August 2020 - Bicycles Create Change

30/08/202001/02/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Janis Hanley – Culture, milieu, and territories

As many readers know, I am using Feminist New Materialisms (FNM) as my framing for my bicycles-for-education PhD project. FNM is a wonderfully rich and challenging approach to be working with. To help deepen my understandings of NM, this year I have been working as the co-convenor (alongside the amazing Dr Sherilyn Lennon) of Griffith’s Uni New Materialisms Special Interest Group (SIG). Each month, we meet to discuss NM approaches, readings ad applications. We do writing and process activities to help activate and stretch our NM understandings and have an invited guest present to broaden our ideas for working with NMs. Click here to see our other New Materialisms sessions.

This post shares some highlights from this month’s NM meeting where we had Janis Hanley (Social Science PhD candidate) presenting on Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture.

See more incredible work by Janis at her Local Yarns blog.

New Materialisms SIG: Janis Hanley - Culture, milieu, and territories. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th August 2020. — Image: Digital Rhetoric Collaborative

Janis Hanley – Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture.

Abstract: For some time now I’ve been exploring ways to conceptualise organisational culture, and safety culture in relation to organisations as assemblages – both for my PhD project and assisting in WHS research. The ideas I’m currently playing with are milieu and affective atmospheres. This work is for a journal paper presenting a case study of safety at a regional coal fired powerplant (scheduled to be phased out), based on ethnographic interviews conducted by Dr Tristan Casey and myself, about a year ago.

Tristan, a workplace, health and safety expert at Griffith, led the project, and is the co-author. The ideas around this paper are being presented here to test it out as a work in progress, and as a practical application. I hope it will help stimulate discussion around these concepts, and be practical for you in terms of considering your own research. Do these concepts resonate with your research? What new things might they reveal?

The Readings

Wise (2010) Home, Territory and Identity Download

Bennett (2005) The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout Download

What we did: the SIG meeting

This meeting was really great. In a meeting prior to the session, Janis and I discussed the abstract and how best to organise the session. We ended up pivoting from the original abstract and instead, Janis ran us though some of her milleu work from her current PhD project.

This was a really interesting session (aren’t they all!?!). Janis took us on a creative and analytical exploration of milieu, territory, atmosphere, agency & culture. Using some written and visual excerpts from her current PhD research-in-progress on the historical Queensland textile industry, Janis provoked us to consider how milieu, chi, concepts of ‘home’ and atmosphere resonated with us and in our research.

Stand out aspects of this discussion were divergent responses to a piano, political graffiti in a factory and participant appreciation of Janis’s diagrams that showed the ‘bite of elliptical surfboards’.

We also did a number of individual and collaborative activities that helped activate and draw out some points for discussion. I found these to very revealing and generative. You never know what to example or what might emerge – but it is always something unusual and interesting. I took a lot away from this session and it gave me much to think about in regard to how atmosphere, milieu and conceptions of ‘home’ feature in my own work and life. Very provocative.

We also did a writing activity. This is one of my favourite things to do I n the SIG as it really helps me try and apply and explain NM considerations in writing, which is a critical skill I need for writing up my dissertation – so any help, practice and feedback I can get with this is very welcomed.

The writing activity we did was for us to write for 10 mins and then share and discuss interesting aspects that emerged. Below was our stimulus for this task.

Writing Activity:
Think about the layer of milieu or territory in your research.
Write a 100 word or so autoethnographic piece inspired by your musings.

Below are some snapshots of our discussions and a draft of this session’s writing activity.

25/08/202028/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 5): ’The Art of Free Travel’

In this post, we look at how Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, their two children (aged 11 and 2) and pet dog used an incredible 6,000km family bike tour up the east coast of Australia as a way of putting into action their ethical, environmental and social principles. This is the fifth and last instalment of our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. Previously we looked at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, then ‘Returnity’ by Elin Wikström and Anna Brag, then ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival. The last post was on how public space is being creatively activated as sites of protest using bicycles by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Enjoy! NG.

The Art of Free Travel

A final project that demonstrates the power and promise of the bicycle is the 6,000-kilometre journey taken by “Artist as Family”: Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, their two children (aged 11 and 2) and pet dog.

As writers, gardeners and environmentalists, Ulman and Jones exemplify the ecological sensibility that a growing number of us embrace. In 2015 they decided to take up this environmental imperative as an artistic-philosophical project.

