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I’m watching a Hitachi earthmover bury a suitcase in a mound of dirt inside Carriageworks when my mind peels off on a surreal tangent: does the machine have job satisfaction? I happen to know that another machine on this job has an MOU with its human operator outlining fair work conditions, and I’m wondering if this excavator got the memo.
In fact, the Hitachi just buried the memo: 25 tiles bearing the text of a labour agreement between artist Sophie Penkethman-Young and the 3D printer she used to make them. This weekend, members of the public will dig them up as part of Heap: an unusual mix of exhibition, installation and “archaeological dig” featuring 80 artworks by eight Australian artists, commissioned by the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (Fodi). Taking place in Carriageworks’ cavernous foyer, it’s the centrepiece of a program of panels, performances and screenings inspired by this year’s theme: revelation.
During the installation process, I see a bronze mushroom, a canister of kangaroo apple and a spider costume buried under 120 tonnes of earth. Already interred: a human figure cast in hardened dirt, and a funerary urn. Each represents a “dangerous idea” – something “that has potential to change the world if taken seriously”, says festival director Danielle Harvey. Audiences are invited to “really get their hands dirty” in excavating these ideas, “as a prompt to think a bit deeply” about thorny issues such as climate change and colonisation.
Heap draws on a “very obvious metaphor,” Harvey concedes, but a powerful one. “We’re a country built on mining and excavating, so what we find in the dirt and the lens that we [put on it] – whether it’s interesting or dangerous, and how we value it – is super interesting in an Australian context.”
Unlike the mining industry, diggers will be required to relinquish any treasure they unearth, with the artworks progressively added to a nearby display.
“We need to find new ways to get people to pay attention to these issues,” Harvey says. “Art feels like a really important way to progress and expand some of these conversations.”
Penkethman-Young’s cheeky provocation cloaks a radical idea: what if we didn’t treat machines as an endless source of production? The artist limited use of her 3D printer to a standard work week of 38 hours, capping output at one tile per day. It would have been quicker and easier to run the printer 24-7, but Penkethman-Young is pushing back on this mindset. Her artwork is an invitation “to think about all invisible labour” and how we value it – or fail to. “What would it mean if I really stood by my ethics? This is the silliest take I could do.”
Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew’s dangerous idea is couched more poetically: a series of canisters bearing medicinal and edible plants native to the Americas, the Middle East and Australia, each accompanied by an explanatory note. Andrew worked with botanical specialists and Indigenous medicine people to source the specimens and stories, which include Lebanese wild thyme (za’atar), Australia’s murnong (yam daisy), and several types of hallucinogenic Brugmansia (angel’s trumpet), used for healing and spiritual practices in Colombia.
“Opening ourselves up to knowledge systems that are thousands of years old” is inherently dangerous in this highly pharmaceuticalised era, says Andrew. Many of the plants in his project are considered dangerous through a western lens – such as coca, used to produce cocaine, and the poisonous Borrachero – whereas their indigenous uses are purely salutary. The way we frame plants is often “built around racism, around ignorance,” he says.
Aretha Brown, working with members of her queer women’s collective Kiss My Art, also foregrounds First Nations perspectives in her commission, reimagining the Australian flag through a queer, Gumbaynggirr lens. The result, a quilt, was sealed in a suitcase before burial.
“I don’t think [the Australian] flag properly represents us – and I think it’s actually divisive,” says Brown. “What could a new Australian flag look like? And how do you go about changing it? Is it something that happens after we become a republic? Is it something that happens when we change Australia Day? I think these are pretty dangerous ideas.”
Elsewhere, the sense of danger is less political and more poetic: Tim Silver’s human figure cast in hardened dirt is a statement on emotional distress and withdrawal, while Tarryn Gill’s urn, made from gold fabric and bearing the multiple faces of Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, is a statement on mortality and mutability.
Gill was inspired by Freud’s theory of the self as a collection of fragments we unearth over time, and by the recent death of her cat, for whom she made an urn. “I wanted to make something similarly reverent, but my own funerary ornament,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about what Jung says about middle age: you’ve spent all this time building achievements and staking your claim on the world, and then … [you realise] that’s not really what life’s about. What do I do with the time I have left? Time is actually what is dangerous.”
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