AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Mixed field notes from Amangu country, read from Crete, February 17 to March 30, 2023.

Back in Carnamah. Tired body. Grief gut. Neat streets after a searing hot day. Sweat builds, even under air-con bed. No performance here, just secretions.

Walking when the golden hours sings:
ping…dab…ba…summer seed, green shimmer purple…
a granular quiet, so much industry standing still.

The grain of this land intoxicating and laced with old hungry gods.
Out here in the face of mono crops, city CV inflation, agribusiness writing, and, reading begin to collapse[1]

*Silent silos

The relentless heat of a Western Australian summer insistently disrupts the writing of these field notes, provoking a question that smoulders at the back of my throat. My time here necessitates a peculiar merger, weaving my work with the cultural artefacts of the Art Gallery of Western Australia an imperative for the future exhibition.

But what can the treasure trove bring to the table? And how can the socialities of this place, transform the Art Gallery of Western Australia's State collection?

Inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva's poet(h)ics, I propose a move away from typical constraints. Her approach urges us to liberate these encounters from the shackles of representation, and the legal and economic structures that rigidly maintain them. It contests the established practice of the Artist as a voice giver to: objects, locations, people, systems and beings, within a collection generating foreseeable or incidental, pastural or social connections.[2]

*A heavy ball drops on artificial lawn at Carnamah long balls club.

The agri aspect of agripoet(h)ics operates on dual levels. Firstly, it recognises the agricultural dimensions that shape our lives, codes, practices, and historicity, as well as the structural formations associated with value, statehood, globalisation and production. Secondly, it seeks to aggregate adjacently and agitate surreally those tendencies that govern selfhood across various realms of existence.

Commodities, like grain under this light, are not merely secondary products of social structures or methods of production, destined to be consumed or replaced by capital, instead, agripoet(h)ics reveals the inherent significance of relations in process, in motion, and “if tuned carefully, can become robust enough to grow and proliferate, proliferate through and beyond the institution.”[3]

Just as Roland Barthes famous, The Grain of the Voice[4], moves beyond discursive language — grain, identity, and wool represent aspects that exceed market relations, opening the space for the “reevaluation of value.”[5]