Over a period of 14 months the family rode their bicycles from their home in Daylesford in Victoria to Cape York in Northern Queensland, during which time they lived by foraging (they had extensive knowledge of edible plants), fishing, trapping, exchanging labour for food on farms, and through the hospitality of friends and strangers.

Click here for Meg and Patrick’s blog: THE ARTIST AS FAMILY

Dissident Bicycles (Part 5): ’The Art of Free Travel'. Bicycles Create Change.com 25th August 2020.

Their blog posts and book attest to the heightened engagement with the world that bicycle travel affords: two-year-old Woody was able to identify an enormous variety of animals and plants, and meaningful connections were made with the many strangers who invited the family into their homes, sharing their knowledge and stories.

The physical demands of cycling focused their minds upon the needs of the body and the available sources of energy replenishment.

As these projects demonstrate, the bicycle is a nimble tool for individual and collective agency and a catalyst for knowledge creation, self-awareness and meaningful social encounters. It is a technology that serves our need for self-reliance and exploration, without surpassing the body’s capabilities.

In an era in which we are incarcerated by our affluence – through work, debt, declining physical and mental health, and an exploitative and wasteful dependence upon the declining natural resources – the bicycle is the ultimate dissident object and symbol of freedom.

Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.

The contents of this post was written by Laura Fisher and first published online by Artlink (2015). Minor content edits and hyperlinks/footnotes edited to aid short-form continuity.

21/08/202022/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 4): ’The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’

This is the fourth instalment of our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first looked at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, the second ‘Returnity’ by Elin Wikström and Anna Brag and the third was ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival. Here we look at how the UK’s activist organisation ‘The Lab‘ use bicycles to assert creative civil disobedience to subvert dominant power structures. Enjoy! NG.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Bike Bloc (2009)

Also using public space creatively, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination in the UK have mobilised bicycles to serve quite different ends.

The Lab is an activist organisation that has devised inventive forms of creative civil disobedience to assert an alternative to the nexus of capitalism, consumption and environmental destruction.

They try “to open spaces where the imaginative poetic spirit of art meets the courage and rebelliousness inherent to activism”.

In 2009, the Lab developed the Bike Bloc as a form of direct action for the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen (the unsuccessful forerunner to the recent Paris Climate Talks).

Hundreds of people worked over several weeks to design and weld activist bicycles and practise “street action cycle choreography”.

Double Double Trouble – a Dissent Bicycle-Object

Some of these were paired tall-bikes that gave riders a great height advantage (confiscated by police before the protest), while others were equipped with megaphones that played music, sirens and abstract sounds in synchronicity.

One such bike recently featured in Disobedient Objects, an exhibition developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London which toured to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

As the video documentation shows, the Lab embraced the model of an insect swarm in order to create a dispersed field of sound and activity that drew police attention in different directions.

What makes this action so compelling artistically is the intersection of DIY cycle culture and the lessons of radical theatre and performance.

The bicycle was assessed for what kind of form it might contribute to coordinated protest, notably creating a fluid field of assembling and disassembling bodies and sound.

The contents of this post was written by Laura Fisher and first published online by Artlink (2015). Minor edits and hyperlinks added and footnotes removed to aid short-form continuity. Images from Makery unless attributed.

17/08/202022/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 3): Oz Asia Festival ‘Shedding Light’

In this post, we continue our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first post looked at Ai Weiwei’s most iconic bicycle-based artworks ‘Forever’ and the second detailed the ‘reversed engineered’ bike project ‘Returnity’ by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag. Here we look at the incredible collaborative illuminated bike-light-culture- performance ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival 2015. Enjoy! NG.

Dissident Bicycles (Part 3): 'Shedding Light' Oz Asia Festival. Bicycles Create Change.com 17th August 2020.

Shedding Light – Tutti Arts & Oz Asia Festival (2015)

We left off the previous post on the ‘reversed engineered’ bike project ‘Returnity’ by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag, with the idea that experimentation can be used to engage cory and mind in such a way as to galvanise both personal autonomy and social affinity.

This was further demonstrated by the Shedding Light project that featured in the 2015 OzAsia Festival in Adelaide.

Shedding Light was a two-year collaboration between Tutti Arts, a multi-arts organisation for artists with a disability in Adelaide, and Perspectif, a sister organisation in Yogyakarta 2013.

Among the many mediums through which the artists explored the Indonesia–Australia relationship were creatively constructed carts inspired by the Indonesian kaki lima (street vendor carts), and vehicles inspired by Sepeda Lampus, the four-wheeled pedal cars augmented with neon lights and sound systems hired out at the Sultan’s Palace square in Yogyakarta.

