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"We could be anywhere."
"I know this place."
The two novels "The Shipping News" and "Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow" gained much of their impact from their depictions of remote and specific regions of the world. Rather than placing the reader in global generic space, they emphasized notions of local knowledges and local understandings, particular climates, dialects, vernaculars and geographies that form people and are carried within them. As the exact opposite to a superficial glancing notion of your surroundings, this kind of experience involves an attunement of all the senses as well as an adjustment to the quiddity of a particular place. For most readers, the value of this experience of strangeness is a fresh view of the familiar and its potential for knowing and meaning.
The assertion of the particular or endemic against the homogenization of global corporate culture asserts multiple futures, multiple ways of seeing – and thus infinite combinations of thought and, I think, hope for the future.
All Australians have to come to terms with an increased understanding of Aboriginal prior occupancy of Australia. Aboriginal concepts continue to infiltrate the wider Australian society - and the idea of sacred sites, country, custodianship are well-entrenched in Australian culture. And, it can be noted, they often reflect ideas brought here from other cultures and other countries. The land can be seen as mother, gift, treasure, possession, weapon, theme park.
Knowing where you are as a specific place and also knowing that you are part of a global society, able to take part in an unprecedented mixing of cultures and languages, is exciting.
I tell my students, when I have students, that the house of art has many rooms. I think that in the future the house of art will continue to have many rooms, that its traditions will recur and re-invent themselves, that the internet will continue to provide free space for wild growth that eludes the gatekeepers of culture and provides a platform or "exhibition space" for each person in the world with access to a computer. Art can be compromised, it can be soft porn, and/or introverted and self-regarding, it can be a search for novelty to prong jaded appetites or, at its best, in many diverse ways it can provoke, make connections, expose injustice, charm and delight, enter intimate space and arouse the deepest thoughts. The common factor of all art is freedom and in that freedom lies possibility, re-invention, reflection, the externalisation of private thought, human responses to the world, a necessary part of life.
Stephanie Radok
South Australia
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