CSCW EP 87 BIGhART - BIGsTORY Chapter 2

[00:00:00] Bill Cleveland: From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World. Hey there, this is Bill Cleveland and I'm going to invite you to listen up a bit.

What's that sound? There's some kind of machinery thing going on, that's for sure, but it's not just a mechanism.

There's humans in there, doing whatever it is. Yeah, there's a lot of motion and energy and, uh Raw, rolling rhythm.

Rolling and scraping on hard surface with an odd beat that, that's coming and going in what sounds like a big, open space. Now, I know some of you knew it right off. Maybe because you felt it in your body, in your feet, in your knees, in the wind in your face, your hair, because ,you've been there, doing it.

Maybe you got it because you saw others doing it, practicing, making stuff up, trying and failing, over, over and over again, just to stick it. Well, if you haven't figured it out, what you are listening to is an emerging culture manifesting in time and space. In this instance, young humans finding freedom in a cocktail of gravity, adrenaline, and grace.

These are skateboarders rolling, and jumping, and flying in an environment made just for that in Tasmania, the smallest and southernmost state in Australia. Which, if you were with us for our last episode, you know, is the home of Scott Rankin and the organization he runs called BIGhART, which He describes thusly.

[00:02:11] Scott Rankin: Bringing stories that are seemingly invisible into visibility for people in such a way that it's harder to abandon them. Or another phrase that we use is… it's harder to hurt someone if you know their story.

[00:02:28] BC: Now, if you visit BIGhART's website, which I encourage you to do, you encounter the following:

BIGhART is Australia's leading arts and social change organization.

We make art, we build communities, we drive change.

30 years in operation, 62 communities engaged, 47 awards won, 550 artists contributed, 9, 500 people participated, 2. 6 million audience members.

I'm sure you'd agree, that's a lot, but given that social change mission, you may be asking one of my favorite questions.To what end?

In our previous episode, Scott Rankin talked about two initiatives, Ngapartji Ngapartji and the Namatjira Project, that both addressed that question, and also provided some insight into the how.

[00:03:23] SR: Visibility requires virtuosity, and sometimes we frown on that word at our end of the making. But for the voice of sorrow or the voice of abandonment to be present, it requires every ounce of our virtuosity in content and our virtuosity in the process of making the work.

So keeping an eye on invisible stories and making them visible, my focus is on the 80 percent of that task which is process, not so much on the 20 percent kind of commodity western view, of, of the power of content. Content is good, but the process and who's welcomed into the process, who's, who's allowed to be one of the makers and, and how you, how you break down those permissions is the real work.

[00:04:12] BC: In this episode, we'll learn more about BIGhART's approach to creative change making. Along the way, we'll hear about BIGhART's current work at the confluence of youth culture, environmental justice, and of course, skateboarding.

Part Four: Walking the Edge.

One of the things that you've done that I've seen over the course of your work, which I think is astounding, and would also be to many people who aspire to BIGhART's level of impact, is understanding what it takes to allow what happened in Ngapartji Ngapartji and the Namatjira Project to come to you.to emerge.

These projects took a decade or more to come to fruition and evolved over time with many layers, permutations, partners, and intentions. Could you say something about what it takes to make work that is both focused and rigorous, and so highly adaptive to changing conditions to the changing story?

[00:05:20] SR: Yeah. It's interesting, like, watching younger artists and practitioners, there's a lot of language around change, and the criticality of change. And, you know, we use all the language of violence and war, “We've got to make an impact. This is the target group.” But look in the world right now, at any of the conflicts. Change and fanaticism walk a knife edge. And a terrorist wants change the same as a pacifist.

[00:05:50] BC: Yes, there's a long list of enormously powerful change agents who have hacked the world's storyline that we need to pay attention to, especially now. Monsters like Pol Pot, Stalin, Milosevic, and Hitler, who, of course, was an artist, and our own Orange Beast, each of them in different ways, harnessing collective fear by way of the imagination to fracture and replace their community's story.

So, its not just fun and games. Given that ever present reality, how do you take those steps?

[00:06:26] SR: So, we need to walk into that space very carefully without a deadline. We need to be invited into the space to walk in, or to be in discussion about a gift that you might bring to trigger an invitation. So, those are all old traditions on this country. (Australia).

You walk to the edge of someone's country, you sit, and you wait, and they'll come to you, and a welcome to country will take place for your safety. And that needs to happen in the making of these kinds of works. So, if you think of skateboarders… skateboarders are often young people, self-soothing, a whole range of inner worlds, inner turmoils, that they're staying alive because of the self-soothing of skateboarding.

And then around that is the incredible Nijinsky prowess. The physical ability to be able to map architecture and redraw on wheels. and explore the potential between a council draftsperson and the mechanics of the deck, and then, the ability of the body.

