask, I would offer it to her discreetly. But I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t want - or need - my self. She is taking something else. Maybe She has found something I lost, like the ability to laugh without considering when to stop. If She has found it, then I want it back. But there’s no use asking for it back because she doesn’t need it.

She is looking all over me. She wants nothing I can give her, nor has She taken anything I have lost. She is not God yet she sees everything.

It seems that She doesn’t experience fatigue. She’s looking at me as if She is surfing the internet, scrolling up and down with her eyes, noting everything down not because it’s important, but because it’s there. Maybe when She looks at me that’s all she sees: a fevered collage of predominantly pointless information occasionally yielding something poignant. I wish I could shake her and say: “I’m sorry, but you’ve got it the wrong way around, I’m a considered union of meaningful components standing out against a background of predominantly pointless information!” I would tell her but it would be useless; her resolve is permeable. I just pass through her like passengers at a train station.

If only She would express something of me in her eyes, or maybe just a slight expansion or contraction of her forehead - either way, I’m not fussed - a flared nostril, a tightened lip, a pulsating temple, a tried breath, anything really. It’s not hard. I’ve seen people barely look at me once and casually express deep flaws in my character with the hitch of an eyebrow.

She looks up . . . and down . . . and up again. I’m beginning to think She has no eyes, just two clear glass buttons filtering colours through to some kind of reclining, languid perceptual lobe that is really just a parasite draining all her senses so that She is relieved of the burden of expression. She looks up and down and up again. Maybe She just smiled . . . no, that was just me creating a smile for her and painting it on with my eyes. Does She see everything? Surely she can’t see the smile I just painted on her face, or the slight blemish I have just placed above her right temple. No, she looks up and down, her face expresses nothing of me, but now I have also added a sartorial lift to her smile, as hough she has just heard me for the first time. If I darken the tint of her hair a little, perhaps thicken her eyebrows . . . now she looks like a teacher who has forgotten her teaching notes.

She’s looking all over me, but I can’t really see her anymore. She doesn’t express anything of me, but I can express something of me in her. I can widen her eyes a little and slightly shade her eyelids so that she reminds me of a girl I once loved who drank lots of whiskey. When she looks up and down again, I add a quick exhalation of air from her nostrils, as if she is sitting on a train and has just been disturbed from her magazine by her own curiosity. When she is looking all over me, I make her lips turn inside and out, moistening them, highlighting some kind of readiness.

She looks all over me with her glass-button eyes, seeing things I don’t have, things I may have lost, things I would willingly give her; but she is not God and she can’t see the hand I have just placed over her eyes or the stars that are now exploding beneath her eyelids. She can’t see the thick red blush that starts around her neck and rises up into her cheeks, or the anger gathering in sharp angles at the intersection of her eyebrows and the top of her nose. I can see her hand clutching a used tissue while her other hand is placed firmly on her chest; her eyes well with tears and her lips are thin in defiance. More and more she is becoming the archetypical She: the Grandmother, the Mother, the Lover, the Earth.

I can see her in the process of becoming, but ofcourse she is none of these things; she is the pair of eyes that never stop looking all over me. I am an assemblage of information: a wall, a tower, an old man with an umbrella, a bicycle, its shadow, the thing being pointed to by a child, the walking away, the approaching and the standing still. These are are all things that she sees and things that I don’t have to give her. If I have lost anything then it is because she is not God and she cannot see everything. She looks up and down . . . and up again. If she can take me from myself then I have not wasted my time sitting here.

these walls,

these large, stony walls,

were built by people like us: tired, hungry, impatient,

unconvinced by miracles, flattered by explanation.

These walls, these desperate, lost walls.

queste pareti, queste grandi, pareti pietrose,

sono state costruite da gente come noi: stanca, affamata, impaziente,

scettica sui miracoli, adulata dalla spiegazione.

Queste pareti, queste pareti disperate e perse.

everything is of interest yet nothing is interesting

tutto è di interesse tuttavia niente è interessante

beneath me there is only the earth.

above me stretch all the things I once loved

looking down in pity

sotto me c’è soltanto la terra.

sopra me tutto cio’ che una volta ho amato si allunga

guardando giu’ con pieta’

there is the head of a bull, alone in space,

looking beyond its daily bread.