This part of Shedding Light was realised in collaboration with James Dodd, an artist who has long engaged in bicycle modification as part of a practice concerned with informal and incidental forms of public creativity.

Dodd fabricated the pedal cars using two bicycles so that they could accommodate a Tutti artist, a support companion and a passenger.

The neon light frames were modelled upon designs created by three Tutti artists: a unicorn (William Gregory), a shark (Joel Hartgen) and a three-headed snowman (James Kurtze).

Over several nights, passengers would be taken a short distance around the Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza to a special location where a short performance by another Tutti artist was staged for them.

Like Returnity (see our previous post Part 2) , Shedding Light involved modifying bicycles to facilitate a creative social intervention, in this case tied to the aim of enhancing the visibility of Tutti artists.

As Dodd relates, what made the project so rewarding and unusual was that it created intimate encounters between festival audiences and the Tutti artists out in the streets, far from the organised formality of ticketed events.

13/08/202013/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 2): Brag & Wikström’s ‘Retunity’

This August, we have a 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first post looked at the importance and impact of one of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic bicycle-based artworks ‘Forever’. In this second instalment, Laura looks at the refashioned (literally) ‘reversed engineered’ bike project entitled Returnity by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag. Enjoy! NG.

Dissident Bicycles (Part 2): Brag & Wikstrom's 'Retunity'. Bicycles Create Change.com 13th August 2020.

While Ai’s bicycles are polished and quiescent, many other artists have employed the bicycle’s movement to activate different kinds of individual and social behaviour. For example, in 1997, as part of the Skulptur Projecte in Münster, Germany, artists Elin Wikström and Anna Brag staged an event called Returnity.

They engineered nine bicycles to travel backwards when they were pedalled forwards, and equipped them with training wheels and a rear-view mirror.

A bicycle club was set up in a public park for three months, providing instructions to members of the public who attempted to ride the altered bicycles. In the end, over 2,000 people participated with about a quarter of these returning again and again to improve their skills.

These bicycles were a prop for heightening people’s spatial and sensory awareness. They also created an unusual social space. As Maria Lind remarked, it “was a playful test that referenced lifelong learning [and] connectivity in a globalised world” and an exercise in “radically rethinking and deliberately disorienting one’s naturalised behaviours”

Lind’s comments about Returnity are a reminder that the bicycle’s humility as a human scaled machine paradoxically gives it great power. Not only is it open to inexhaustible experimentation, it can engage the body and mind in such a way as to galvanise both personal autonomy and social affinity.

09/08/202012/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 1): Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’

For August, we have a 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney). Originally published in long format in Artlink, the five projects Laura details are examples not only of how bicycles create positive social (and other) change, but how this achieved utilizing the arts and performance. In this first instalment, Laura describes the importance and impact of one of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic pieces ‘Forever’. Enjoy! NG.

The bicycle as dissident object: Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’

One of the centrepieces of Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria is a fresh iteration of Ai’s Forever sculpture. Located in the foyer, the sculpture consists of a towering arch of over 1,500 interconnected bicycles, all uniformly produced to a minimalist design. The Forever series is now among Ai’s most known works, having been exhibited in many configurations in museums and public spaces in London, Taiwan, Taipei, Venice and Toronto and elsewhere. The namesake is China’s Yong Jiu (which translates as“Forever”) brand of bicycle.

Established in the 1940s, the prized Forever brand dominated China’s cycling culture for several decades before the car became more widely used. For Ai there is a tainted nostalgia about the Forever bicycle. In the remote village where he was raised after his father – an enlightened and popular poet – was exiled from Beijing, the bicycle was not only needed for travel but for transporting things. It was also out of reach to all but the well-off, a high status object of intense desire for a child like Ai living in poverty.

In the first version of the work (in 2003) Ai suspended real Forever bicycles in a circle, and removed the chains, handlebars, pedals and seats. Eliminating these features set him on a path of abstraction, which in turn allowed him to introduce ambiguity to the object and play with patternation. Subsequent versions of the work left the readymade quality of the original behind and embraced a manufactured aesthetic, with the sculptures acquiring spectacular architectural proportions.

The bicycles seem to be self-propagating as grand crystalline structures, yet they are strikingly immobilised: ossified in gleaming stainless steel. In light of Ai’s ongoing critique of the constraints on liberty and individuality in China, it is hard not to interpret Forever as a potent vision of arrested movement, and its mass-produced elements as a metaphor for a particular kind of circumscribed sociality.

