As a Director of The Molonglo Group and on behalf of the owners of the apARTments at NewActon, I am delighted to welcome new visitors and old friends to the NewActon Precinct. This occasion of our instigation of a significant video/sculptural art installation, Spooky Action at a Distance, and our series of events extending over the two-month period of the National Gallery of Australia's Soft Sculpture exhibition is a special moment for us.
/ As a new art and design precinct in the heart of Canberra, NewActon is actively being created as a complex ongoing collaboration among its owners, architects, artists, heritage and public art consultants, tenants, workers, visitors, and a wide array of other people who have experience in the making of vibrant public places.
/ Our approach to NewActon is driven by our recognition that there is a particular urgency about this time in history. The importance of identifying our distinctiveness through embracing the plurality of contemporary cultures among us is obvious. Our generations as a whole have begun to understand that the old definitions of ownership, hierarchy, belonging, and single-culture views are a road to poverty and extinction.
/ When we share, we inexplicably have more. When we give up notions of absolute occupation and instead accept the temporary shared custody of a place, we become richer and are less oppressed by the demands of keeping others at bay. And like all economies, when we accept our identity and our sustenance as being created by all participants in the food chain and in society, instead of only a few, we are far stronger and more resilient than when we are dependent upon only one definition of ourselves, one financial stream, or the mythologies of one dominant view.
/ It is clear that if we want to strengthen and reap the benefits of pluralism, then we must express and present inclusive views about 'who we are' in public regularly. In short, I think we can become skilled at identifying our plural distinctiveness and our cultural richness by actively doing it .
/ In our view, architecture has a fundamental role in our societies far beyond just the making of spaces and buildings. Architecture provides the platform from which living communities are constructed, defining how these communities 'make culture' and meet the natural world. Architecture must inspire greatness, expel intolerance and maintain the harmony that exists in nature. It must advance that wonderful, eternal and unpredictable state we know as 'chance':
/ 'Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us' (Milan Kundera).
/ With this power comes great responsibility for those of us who are developers, architects, engineers, and city planners. It is from this kernel nested in global responsibility that we must painstakingly create and fashion buildings, spaces and cities everywhere. It is not enough that we answer this responsibility locally in one building, in one city or in one country, as none of these exist in isolation from the rest of the planet. We cannot separate sustainability from affordability, or affordability from design excellence. They are one and the same.
/ As it progresses from stage to stage, NewActon is our quiet attempt to create a little piece of 'city making' which seeks to promote tolerance, diversity and authenticity in its approach to property development. NewActon tries to flatten the traditional hierarchies of work, leisure and home wherever it encounters them and to produce something more closely resembling the vitality and rich multi-dimensionality of life.
/ NewActon seeks to connect the local with the global, the ad hoc with the planned, and the unique with the common in order to reverse the 'dumbed-down' approach to the making of so many buildings in our cities today. NewActon's design and daily programming are actively exploring how our human capacities to relate, communicate and connect via the spaces we inhabit can simultaneously drive meaning, culture and respect for the environment. This place is humbly seeking to learn to address aspects of the social health in our communities by consciously creating a tolerant, welcoming place which breaks down the perceived hierarchies and the limiting statements about who belongs and who doesn't. Ultimately, we think this approach is about wholeness.
/ The presentation at NewActon of the video/sculptural art installation, Spooky Action at a Distance, and its associated events intentionally 'invites in' the cultural communities in our midst for whom the content and meaning of who we are so often exists in the digital realm.
/ Our bringing of London-based Israeli artist Anat Ben-David, Berlin-based Israeli curator Adi Nachman, Melbourne artist Martin Bell, and Melbourne curator Andy Mac of Citylights Projects to NewActon for this collaborative work is at heart about the role of chance and randomness in life, the value of collaborative work, and the exploration and critique of cultural and environmental sustainability considered in a global context.
/ We hope you find this presentation of the artists' work stimulating and provocative. It is our intent that this temporary installation will be the first in a number of future temporary digital and video works at NewActon, in which multiple video/sculpture installations around the world may be connected via a new website we are creating which will allow artists to deposit work, curate, and exhibit over time.
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Director
Nectar Efkarpidis
The Molonglo Group
April 2009