Located in a former town hall in Melbourne, Arts House is part of the City of Melbourne’s arts programme, and as such its staff of 16 are all city council employees. In addition to staff salaries it has a programming budget of roughly AU$1m per year. Angharad Wynne-Jones has been artistic director since 2011, and is also founder director and producer for Tipping Point Australia, a network of artists, producers, scientists and activists working together to respond to climate change.

Mission: creative responses to the changing city and environment

Embedded as it is in City of Melbourne’s present and former civic administration (its building is a converted town hall), Arts House has a “fantastic opportunity to intersect with many of the civic discussions that are happening across the city, whether that’s discussions around digital cities, knowledge cities, sustainability, inclusion: all of those topics around what makes a city liveable and viable,” says Angharad Wynne-Jones. A multi-arts venue, its programme offers a variety of connections to those discussions: the art works themselves might provide “a jumping off point to think and talk about some of the issues the artists are responding to”; there is a regular supper-club programme, “where we invite artists and other people to come and speak about thematics that are in the work, over some delicious food”; as well as podcasts, conferences and forums.

The impact of climate change and environmental sustainability have been specific preoccupations for several years: as Wynne-Jones puts it, “without a planet to live on there’s not much point to anything, is there?” Thinking about the environment opens up myriad other lines of inquiry, “from processes of decolonising, indigenous knowledge, feminisms: there are lots of ways that the work that we do intersects and intertwines with other interests and polemics that artists are working with”.

The Refuge Project

As artists and thinkers have moved in their approach to climate change, from “a sense that we could stop it somehow” to “a responsibility to acknowledge the reality of where we are and prepare ourselves for the inevitable impacts of increasing global warming”, Arts House has developed an interest in looking at preparation for emergency. Says Wynne-Jones: “Part of that thinking has been reinforced in the Australian context by the devastating “black Saturday” bushfires that happened in Victoria in 2009, where hundreds of people were killed. At that time some of the spaces of safety were the local art centres and the theatres – and what usually happens in those situations is that the emergency services take over the running of the centre. That experience is a pretty militarised, very well coordinated, extremely outcome-based set of processes.”

Arts House wanted to consider what else a relief centre might look like if artists were involved, and find out whether art could be as valuable in preparation for emergency as it is in the context of recovery. The result was the first iteration of The Refuge Project, which involved six artists, partnerships with the emergency services, and discussion with disaster management specialists across Victoria, through which it emerged that Arts House itself is a designated relief centre. “That brought the whole thing into focus, because where we were thinking about it as an imaginary preparation for an imagined scenario, now we had a responsibility to tell the people of north Melbourne that this was where they should come, when and if they needed to, whether that’s through flood or fire or any other disaster.” The event lasted for 24 hours, and brought more than 700 people into the building, “many of whom had never been to Arts House before”, to engage with a set of artistic approaches to how “heat and warmth, well-being, sleep, communication, food” might be provided in case of emergency.

The day had a positive impact not only for participants, but also for emergency services: “they need to rehearse these exercises all the time, to be ready, and artists spend a lot of time rehearsing, so there was that quite basic sense that we had a skill to offer, which they jumped on”. Plus they were struck by the artists’ “incredible capacity to be playful and imaginative” in sharing information – especially compared with their usual practice of “just giving out leaflets”. And it has opened up a “filigree of opportunities to engage with communities”: whether through an artist doing a residency with the emergency services or a new partnership opening up with the local refugee young people’s support group.

This was just the first element in a five-year programme, through which Wynne-Jones hopes to look further at “the role of aesthetics in sensitising individuals and therefore organisations to aspects of the project relationally: that seems to me to be really critical in terms of the deepening and the strengthening of connections between people. The thing that makes communities survive, not just disasters but more generally be resilient communities, is the quality of connection between people, and what became evident was that the aesthetic elaboration and heightened imagination that the artists were working with really increased the sensitivity and capacity of people to make that connection.”

Challenges

“The arts have got the right language” to communicate with diverse audiences

The challenges Wynne-Jones discusses are more general than specific to the Refuge project. Language and communication raise various questions, from the need to be sure that “the arts have got the right language” to communicate with diverse audiences, to her sense of the unhelpfulness of the “instrumental versus intrinsic value discussion” unhelpful, a duality she recognises in “the conventions of the way that art institutions programme and how we market to audiences”. She also wonders whether festivals that are art-form specific (for instance, a dance festival) are as successful in strengthening civic engagement as festivals that are more thematic and multi-disciplinary. “Civic responsibility is such a huge concept, with so many facets, and so many ways that could be expressed, that in part just finding a focus and finding your sphere of influence and your capacity to make a change is a task,” she argues.

What next?

Specifically, the success of the first Refuge Project day has inspired the organisation with “real confidence in terms of being able to open up conversations with non-artists, and look at connecting with a regional community, because we’re interested in smaller rural communities who deal with the risk of fire, drought, flood, for many months of the year. What are their strategies of resilience? How do they connect? How can we work with them to understand and grow our own capacities, and is there something that we can offer into that regional context that might be of use and of interest? How can we become hosts for each other, if they or the city residents got displaced by a climatic disaster?” Such questions, Wynne-Jones notes, “wouldn’t naturally come through an organisational approach to disaster management from the existing services, but do come through an imaginative visioning by artists around what the world could be like”.

More generally, Wynne-Jones points out that the social demographic of North Melbourne is changing rapidly, particularly with an influx of students and young families. That creates for Arts House “a critical role, to be a connector between the existing community and the new communities that are coming in. Refuge has potential to play with the dynamics of that, what it means to welcome people in the face of displacement of whatever sort, and also for us to identify who the networks are, who the people are that we can communicate with.”

“We talk a lot about how we can make our organisation ready, and how we can decolonise ourselves, decolonise this institution”

She is also thinking about succession: “I’m a white middle aged woman and I need to move over, so we talk a lot about how we can make our organisation ready, and how we can decolonise ourselves, decolonise this institution, prepare for a generational shift that means that Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse communities can feel at home here and can come as audiences, can come as artists, can come as leaders of the organisation.”