It has been forgiven its sins,

bereft of its beating heart

and bestowed with the stoic tragedy of its own demise

c’è la testa di un toro, sola nello spazio,

che osserva oltre il suo pane quotidiano.

È stato perdonato per i propri peccati,

è stato privato del suo cuore battente

ed è stato concesso con la tragedia stoica del relativo proprio crollo

roarawar feartata collective: Palm Plaza seating project opening

2008-08-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

performed by benjamin cittadini, brigid jackson and craig peade

2008, Palm Plaza, dandenong, melbourne

roarawar feartata collective: the impossible shame of a mediocre life

2008-08-30T04:31:00.001-07:00

devised and performed by craig peade and benjamin cittadini

2008, CARNI, melbourne

roarawar feartata collective: to have done with the judgement of god

2008-08-30T04:19:00.000-07:00

performed by craig peade, sarah mainwaring, georgie reade, brigid jackson

directed by benjamin cittadini

2007 fringe festival. bar open, melbourne

The Crow Project: Phase 3

2008-06-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

Crow waits

Crow follows

Crow sees and is silent

Crow eats the world

and his belly still rumbles

roarawar feratata collective: The Crow Project: Phase 2

2008-05-26T06:16:00.000-07:00

performed by craig peade, benjamin cittadini, georgie reade and brigid jackson

2008, 8hr day monument, cnr russel & lygon st., melbourne

more familiar

than a thousand people

you know

The Crow Project: Texts

2008-05-16T00:43:00.000-07:00

The Doctrine of Cycles

This doctrine ( whose most recent inventor called it the doctrine of the Eternal Return ) may be formulated in the following manner:

The number of all the atoms that compose the world is immense but finite, and as such only capable of a finite ( though also immense ) number of permutations. In an infinite stretch of time, the number of possible permutations must be run through, and the universe has to repeat itself. Once again you will be born from a belly, once again your skeleton will grow, once again this same page will reach your identical hands, once again you will follow the course of all the hours of your life until that of your incredible death. Such is the customary order of this argument, from its insipid preliminaries to its enormous and threatening outcome. It is commonly attributed to Nietzsche. from "The Doctrine of Cycles" by Jorge Luis Borges

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow

from "Eaxamination at the Womb-Door" by Ted Hughes

The Woiwurong Koori people's elders told a similar myth of how once there were seven young women called the Karatgurk who lived on the Yarra river where Melbourne now stands. They lived on yams which they dug out with their digging sticks, on the end of which they also carried live coals. They kept the fire to themselves. They cooked their own yams, but gave raw ones to Crow. One day Crow found one of the cooked yams and tasted it. He found it delicious and decided to cook his yams from then on. The women refused to give him fire and so he decided to trick them out of it. He caught and hid a lot of snakes in an ant mound, then called to the girls that he had found a large ant mound and that the ant larvae tasted much better than yams. The women ran to the mound and began digging into it with their sticks. The snakes came hissing out and chased them away, screaming. But them the women turned and began to hit out at the snakes with their digging sticks. They hit so hard that some of the live coals were knocked off. Crow was waiting for this. He pounced on the live coals and hid them in a kangaroo skin bag he had prepared. When the women had killed all the snakes, they came back to look for the coals. They could not find them and decided that Crow had taken them. They chased him, but he flew out of reach and perched on the top of a very high tree.

Bunjil saw what had happened and asked Crow for some of the coals, as he wanted to cook a possum. Crow offered to cook it for him and when he had done so, threw it down to Eaglehawk who saw that it was still smoking. He tried to blow it into flame, but failed. He ate the possum and while he did so, the Koori people gathered around and shouted at Crow to give them fire. The din scared him and at last he flung some live coals at the crowd. Kurok-goru the fire-tailed finch picked up some of the coals and hid them behind his back and that is why these finches have red tails. Eaglehawk's shaman helpers, Djurt-djurt the nankeen kestrel and Thara the quail hawk, grabbed the rest of the coals.

Then the coals made a bush fire which burnt Crow black. It also spread over his country and Bunjil had to gather all the Kooris to help put it out. He placed some rocks at the head of the Yarra river to stop the fire spreading that way, and they are there to this day. His two helpers were burnt and became two rocks at the foot of the Dandenong Range. The Karatgurk were swept up into the sky where they became the Pleiades, the stars representing their glowing firesticks.