And yet when we see skateboarders we think they're going to steal my purse or my man bag. They're going to knock me over. They are a menace. We must put uncomfortable stainless-steel things on the edge of everything. And we need to put signs up, generally speaking, “DO NOT SKATEBOARD HERE.” And so we say to a generation, and we have said it through and through, “You don't belong! You can't connect to your environment! And we want you out of sight and out of mind.”

Now, some cities in the world are recalibrating that and skateboarding facilities are incredible. But in the same way with young people, who we love to hate because they remind us of our own mortality and we're threatened by it, you need to sit down on the edge of their country.

And you can't go in to work with skateboarders and go, “Well, we're going to do this thing. It's going to go like this. And here's a script.” You know, you go in and inquire about the beauty of the traditions that they are already in. It is the cathedral of their own movement. And you're lucky to be there.

I'm bringing this one up because it's a, for us, it's a 10-year project. And we've just, on the weekend, this beautiful, big, trailable half pipe is now sitting right on the edge of what's called the Tarkine Rainforest, temperate rainforest, here in Northwest Tasmania.

[00:08:59] BC: Part Five: Skate of Mind

The project Scott is referencing here is one aspect of a long-term impact investment initiative that BIGhART has launched called SKATE. Like many BIGhART projects, Skate was born in response to a community need, a ripe opportunity, and a pinch of serendipity. The initial spark for the project was kindled in the Rankin family's backyard, where Scott built a halfpipe for his son, Locky.

Now, Locky was deep into skateboarding, which Scott began to appreciate as something much more than a roguish extreme sport. He saw it as both an art form and a culture that had the potential to fit into BIGhART's approach to leveraging community assets as multi layered vehicles for dynamic community change.

Learning from Locky, Scott came to recognize skateboarding's powerful performative potential as a rhythmic, multidimensional movement and soundscape that was both familiar and infinitely adaptive. With this in mind, BIGhART began to integrate skateboarding into their theatrical work with high school students in North Tasmania.

Over many years, the project has evolved to become a full-scale theatrical production incorporating music, movement, light and sound, involving dozens of local youth and professional skateboarders from the skateboard company Element as cast members. Another aspect of SKATE is helping to build spaces like the Tarkine Half Pipe, where skateboarders can gather to practice and learn and celebrate their passion for skateboarding.

As is often the case with BIGhART, there's more than one story playing out in this initiative.

[00:10:48] SR: Professional skateboarders from Element and young people are coming down to skate the Tarkine, and everything goes on Insta (Instagram) and their own channels. They are filming, we are filming, and the Tarkine, which is threatened by a mining company, is going to live in the bedroom channels of young people globally because this temperate rainforest is being skateboarded.

[00:11:09] BC: Here is Dr. Bob Brown, the leading advocate for the Tarkine's protection and conservation.

Dr. Bob Brown: Well, there's very little left of that natural universe on the planet, and the Tarkine is one of the most viable and important places left. And here we are in one of the most continuous, long-lived democracies, charged with either ripping it up for a few more minerals, cutting it down for a quick few dollars, or celebrating it as a place which will lift human spirits forever into the future, if we look after it.

And I know which side I'm on.

[00:11:53] SR: Now, at the same time, we're developing a whole range of activities called Skate of Mind, which are about soothing, and thriving, and belonging. And it's a mental health project. And we're also making a really big commercial work where skateboarders make the music with the act of skating because when you're on set architecture, you skate in time and also painting with light through tracking projection, etc.

And that work is to build, this is ambitious, Bill, we want to gross a billion dollars around the world, put 100 million away into a corpus so, all of the profit. And then those young people can use the 100 million that's in the corpus to change the world because we invite young people into an adult world to bring about transformation.

[00:12:51] BC: You're right. This is an immense undertaking with enormous implications. Given the care you've taken with your collaborators and partner communities, not to distort the social and cultural ecosystem you're working with, how are you approaching something of this scale?

[00:13:07] SR: So, so it's recalibrating that, that whole approach thing. It's taken ten years of sitting on the edge of skateboarders country and listening to the cathedral of their movement. It's our longest project to date, within the thirty years of BIGhART. We have legacies on the legacies. Or, it's a project that's, has its own trajectory. We are usually careful about not building dependency. So, creating something beautiful and breaking it apart, allowing what was once a story, it could be the Namatjira story about the injustice of that copyright issue. That's no longer the story.

And often some of the worst work in our sector, our part of the world that you'd be familiar with is in individual lives, and also community lives, is locking the narrative to a certain point in time and putting your snout in that trough as an arts organization or a writer or whatever and feeding off the trough of that deficit rather than seeing that is a previous chapter. Now people are doing this, and we have to be careful of that, and careful of monetizing change---careful of looking for something to change.

