hi pvi,
i feel like we at lala owe you a vote of thanks as it was this is the time…this is the record of the time that brought about the creation of lala. how important was that for you guys to do and how do you see the event now that it has been 2 or 3 years since then?
i think its us who owe you guys the thanks for participating in the first place! its totally cool that everyone seemed to find ways to let it catalyse more conversations, collaborations and artist driven initiatives and that’s more than we had ever bargained for!
it’s ironic that ‘this is the time’ came at a point where we were really struggling with financial survival strategies as a collective. holding the symposium and sharing ideas and stories about the mid career ‘void’ that we all seem to fall into at some point in our practices really emboldened and energised us as a group.
‘this is the time..’ was really special for us though because we were able to rally together as a sector and realise that we have a voice and a place in the cultural landscape. for it to be artist led and primarily focussed on practice was something we were very keen to initiate. as a symposium and live event night, it was an opportunity to talk and show and get a sense of what was happening on a national level with peers. it was v inspiring to have so many critical practitioners under one roof, and in perth too!
interestingly, we are now planning for a ‘this is the time 2..’ [or t2] to happen hopefully in 2012 and are beginning to think about it as an ongoing biennial celebration and interrogation of live art / interdisciplinary art practice. we’ll keep lala posted on developments, but now that cia studios is becoming more established there are more opportunities to house it there and really give it a home…
after being together as a collective for over 12 years now, are you still finding it interesting to be making work, does it feel easier or harder?
well we feel older and not as nimble on our feet! but I think we enjoy setting ourselves impossible challenges so that we’ll always have something juicy to grapple with. its definitely not easier that’s for sure! as the politics of public space shifts, we have to find new strategies to enable ideas to come to life outside.
what is lovely is that over the ten or so years we have developed a collective working methodology and a shared language for making work now, so it means that the devising process feels really grounded. the flip side of that is to stay conscious of not getting too comfortable by sitting within our comfort zones. I think that’s why its become so important for us to expand out and collaborate with new people whose skills are radically different from ours. it enables us to keep learning from others and challenges our perspectives, which has been really healthy.
making work together and expanding our networks of collaborative comrades is still really key to who we are and how we operate as a collective.
when you guys broke into the national scene with tours around the country you were really railing against the post-9/11 political situation, does the political of today still drive your work now and what are you reacting against?
definitely. but i think what we are realising is that the more overtly political a work is, the less transformative potential it has. so works we’re developing now seem to be much more playful, but still with a bit of a sting in their tails, hopefully! we’re also pushing that audience/performer relationship to a point where we are more facilitators to their activities [as opposed to them watching ours] and that shift is really interesting for us, generating more of a shared ownership over a performance or intervention.
you are just about to travel to adelaide to take part in vitalstatistix season called adhocracy, can you tell us about the work you are taking there and how you are engaging the locals?
yay!
yes we are here now undertaking a short residency and collaborating with ten amazing local artists on ‘transumer:deviate from the norm’. its a site-based intervention on the streets of port adelaide that invites audiences to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment.
so audiences are armed with their very own i-torch [a feat of engineering that consists of an iphone welded to a heavy duty torch] and a deviation kit full of absurd weaponry to use at various sites in the work. its very heavily driven by sound, with audio instructions directing the audience thru the streets. and we have associate pvi artist jason sweeney back on-board for this, so are v excited about working with jase again. our adelaide collaborators are ‘the motherfcukers’, an elite team of street superheroes who are determined to use the city as their playground.
so all in all its shaping up to be a bit of an adventure. I think we’re selling out too, as its a limited audience each night, so if peeps are in town and keen to check it out, get a ticket 
who are your current influences, artistic or otherwise, who are you loving at the moment?
ooh la la! so many! but I have to say theres two amazing books that really inspired us towards the making of this work and they were: ‘urban interventions: private projects in public spaces’ and ‘trespass: a history of uncommissioned urban art’. just some beautiful works in there and terrific methods of playfully subverting the official narratives of place.
thanks so much!
muchos respect to la la land!
pvi collective are a bunch of fcukers who succeed in accomplishing impossible tasks and who never, ever use capital letters.
pvi collective – pvicollective.com
vitalstatistix – vitalstatistix.com.au
Recent Comments