Becoming Footscray

Image/Appearances

The city is best, or most readily appreciated as an aesthetic production without the distraction of people – their bodies too willing to disrupt the aesthetic organisation around them; their conversations organising new bodies – unattractive, atypical, anomalous bodies whose aleatory productions disinherit the theatre around them, denuding the structure and the process which produced them from within. These bodies haunt the elegance of urban design with the spectre of its own decay.

The “image” that some (loftily called ‘placemakers’) seek to present in the urban spaces of Footscray is just an image, or even an image of an image – a reproduction or simulacrum of an urban space – a copy with no original, a signifier of nothing. 

A seating area is created by people sitting down, not the other way around. In the renewed seating area’s of Footscray, we see an image of what a space with people seated in it might look like, an image that is clearer without people sitting there. This image of a seating area is not an invitation to sit, but a designation, an instruction of where and how to sit.

The Image of “Clean”, “Safe” and “Diverse” public spaces in Footscray is a direct, though ungrounded counterbalance to the Footscray of Appearances – the Footscray of dirty, threatening and misanthropic otherness. By creating spaces which project the image of the social relations they simulate, the ‘placemakers’ of Footscray are attempting to reduce the Footscray of Appearances into the Appearance of Footscray. 

The constructed Image of Footscray is an image which is taken from the pseudo-reality of the Footscray of Appearances, and embedded in the hyper-reality of the simulacrum. In fact, it is the untameable projections of the Footscray of Appearances which motivates the Image of Footscray to complete the alienation of the image. 

Activated Spaces

The concept of “activating” public spaces was dreamt by urban planners to solve the problem of “failed spaces” – a concept also dreamt by urban planners. Failed spaces are generally spaces which have failed to adhere to a projected aesthetic and closely mediated social production. These concepts are dreams because one cannot “activate” space anymore than one can fail (or be failed) by it – space is, by definition, a process of activation: '...place is an assembly of elements co-existing in a certain order and space is the animation of these places by the motion of the moving body...' (Augé, 1995, 65)

There are no inactive spaces in Footscray. There are however places whose spatial animation does not adhere to the specified activity – let’s call it the activity of the Appearance of community in productive consumption of the image of its own activity. There are places in Footscray where people are unproductively doing “nothing”, or doing something other, undefined, illegal, unseen, uncontained, uncooperative. These places need to be “activated”, or “renewed” in order to eliminate the spatial animation of unproductive bodies and implant new bodies, 'alienated desiring machines' , which activate the space in the 'interest of functional relationality for the sake of commodity consumption.' (Elias, 2010, 826)

To avoid engaging with the Footscray of Appearances, the Appearance of Footscray imposes a new narrative, a simulacrum of community, a rendering of previous undesirable and undesiring spaces “inactive”, or even non-existent. It then renews or (re)activates these spaces as desirable, or desiring spaces, capable of existing independently of bodily spatial animation.

Performers don’t need a theatre to animate their performance, but a theatre needs performers to animate its structure. In the social production of public spaces, the structure for the performance of identity resides in the relations, conversations, interactions and bodily adventures of the public themselves, not the built environment that tries to entrap them.

Renewal is a given in public space – it inheres to the synchronic process of the production of space. “Urban Renewal” is euphemistic rationale for the management, or mediation of this process. 

As the built “theatre’s”, or “galleries” of public space are abused and undermined by the transgressions of bodies assimilating them into their own individual identities, they require constant “renewal”. One of the design solutions for this “problem” has been the concept of “pop-up” spaces, or spaces which seek to simulate the movement which animates space. However, rather than “activating” places with notions of ephemerality and spontaneity, they encourage the alienation of bodies from the spaces that are produced by them. While a pop-up space comes and goes, the production of interrelations and the activation of publics and places continues becoming, irrespective and unaffected by the act of aesthetic mapping – ephemeral or forever outdated -  imposed upon them.

