What does it mean to feel at home?

[AT HOME] invites both intimacy and discomfort by engaging us in concepts of ‘domesticity’ and ‘the suburb’ in the Australian psyche – to make ourselves ‘at home’ here in the artwork. Yet the audience remains at a distance as ‘a guest.’

A 40-minute drive west from Melbourne in torrential rain brings me to 42 Anderson Street, Wyndham for the Saturday morning program of the first iteration of [AT HOME]. Following a short stretch of highway, the street blocks grow wider and the footpaths more walkable. When I open my car window – winding the neighbourhood roads lined by sturdy 1950s one-story brick family homes – I am met with birdsong. My GPS tells me I’ve reached my destination: the corner lot with a well-cared for garden. As I park up on the road verge behind a few cars and trucks, my eyes are drawn up to above the garage. Oversized LCD text sparkles in the cloudy sky like a beacon, on an armature that looks like it was designed for a drive-in-movie screen. This spectacle signals to me that something exciting is happening today, and I wonder what the neighbours think of this art event – a distinct departure from the usual pristine white cube. I walk past the knee-high brick fence and up to the front door. While I do see the [AT HOME] signage, I’m still apprehensive entering someone else’s private space, like an anxious rental tenant doing a property inspection. Picking up on my unease, the young woman at the door nods at me to confirm I’m welcome here. 

No one else has taken off their wet shoes at the door threshold as was my first instinct as a guest. I can now see a few people wandering around the house still also in their rain jackets. This domestic space now registers as public space to me as I follow them down the hallway, exploring out the back deck and onto the lawn. Some people linger near the kitchen, like me, captivated by Wadawurrung artist Kait James’ bold installation of repurposed tea towels, strung across the room like a series of homemade protest signs. For some, Hang Us Out To Dry confronts the myth of Australian mateship propagated by touristic commercialism and for others, James’ didactic text is a dark reminder of genocide, forced assimilation, and domestic slavery. The kitschy installation creates a physical and metaphorical barrier to the window over the sink and cooking station, but leaning in I can see retro canisters for flour, sugar, tea and coffee on the countertop, rounding out the scene. 

Walking across the clean refurbished hardwoods, each room reveals a different colour of painted wall in vivid shades of teal, a yellow-hued sea green, and what could be described as the colour of Chartreuse. I remember my friend’s grandmother once telling me these water colours represent ‘peace, calmness and coolness’. I wonder if this was what the homeowner intended as my eyes continue to search for evidence of who might actually live here. Or maybe the house was repainted for this art happening? I take a quick look around, peeking into the other bedrooms emptied of furniture, and make a mental note to revisit the projected films and spend time with the more intimate photographic works after getting my bearings. 

My thoughts shift abruptly again: I wonder who lives here now, who lived here before them, and what this land was like before this suburb was developed.

In the context of settler-colonialism here in so-called Australia, when so many of us are living and working in places not our own through both migration and displacement, how do we maintain respect for the cultural identity of a place? 

So true is the responsibility for curating or producing artistic works on someone else’s Country. While [AT HOME] materialised as a three-day happening, the organisers – an informal collective of artists, designers, researchers and producers called Common Collective – have undertaken many months of dialogue and engagement with local First Nations artists and cultural workers. [AT HOME] Wyndham can be seen as part of a long history of artists and activists working in the public and social realm to point to the ‘politics of’ and to activate ‘connection to’ place by stimulating dialogue about urgent geo-political concerns. Yet the underlying colonial impulses of practices that collaborate with community cannot be overlooked through the gentrifying lens of artistic spectacle if short term activations lack reciprocity with local collaborators who ultimately provide the content of their lived experience for an externally-negotiated curatorial vision. 

The Bunurong and Wadawurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nations are the Traditional Custodians of the lands where [AT HOME] Wyndham is located. The wirribi language word for the Werribee River, wirribi-yaluk, means ‘backbone’, which has informed the suburb’s name. This is one of Australia’s fastest growing suburbs, due to the offer of affordable housing on Melbourne’s fringe. Approximately 60,000 residents have arrived in the past five years with more than a third of young families arriving from overseas through both humanitarian and skilled work visas from locations including India, New Zealand, China, and the Philippines [1]. Built on what was largely agricultural and industrial land, Wyndham’s name is said to refer to John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, a British science fiction writer. These contrasting frameworks of unceded Aboriginal land and the colonial dystopia of art in the suburbs literally create a house shaped container to explore multiple perspectives of place. 

[AT HOME] offers visitors multivalent readings, expressed through a series of artistic imaginaries, nostalgia for Australian suburbia, and diverse cultural representations of longing and belonging. The loose but confident collective curation of [AT HOME] juxtaposes many perspectives on place through many entry points. More than a dozen artists, researchers, and collectives – the majority of them local – have contributed unique architectural additions, art installations, photographic displays, video works, and artist talks, and I'm told they are setting up a house party with a DJ and barbecue in the backyard later this afternoon.

While I’m still not entirely confident that I am permitted to do so, I perch on the edge of a couch in the lounge room to take in Maintenance of Care, both an installation and short film by artist Akwal Magek. This artist invites us into her private life to view Black hair care tools and commercial products lined up on the mantle amongst small pot plants. I side step across the room to smell each product one-by-one down the line; I read the pink sign above reading ‘Don’t touch my hair’. My first impulse is to accept this as an invitation into her intimate world of care, but as in James’ pointed use of text, these words in Magek’s signage draw a clear boundary between what experiences and memories are offered for sharing and what will be withheld. Magek is known as a vibrant storyteller, challenging social assumptions including beauty stereotypes, and always asking her audiences ‘Why?’. I imagine her living here at 42 Anderson Street. 

As we settle in for the programmed conversation between Taungurung artist Steven Rhall and Whadjuk/Ballardong Noongar designer-researcher Jack Mitchell, I sit next to a friend I haven’t seen for a while. The speakers are seated on one side of the large table and the rest of us spill out onto the covered deck still dripping from the morning rain. After acknowledging Country, Rhall describes his post-conceptual art practice in which he interrogates modes of representation through performative, curatorial and interventionist projects. With a smirk, he also discloses that he works for the City of Wyndham, who is partnering on this event. Also after acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of where we are meeting and his Elders in Western Australia, Mitchell introduces his place-based research and how he aims to instil custodial relationships with the environment. Over the next hour, we, as guests, have the pleasure to listen into their thoughtful conversation. Stories unfold about what it means to belong to Country, rather than to own land as property. Caring for Country includes its people, story, and natural environment – as a responsibility for all of us, especially when living or working on someone else’s Country. 

Like Lucy Lippard’s seminal Lure of the Local, [AT HOME] reminds us that place – as identity, culture, and landscape – is not fixed. Artistic provocations can provide unexpected meaning and new interpretation through attending to relationships and considering the connections between political, social, and cultural contexts more deeply. Lippard argues that “[t]ravel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.” [2] Rhall and Mitchell’s discussion, within the backdrop of [AT HOME], has deepened my understanding of the complexity of Country and led me to reflect on my own responsibilities both in my own neighbourhood and in my socially engaged art collaborations.

As an uninvited guest to Australia from Turtle Island/Canada – the lands of the Nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Nakota, Lakota, and the great Métis nation – I remain in a constant state of simultaneous longing for home and for belonging in so-called Australia. The temporary guest-host relationships that the artworld creates through happenings like [AT HOME] offer space for the negotiation of these feelings, and more broadly for our deeper interrogation of concepts of critical hospitality, Indigenous-settler relations, and the persistent reimagining of place.