I use the phrase “look for the flow of consequences and then you don't trap people in time.” It's not about you. It's like, do you know Winnie the Pooh? Well, I sometimes talk about Winnie the Pooh and Piglet throwing the sticks in the river and then running to the other side of the bridge to see where the sticks have gone, and which one is winning or whatever.

And in a sense, communities are changing all the time and you're entering into that flow of change. That's not your responsibility, and you're bringing a gift on invitation, and then there is a flow of consequences from your involvement. But we tend, again, to commodify change making, and, and put ourselves as the hero at the center of it, rather than be part of the flow of change and change yourself.

[00:15:10] BC: Part Six: Compost Stinks and Soil Thrives

So, Scott, BIGhART has always been a delicate dance; learning, adapting, recalibrating, all the while, staying true to core values and intentions. And Skate is not only going to put a lot of that to a test, but the opportunity for learning will be enormous. You've created a body of work based on a cumulative process of learning, of being a student of the communities.

And I can really understand that along the way, you can feel expert at learning and also feel incredibly humble at the fact that every time you open one of these new stories, you're not starting off learning how to learn, but you're having to learn a new culture, a new relationship, a new rhythm, a new language, all of those things that come with each of these places.

So, as you move forward, the question will not only be, “What have you learned”, but “How do you pass that on to others?”

[00:16:21] SR: Yeah, it's a big question. It's easy with a great storyteller like you to talk about these things as though we never failed, or there weren't mistakes, or “We’re doing very well, thank you.”

It is in a constant state of unknowing and propped up failure. It's like compost stinks, and then soil thrives. And, you know, there are times when it's all compost, and you don't know, and you shouldn't know, and it's an ugly way of looking at it. But over the last 30 years of BIGhART, we're a hundred and million, roughly. That's about what we've raised for communities living with disadvantage. And invisible stories, et cetera. And there's 500 artists or something. There's a number of people who have stayed for two decades of work. And people tend to stay long. And they're using first projects that they're involved in as an awakener and a quest.

And then that quest is saying to them, “What can you let go of and what don't you know?” So that you can be quiet. And we are peak primates, peak predator primates, addicted to left brain, data-based skill sets. Like, it's a chronic addiction that's going to destroy most of us and the planet. So, if we are requested as young artists to come innocently to find a solution to something that is defined as a problem, then we will be coming with the problem to solve, to try and come up with a solution, because the problem is the way of life.

[00:18:05] BC: Uh, yes, “We are the do-gooders, and we've come to do good.”

[00:18:09] SR: So, the first projects are usually getting rid of those addictions and not castigating yourself, but just it's like a series of gestalts of, I see this new thing. So, it is the project talking to you, and you're the one who is just as much in the moment of navigating change. And then these careers start to emerge around what I think is a remaking of wisdom, which we honor in First Nations without question, but we dishonor amongst ourselves. And often eldership is earned by the wisdom that's come from being quiet. And letting go of your assumptions and your addictions.

And, and so I would hope that younger artists are coming into projects, and communities, and processes…. I mean, I'm a playwright, so I've got to say this, …but they are on a dramaturgical journey themselves. And they are learning these new virtuosities in the process of making, not mesmerized on the content, the commodity, and the stardom.

It's those virtuosities, using a European word, that are found in the deep women and men of learning in these ancient cultures on this continent. And it's in the same zone those virtuosities that a man or a woman can be a Ngangkari who heals…(a traditional aboriginal healer) …it's not my place to say, but can travel in ways that that non-Aboriginal people don't know how to.

Elon Musk does not know that people can be in two places at once. So, there is a world of high culture and high mystery that beckons us. And we work with skateboarders, we work with seafarers, we work with Aboriginal people, we work with the elderly. In all of those sets, there are deep wisdoms and learnings that you find yourself actually in an exchange, as a younger artist, and you become an older artist.

[00:20:08] BC: Yeah, and not just in the process, but in internalizing the practice. And along the way are an accumulation of skills, many of which you're not always aware that you are accruing, but that becomes the way you think about the world. One of the things that we struggle with a lot is, how do we pass that on?

Particularly, the most impatient moment in human life is that young artist, wanting an instant gratification and a sense of accomplishment overnight, which sometimes occurs. Sometimes to the detriment of the people for whom it occurs. But it just occurs to me, it's a wonderful thing that artists in Australia wanting to go down this path. There's definitely a model there. There's a practice, there's people doing this work and lots of members of your community who are no longer in your community but are out there doing other things. Based on the same experience. This is a great national resource. And Australia is the kind of place where an organization like, like BIGhART can become that.

Our country is a little different. Something like BIGhART would, I don't know how many enemies you have, but boy would they have a lot of enemies here. It would be a lot of people trying to mess with it. Virtuosity is, in fact, threatening to those who want to slide by. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of sliding going on in this country these days.

