M12 Collective: Ornitarium

Ornitarium photograph by Richard Saxton

Next week sees the opening of Spaced - Art Out Of Place, the International Biennial of Socially Engaged Art. Members of the M12 collective will join the exhibition and its related symposium to speak about the installation they designed and implemented in Denmark, Australia: The Ornitarium.

This aesthetically elegant structure serves as a bird hide, a place of rest, and a site for art and contemplation - while welcoming local residents to consider the ecological and cultural landscape. 

The Ornitarium is housed at the Wetlands Education Centre and is operated by the group Green Skills.  Below, the M12 collective elaborates on the ideas behind this structure and its relationship to place. For more information, and larger high-resolution images, please visit here: 

This project has been inspired by “local knowledge” found in Southwestern Australia – specifically knowledge related to birds that populate the regions wetlands areas, regional timber types, and building methods. The work is designed and built as a bird hide and as a social space. The Ornitarium has a large front wall that stands as the dividing line between human habitat and wetland habitat, and a platform that invites visitors to spend time around the structure; encouraging learning and providing a catalyst for developing a deeper connection to the local environment and community.

The structure explores duality, and binds built space with environment—the inside expresses notions of the private, contemplative, communal, and reflective, and the outside wall stands to camouflage human engagement and reinforce fragmentation, and instinctive habitats such as nests and forests.

UPDATE: Here's Naomi Millet of The West Australian writing on the Spaced - Art Out Of Place installations: 

Towns such as Narrogin, Leonora, Northam and Mukinbudin are practical places. You might expect to see farmers there, and wheat bins, or sheep trucks, road trains and specialist machinery.

In the town centre, there might be a couple of granite and bronze memorials to founding pioneers but, apart from that, you wouldn't have very high hopes of encountering much sculpture, painting, multimedia or art in these often stark environments.

This perception is set to change dramatically with the emergence of Spaced: Art Out of Place, an ambitious biennial project featuring a collective of international and Australian artists which not only breaks new ground but also covers a vast amount of it.

Related Articles:
The M12: A New Vision For The High Plains
The 2011 BIG FEED
Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes

White House Rural Conversation: #WHChat

Folks, we've been slow with articles and correspondence this week due to another series of technical issues. We'll be back to normal form this weekend.

Importantly, today one of President Obama's senior advisors is presiding over a Twitter discussion on rural issues this morning at 10am EST [#WHChat]. More information can be found on The Daily Yonder. 

Let's share our voices and our perspectives!

Update: The Black Hills Are Not For Sale

Mural Installation on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles; Honor The Treaties Facebook Page

Last year we discussed Honor The Treaties, a promising collaboration between photographer Aaron Huey, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and a host of urban and indigenous street artists. 

Today we have more information on the latest developments in this project which crosses all kinds of generational, regional, and rural-urban lines. Here's video the recent Shepard Fairey installation on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, followed by Mr. Huey's brief summary of the project:

The Black Hills Are Not For Sale from sinuhe xavier on Vimeo.

“The Black Hills are not for sale!”  is a common rallying cry for Treaty rights on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

In 1980 The longest running court case in U.S. history, the Sioux Nation v. the United States, was ruled upon by the U.S. Supreme Court.The court determined that, when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders, the terms of the second Fort Laramie treaty had been violated. The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken and that the initial offering price plus interest should be paid to the Sioux Nation. As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation. The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, “The Black Hills are not for sale.”

The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties with the Lakota. The call to action I offer today is this: Honor the treaties.  Give back the Black Hills.  It’s not our business what they do with them.

My goal is to amplify the voices of my many Lakota friends and family on Pine Ridge, all of whom have advised me on this campaign.

Thanks!
Aaron Huey

Ernesto Yerena signing copies of his contributions to the project

More information, as well as downloadable images for wheat pasting, can be found at Honor The Treaties. The organization also hosts a Facebook page (where many more images and videos can be found), as well as a tumblr page.

Related Articles:

Honoring The Treaty: Aaron Huey And The Pine Ridge Reservation

The People Speak: New Work From Jetsonorama

Almanac For Moderns: Rejoicing In The Noon Mercy

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

January Twenty-First

I wonder how much of fatality has come to the birds in the past week that I have been house-bound, while storm after storm swept the fields and woods, with alternate thaws followed cruelly by sleet. The papers tell of airplanes brought down with their fuselage ice-incrusted. It is not the cold that kills the birds, and somewhere, somehow, they always manage to find forage; it is winter rains that ground them too. For the titmouse that I come on stone dead in the woods, how many more small winged creatures are lying for the hawks and weasels to find, in the hills and on the fields!