Story courtesy of Aboriginal Mythology (1994) Mudrooroo, Thorsons, London, pp. 35-36

This isn't the wind in the maples, my boy

No song to the lonely moon

This is the wild roar of our daily toil

We curse it and count it a boon

For it is the voice of our cities

It is our favourite song

It is the language we all understand

It will soon be the world's mother tongue

from "Song of the Machines" by Bertolt Brecht

The Crow Project: Phase 1

2008-05-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

Crow, disguised as Peacekeeper

peels back the tensed corners of "true time"

let the dripping mouths of hungry children sing:

a hundred

million

grains of sand

are nothing but a handful

crow flexes tongue and gurgles

5 onomatopoeic notes for time and space

crow rakes leaves but death never comes

words hang about

crow re-digests lunch

eyes meet eyes

crow is re-born as crow

Docklands: Site interrogation

2008-04-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

In the lost hours of the night, the Docklands is like a set of long, cold fingers searching a deep pocket for food, water, warmth and companionship. Security guards - solitary figures in solemn contemplation - provide protection for fleet footed gangs of rats to forage and fill their ample bellies from the exhuberant leftovers of their human inferiors. Footsteps are compressed by the singularity of their sound, as if the ground is covered in fresh snow. The lights in apartment windows are on, night and day, making it hard to judge whether people are sleeping or merely waiting patiently for the sun to rise. Certainly many buildings idle quietly, echoing the distant flight paths and car passings from people living their lives elsewhere. Liquid constellations waver slowly on the satin-black surface of the still-waters, hugging the ramparts of buildings like a snake calmly asphyxiating its prey, revealing nothing of the life that keeps its cold blood circulating. In the dark open spaces, words and syllables from the day’s conversations hang about, re-organizing themselves into more intelligent, less impulsive responses, righting the wrongs of passive minds and lazy tongues. Sculptures - ‘public art’ - appear out of the silence like coy somnambulists invading someone else’s dreams, neither lost nor at home, uncomprehendingly enduring. If there was a time and place for people, objects and spaces to dissappear, be forgotten, merge with the night, then it would be here beneath the hunched shoulders of hastily erected buildings whose silhouettes fall haphazardly on empty pedestrian crossings. Traffic lights keep each other company, beating contrapuntal melodies that distort the tuning of ‘real’ time. Embattled phone-booths breathe in the frugal glitter from random stars. A cigarette glows but the face remains veiled. In the wandering hours between late-night and early-morning, the Docklands resembles a sensory deprivation tank: the hallucinations of the blind, the deaf, the lonely and the hungry, emanating across the infinite depths of a black serpent whose belly will soon swell with the ill-conceived structures of the whole city.

Come, my little ladybug

let us court the perfection of geometry

music is light and windows are the eyes:

eyes that sing.

Business is the beating heart,

the middle-man

the active woman,

filling in the shadows of darker freedoms.

Burning the script/unshivering the past,

saving for the future and selling our dreams;

rainbows of electricity,

children are the colours that make modern architecture

Proposed Public Monuments for Docklands

#1: "Every man must have his Master"

#2: "The Crash"

#3: "Time will leave its mark"

"More food, less wind, no football dickheads, no more malls!"

"We fish here pretty often. We caught 4 or 5 bream. Its alright. Sometimes you catch eels, but they say you can only eat one a month, you know, mercury poisoning. In Croatia you can't catch fish anymore, they eat them all. There's no birds there either, they eat them too. I been here 45 years, more than in Croatia. One night I was walking m dog and the young kid calls me a fucking wog. I tell him I've been here longer than you, I am more Australian than you."

2008-04-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

The social world is a world in becoming, not a world in being ( except insofar as 'being' is a description of the 'static' atemporal models men have in their heads) . . . there is no such thing as "static action." Victor Turner - "Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors"

Words such as "society" and "community" are irrelevant in relation to the actual flux of social engagement.

CERES Site-specific performance project: Heresies of the self

2008-04-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

only the mind remembers, the body moves on,

spiders feign sleep and small stones are sidesteppped

unrecognised, impatient and irritated,

wheezing in the bilious throng of yellow light

time is a claw that shreds smooth surfaces

and in this death no other life is remembered,

only the dusty hue of 'self'

atomised in the darkness