Writing the Brisbane Powerhouse
Lisa Anderson's Writing the City and Arterial's Elektrosonic Interference
fineArt forum, 2001

The Brisbane Powerhouse has become one of those contested urban sites: it probably always has been. As soon as this former industrial building was transformed into a cultural space, artists claimed, reclaimed, told, recounted its history and spoke of the work which once happened here. The serviceable and modest 1920s building retains many of the fittings from its original use as well as the layer of graffiti which had appeared since the powerhouse fell into disuse.

In acknowledging history, we might learn something about ourselves, or at least, of gentrification. A question seems to hang around, an unwelcome reminder of the possibility or likelihood that cultural developments and precincts actually contribute to the gentrification which displaces lower income residents, replaces vernacular architecture with walls of neo-toscano apartment villas and converts century old warehouses into trendy lofts. 'Yuppy ghetto' is the word around town.

Hanging off the outside of the Powerhouse with a team of scribes writing their stories in chalk, Lisa Anderson reclaims this cultural space for the community. Her series of public artworks and events, Writing the City, is into it's fourth incarnation with Architectural Fictions. The body of works which comprise Writing the City is concerned with narrative, in particular, an engagement with "ideas of narrative driven space. With Writing the City, she emphasised that story lines of a place form the underlying threads that hold together, a kind of architectural fabric reliant on detritus, desires and domain of occupancy."1 Across the side of the building, Anderson has painted MINE in gigantic letters and it's taken her four days to inscribe ownership. The scribes - school students, kids, academics, writers - have added their own stories in chalk: stories about culture, community, place and of living in the 'renewed' inner riverside suburb of this subtropical city. The works also emerge from a narrative of collaboration which is formed by a multitude of stories, encounters and experiences.

Someone writes 'Whose community? Whose culture? Whose history?'. My thoughts turn to the Festa di San Giuseppe which takes place annually in the adjacent park. It was first staged 25 years ago so that the post-war Italian migrants who have settled in the area can enjoy festivals like those in Italy. My thoughts turn to the homeless sleeping in that park and the moral outrage expressed by locals too well-off to care: what about crime, what about safety, what about the children. My thoughts turn to the numerous boarding houses around the suburb where the pension or the dole just barely covers the rent. As the disposable income group moves in and chase everyone else out, I think to myself, "there goes the neighbourhood".

Arterial's Elektrosonic Interference also presented a response to the site, a cultural and community history of the Brisbane Powerhouse: once a working power station which generated electricity for the city's trams. Working with performance artists, Barry Schwartz and Bastiaan Maris, this project recorded oral histories with former workers from the powerhouse to produce an installation and performance piece which occupied the centre's turbine hall. It engaged the labour, Indigenous and natural histories of the site in a non-linear multimedia mapping of the building's interior.

Drawing on the disastrous and destructive past which includes the death of powerhouse workers from asbestosis, Elektrosonic Interference charts a sustainable future. Images of the natural, industrial and corporate environment were projected on the walls, a vocal group performed an 'aural sculpture' and an unbearable humming of machinery reverberated through every body. Schwartz improvised his performance, strumming at electrically charged wires which showered him in sparks and inducing impossible industrial sounds from unlikely instruments. He's random but not frenetic.

In public artworks such as those presented by Anderson and Arterial, there is a strange meeting of the past, present and future which urges us all to be mindful of our sense of place: of who and what has passed through and is yet to arrive. Place can be a precarious space which crumbles and disperses under economic, social and political pressures. Places can be vulnerable to the immense forces of globalisation. Patricia C. Phillips has argued that "public art cannot mend, heal, or rationalize a nostalgia-driven desire to return to less volatile times. It can, however, provide routes to new conceptions of community so that the fragmented elements of personal experiences and the epic scale of urban dramas collaborate to define a contemporaneous idea of the public."2 Both artists seem to speak to the risks of living in these uncertain times and uncertain spaces. While Anderson is suspended from the Powerhouse by abseiling apparatus, Schwartz really is mixing water and electricity. There's a carnivalesque quality where the danger somehow adds thrill to the spectacle. Both Writing the City and Elektrosonic Interference have manifest in and from the comings and goings of public life. It's a conception of public life which is made possible by the redeployment of this building, a site through which certain aspects of public and cultural activities are again reinvented.

NOTES
1. Dr Lisa Anderson and Jacqueline Phillips, Writing the City: Public Installations and Collaborations, Catalogue, Artspace, Sydney, 2001
2. Patricia C. Phillips, 'Public Constructions' in Suzanne Lacy (ed), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Bay Press, Washington, 1995, p 70