Diversity/Safety

The branding of “Diversity” in Footscray posits the identity of place as a cultural foodcourt, where all cultures can be consumed equally in panoptic space; a diversity which satiates the appetite of the still dominant Anglo-celtic perspective for apportions of illuminated “otherness”.

The identity of Footscray, or of a participant in the place of Footscray, is increasingly mediated by its relation to otherness – where one might “play” at being a minority or marginal culture; where one can feel they might be in Vietnam or Ethiopia without feeling “out of place”. The foundation of this relationship rests upon these “diverse” cultures, or representatives of diversity, remaining static in their representation. A diversity which diversifies continually, as a product of the fluid engagement of social spaces, cannot be maintained as a simulacrum of communal identity.

The appetite for otherness is not just a product of race or culture, but of capital and commodity consumption: 'Capitalism is the global usurpation of belonging.' (Massumi, 2002,  88)

The tension between a harmony of differences and a fear of undifferentiated otherness feeds not only the spectacle of diversity as a renewable, though stable commodity, but also the spectacle of “safety” as the counterweighted concern of this diversity. “Safety” addresses the undifferentiated otherness by implying that there is a shared or communal “fear” – a public opinion, a concern for the public good. But while this application of “safety” is a response and counterweight to diversity, it also re-invigorates the fear of diversity as a communal value and tantalises the public’s tongue for dangerous otherness.

In the renewed spaces of Footscray, diversity is an image to be consumed by the very people who produce it. Once this image of diversity has been stabilised, its outlines entrenched in the 'diminished semantic field' (Moran, 2012, 72), then the fear of otherness can become not just another motion in the production of public space, but a productive division which enhances the spectacle and deepens the alienation of the bodies which consume this spectacle.

“Safety”, with its implied observance and monitoring, provides for the maintenance and propagation of an aestheticized, “de-socialised” public space. The stabilisation of diversity , the security of a clearly differentiated otherness, and an artificialized public space defined by the cool eye of spectacular consumption are the desired outcomes of the urban renewal process in Footscray. Art and culture are the sweeteners for the ingestion of this process. Public spaces in Footscray are not communal places for the production of everyday life, but designated, monitored and artificially mediated places for the consumption of spectacles.

Footscray Everyday

In Footscray people are not waiting for their places to be made or for their community to be renewed.  Rather than being assimilated into the world around them, they are busy making the world similar to what they are (de Certeau, 1984, 166). 

It is this practice, this production of public space, this performance of the everyday identity of Footscray, which 'eludes the panoramic, panoptic, visual construction and understanding of space.' (de Certeau, 1984, 93) The spaces of Footscray are created by an arbitrary movement of individual bodies, transversing the borders of public and private in their relations with other bodies: the individual is the location at which relationality is conceived. (de Certeau, 1984, xi)

This relationality and transversality between public and private, individual and collective, is the foundation of social identity, and the practice of this process which authenticates this identity. 

The narratives of bodies and their relations with others authenticate the social identity of Footscray and its public spaces. These are lived spaces, where the practice of everyday life creates the lived experience of space (Schmid, 2008, 39). All around them people are “reading” the world and interpreting it in relation to their own experience: 'The Street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.' (de Certeau, 1984, 117) They are writing their own stories with the movement of their bodies, their interactions with others and their consumption of the produced materials around them. This everyday practice – reading, talking, walking etc. – is a product that doesn’t capitalise. 

Already, and always, people in Footscray are renewing their place by manipulating spaces and identities to suit their own everyday narratives. They are 'poets of their own affairs.' (de Certeau, 1984, 34) 

There is in Footscray a tendency to promote the “real”, or the image of a “real person”, or a collection of images of “real people” with their stories captioned, expediting the “invisible immensity of being” for the Appearance. These images are only the story of reality, not the real story; they are a projection of the reality they seek to occupy. The real story, the true identity, and identities of Footscray, are in a constant state of iso-rhythmic oscillation (Meyer, 2008, 150), where the procedures and practices of people manipulating and transducing the world around them produces spaces and identities which cannot be mapped or captioned – lived spaces which define “place”. This definition of place is not a seeing but a going (de Certeau, 1984, 119). 