Yet today, when I trudge abroad, just breaking through the stubborn crust at each tiring step, I hear the brave whistling and clinking notes of many little birds rejoicing in the noon mercy - though the mercury is below zero. I turn this way and that, trying to see them, but wherever I look the intolerable glare of the crusted snow, of the trees glittering in the silver mail, parries my sight like a cutting sword I cannot look into the eye of this ice-armored day; I can only bow my head and listen attentively, to the small indomitable voices of tree sparrows, white-throats and chickadees, ringing as bright and delicate as frost crystals become audible on the tingling air.

A Jetsonorama Panorama

Many thanks to Gary O'Brien for contacting us and sharing this interactive panorama from Jetsonorama's wheat paste installation in Cameron, Arizona.

What's striking about this technology is that it not only gives depth and dimension to Jetsonorama's work, but it reveals how these installations stand as monuments in a sparsely developed landscape - as these representations of folks from the artist's community float luminously beneath a crystal-clear night sky.

Mr. O'Brien is an award-winning photo-journalist currently working Tuscon, Arizona. His site also features some multimedia reporting on a wide range of subjects, as well as a portfolio of work that meditates on natural space and then applies that same compositional sense to domestic scenes. He also spent a portion of 2005 school year with a class of fifth-graders, and the photo-essays and audio work to emerge from that time is particularly moving - and suggests a collaborative model for other artists and community members. 

Related Articles:

Jetsonorama and Wheat Paste Art on the Reservation

New Art from Jetsonorama's Rez

Jetsonorama and the Moving Planet

Contexts: Invisible Cities, Invisible Country

From the ruins of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, Saint Louis; Strange Harvest

Today we present an entry from Invisible Cities, one of the most heralded works of fabulist fiction composed by the European writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985).

Born to prominent agricultural scientists, Mr. Calvino spent his youth on a farm behind the hills of San Remo. He would often climb the trees around the farm and perch for hours on their branches - enjoying a perspective, and a kind of creative solitude, that would provide a lasting metaphor for his fiction. 

Invisible Cities is a book with few peers. In short dispatches almost resembling flash-fiction, we walk into a story of how Marco Polo describes for Kublai Khan the features and limits of his empire, just as it is beginning to crumble around him. These reports, heavily influenced by Calvino's interest in folk tales, demonstrate a particular and agricultural eye for detail and deep history, as well as a sense of spatial relationships that speaks to how his formative years were spent outside of the city walls, in spiritual company with Marco Polo. The rural, and the even the agrarian, influence on his work is often not discussed, though its presence lingers:

Cities & Memory 3

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already kknow this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lampost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lampost to th erailing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

This entertaining and contrary interview with Gore Vidal also helps to explain this "universal" writer; he also briefly touches on the influence of growing up among agriculturalists:

Related Articles:
Contexts: How A Magnet Changed A Village

In Defense of Rural Post Offices: Stories And Media

Selection from a mural inside the Ukiah, CA post office, which closed January 6th

Today we have some updates on the valuable artistic and cultural work addressing the proposed closings of post offices, a move which will disproportionately affect rural communities.

Sylvia Ryerson of WMMT, with Mimi Pickering of the Appalshop Community Media Initiative, produced an excellent 20 minute radio piece that takes the time to sit down with postal workers and their communities - and to hear about the palpable human relatioships which orbit around, and are cultivated by, their town's post office. In many of these communities, these are the last meeting places left - and the last operating public space with a rooted connection to the history and culture:

As the U.S. Postal Service faces financial crisis, Central Appalachia and much of rural America may be hard hit by pending closures of post offices and mail processing centers.  To avoid bankruptcy, the Postal Service had announced plans to make reductions amounting to approximately $3 billion.  Such drastic cuts would result in slower first class delivery and close hundreds of mail facilities nationwide.  After public and Congressional outcry, USPS announced a moratorium on closures until May 15, 2012. In this expanded WMMT report customers at the Burdine and Premium post offices, two of the nine in Letcher County, KY on the closure list, describe what the service means to their communities while officials from the USPS and the American Postal Workers Union offer differing solutions to the Postal Service financial crisis.

More Than Mail: Rural Postal Service Threatened by Mimi Pickering
 

This radio piece is also an effort of Making Connections, a multi-media production of the Appalshop Community Media Institute with a mission to serve as a platform "for sharing news, stories, and information highlighting opportunities and challenges for building a healthy future for Appalachia's people and land." Their deep archives offer a diverse range of stories - from local tax reform to horticulture, agriculture to photography.

These media-makers are also utilizing PlaceStories, an interactive multimedia mapping site, to reach folks from across rural America and hear their thoughts on the importance of their local post offices. This project is linked to the extraordinary Save the Post Office, which offers a range of reports and cultural perspectives far too diverse to accurately summarize in this space - though folks should give a read to the photo-essay on the Alplaus (NY) post office available via the extraordinary Going Postal site. 

For much more information on the challenges facing rural post offices, we recommend (as always) visits to the archives of The Daily Yonder and The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issue's Rural Blog.