[00:21:44] SR: That is super interesting. And like, if you look at, for instance, uh, the phrase tall poppies, that is a thing here. You will get lopped off. We receive zero arts and culture funding from The Australia Council, or Arts Tasmania, or New South Wales. Currently, there is no arts and culture funding that goes into the organization, except in Western Australia, into one project in the Pilbara.

And, in one sense, I go, “That's terrible”, but on the other hand, I go, “That's really great”, because we are stewarding arts and culture so badly that it sits in these tiny agencies of government meaning very little, with very little reach into policy that then can possibly become legislation around urgent issues.

[00:22:38] BC: Yeah, but you do have a big reach. The non-arts cross-sector support base that you've cultivated over these many years has, I think, dramatically broadened the scope and reach and understanding of arts based strategies as a transformative force. in Australia. When I see the investors you credit in your work, I am looking at some seriously fertile soil: banks, community development agencies, boat builders, financial services, electric utilities, dairies, and skate, of course, devised as a social investment enterprise, will really extend the influence and independence of the work. So, Yeah, you've definitely come out of the arts bubble in a big way, not only for BIGhART, but also the hundreds of artists and community partners who joined the party.

Yeah.

[00:23:29] SR: So we've traded the comfort of the garret, in a way, for noninvolvement and young people. Younger artists, we're often scared of the really big idea, the really important idea. Is it Timothy Morton talks about the event horizon of issues are so big, you can't actually see them in the climate change context.

I've totally misquoted him there, but the gift gets instilled down so that you can recognize more clearly the things that are destroying the soul of the narration of the nation. And. It is up to older artists to be willing to be cancelled, or willing to be damaged, or to be censored, or willing to just go with the robust and persuasive powers of a young artist.

Like, if I met me at 25 I would have told me to “Shut up, and get out of my face, you know, nothing, you little upstart.” So, it distills down to being able to stand lovingly and forgivingly and trustingly seeing the talent that has not yet come out of the soil. And assist in a sense for people to see the size of the idea in the small thing.

And, when younger artists are doing that hey become much hungrier for process, and much less mesmerized by the addiction of content making or those things. And currently to bring us back to the very first project in a sense. Right now, 51 percent of all the young people locked up in very inappropriate juvenile justice centers, or youth detention, are, Aboriginal young people from 3 percent of the population. Now, they are the most vulnerable in our midst, and that's what we're doing as a country. And, in a sense, no art needs to be made about anything else, other than that one thing, until that cultural wound is healed. And that needs to happen all around the country, on all Aboriginal nations, led by Aboriginal nations.

And we are the jailers. If we aren't prepared to step into that contested space and be knocked about by the process, well, we should be in arts administration and not making art.

[00:25:55] BC: I can't agree with you more, and we're having similar kinds of upheavals in this country. It has been an incredible privilege to reconnect.

Every culture has its own jargon. And yours isn't ours. And for that reason, it resonates. And so, bringing things from somewhere else is sometimes worth ten case studies from, you know, from the U. S.

[00:26:22] SR: Thank you for those generous words.

[00:26:25] BC: Fellow travelers need to Pat each other on the back once in a while. It's a hard time to be an optimist in the world.

SR: Yeah, sure.

BC: Kind of part of my business model.

[00:26:35] SR: Yeah, I can see that. And can see the way that you're putting together a body of conversations to go out into the world and inspire and to hold things true. It's very good work.

[00:26:50] BC: Thank you. It has really helped me out just to be in conversation with people who aren't insane, or maybe are insane, in the best possible way.

We'll have a great evening.

BC: Okay.

SR: Thanks, Bill.

BC: Take it easy. And I would say the same to you out there listening, but with a twist by way of the great creative change agent, Woody Guthrie, who said, “Take it easy, but take it.” Which I think exactly fits the patience and determination, thsat characterize the BIGhART stories we've been hearing.

It's also important to be aware that what we've heard in this show and our previous episode just scratches the surface of the BIGhARTs saga. And so, if you visit their website at BIGhART.org, that's B-I-G-H-A-R-T. You'll find many more chapters in text, and image, and hundreds of videos, a snippet of which we're hearing right now in the background, in the soundtrack of a film documenting another amazing BIGhART project called The Acoustic Life of Sheds, which is an eight-year-old mobile musical celebration of stories and sounds rising up from farm and boat sheds shared, where else, in shed-based concerts of new and traditional music. Concerts that, not surprisingly, are produced in conjunction with BIGhARTs Project O, which is a leadership and empowerment program for young women.

So, as we end this episode, thanks again for lending us your ears. And also, if you're so inspired, passing this and other episodes on to your friends. Also, if you have some comments, questions, or ideas about how we can expand the Change the Story community, or people you think we should be talking to, please drop us a line at csac@Artandcommunity.com. Artandcommunity is all one word, and all spelled out.

Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the maestro, Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnbbe. Our effects come from freesound.org. Our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And rest assured, this episode has been 100 percent human.