It is in the superposition of small movements, the movement of waves of individual, everyday practitioners - 'an innumerable collection of singularities' (de Certeau, 1984, 97) - that the identity of Footscray is written, and it is shaped by the movement of identity itself, by the going or becoming of social relationality: the movement of private people into publics and of publics into isolated movements, of identity defined by the constant manipulation of things, of temporary identification, of a synchronic order of social reality that is not consecutive, but is a federated instant (Elias, 2010, 826), a vast moment that is washing up against and being compelled by other federated moments, continually dispersing the borders which define them.

Footscray is a place whose spaces are identifiable by the process of their production and by the experiences of those living them, not by the construction of a narrative derived from their image or appearance.

The Sublation

How does the practice of art and the practice of everyday life engage in the practice of becoming together, or 'the unfounded and unmediated in-between of becoming' (Massumi, 2002, 71)? 

How can art become a participant that not only memorialises chosen moments in the unfolding of this practice, but actually provides for the disinhibition of its fundamental movements and rhythms?

Can an art practice advene, rather than intervene, with the (social) production of (social) space, and inhere to its rhythmical iterations?

'Read materialistically, the concept of sublation denotes an act(ion), a creative activity, not so much a real but a realisation, a becoming...Logical and analytical reason, coherent, strictly formal discourse, cannot capture the becoming, the movement of the sublation in the creative act.' (Schmid, 2008, 31)

The essence of this "movement of the sublation" is that the risk, even the certitude of failure, simultaneously presents 'a possibility - a promise'. (Schmid, 2008, 31)

Between the individual and 'indexes of order which is imposed on him' (de Certeau, 1984, 32), there is a space created by the act of living. It is in this space that the "movement of the sublation" can occur, a scramble in the production of everyday life that the artist and the public share and are mutually active within.

Rather than a distinguished discourse for a select public, or game that plays upon divisions between art and life, the practice of relational aesthetics and social engagement can seek to reinstate the process of art into the 'ensemble of procedures' (de Certeau, 1984, 43) that constitute everyday practice.

Ideally, for an art practice that is part of the of the perpetual process of renewal in the Public spaces of Footscray, it must be a process wherein the creative interaction between artist and public - and the space created by this interaction - resists the commodification and spectacularization of everyday life, consequently providing the actual space for people in Footscray to 'claim place as coeval with self' (Levin & Solga, 2009, 42); to own and dispose of their individual gestures, rather than being disinherited of them by their representation. 

It must be a process that re-posits the body as a location for the social construction of identity, rather than the constructions that seek to alienate it.

It must be a process that reinstates the secrecy of reality (de Certeau, 1984, 185) in order to reveal the immanence of myth, poetry and dreams.

If the people of Footscray are "poets of their own affairs", then the artist who seeks to advene with this process is an agent of the in-between, a provocateur of the becoming, a facilitator of the travel stories that create space - the failure and the promise in the "movement of the sublation".

References

Augé, M (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity Verso, New York

De Certeau, M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley

Levin, L & Solga, K (2009) Building Utopia: Performance and the Fantasy of Urban Renewal in Contemporary Toronto TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 53, No. 3, (T203), pp.37-53 (Article), MIT Press.

Massumi, B (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press

Meyer, K (2008) "Rhythms, Streets, Cities" in Goonewardena, K., Schmid, C., Kipfer, S. & Milgrom, R. (eds) Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre Routledge, New York

Moran, J (2005) Reading the Everyday, Routledge, New York 

Schmid, C (2008) "Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space: towards a three dimensional dialectic" in Goonewardena, K., Schmid, C., Kipfer, S. & Milgrom, R. (eds) Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre Routledge, New York