With Flowers

A more lo-fi object and performance that attests to the importance of bicycles (and flowers) to this critique is Ai’s With Flowers. Daily, from 30 November 2013, Ai placed fresh flowers into the basket of a bicycle leaning on a tree outside his Beijing studio gate to protest the confiscation of his passport (in 2011), and documented the bouquets on Flickr. His passport was finally returned in July 2015.

The National Gallery of Victoria installation

The National Gallery of Victoria’s installation is just the most recent in a long line of commissions and adaptations of Forever. And you might ask why the work has had such longevity. While it is no doubt a testament to Ai’s growing fame, it surely also says something about the bicycle’s symbolic currency at this historical moment.

In the coming years, the bicycle is likely to be a significant gauge of our cities’ progress towards finding a more sustainable equilibrium and it is a very tangible instance of the idea that a personal choice, when embraced en masse, can translate swiftly into extraordinary collective good. In this light, the scaled-up Forever seems to be suggestive of the grand promise associated with this disarmingly simple tool of urban transformation.

What is striking about the bicycle in the age of electronics is that it is an honest machine: its means of operating are transparent and its action truthfully felt. As Ai himself points out “They’re designated for the body and operated by your body. There are few things today that are like that”.

As a machine comprising simple cogs and wheels that efficiently convert human energy into movement, the bicycle has unique kinetic and haptic qualities that lend themselves to aesthetic investigation.

Thus, while Ai’s bicycles are polished and quiescent, many other artists have employed the bicycle’s movement to activate different kinds of individual and social behaviour – which is what we will be exploring in the next post!

05/08/202020/10/2020

Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies in Lunsar

This post is a shout out to the community I did my bike PhD fieldwork with – and a call to action to help them when they need it most.

Regular readers of this blog know that earlier this year I went to Sierra Leone, West African to do my fieldwork. My research partners with bicycle NGO Village Bicycle Project and I worked alongside Karim ‘Stylish’ Kamara (VBP Country Manager).

I returned a week before COVID lock down and quarantine was made mandatory (phew!!). Since then I have kept in close contact with Stylish and many of the amazing people I met in Lunsar.

Since my return, I have been worried about Stylish and my Lunsar friends – dreading the arrival of August because of that is when the seasonal torrential rains come.

As well as being an incredible bicycle advocate and business man, Stylish is also very active supporting his community in a number of roles and ventures. Some of these ventures are bicycle-related, others are not.

Stylish’s VBP bike shop supplies COVID precautions for all riders, customers, visitors and staff.

This post looks at one of Stylish’s most significant community program that occurs outside of his role as ‘The bike king of Sierra Leone’ – yet one that is arguably just as important – his annual August Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies in Lunsar.

August is the most difficult month in Sierra Leone

The rainy season in Sierra Leone runs June – September. August is always the most difficult month. Every August, there are devastating rains, storms, flooding and landslides and thousands of the most vulnerable lose their homes, crops, livelihoods and sometimes lives. Schools, markets and health services shut down and people are forced to stay home because it is too dangerous – people and children get swept away and killed.

Last year, there was a particularly devastating mudslide in Freetown that killed many living in shanty towns and locals called it ‘the day the mountain moved’. These communities are still rebuilding even now as the rains come. The video below showing the build-up last year gives a sense of the gravity of the situation.

August rains often constrain access to essential services due to flooded streets and bridges, debris blocking roads and poor communication networks. A lack of electricity means the full impact on the most vulnerable families is not known until much later. This year preparations are more acute given additional COVID lockdown.

Every August many schools in Lunsar shut down. This means kids are missing out on continuing their education and often they fall behind.

In an account on Study, Read , Write, but most importantly: Listen, traveller Zoe details her experience being in the rainy season in Sierra Leone. Her experience highlights the impact torrential rains have on locals and slum communities, especially in regards to sewage, electricity and health via spikes in malaria and other diarrhoeal and vector borne diseases.

Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies in Lunsar

Stylish with participants of the 2019 Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies.

Last August, Hellen Gelbrand set up a Go Fund Me: Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies to help Stylish run a month-long feeding and schooling program for 100 local kids. This meant kids got a meal for lunch (for most it was their only meal of the day) and were able to continue their studies.

Hellen writes ‘August is the hardest month in Sierra Leone, well into the rainy season with dwindling food supplies in subsistence farming communities. It’s especially hard on kids. In what has become an annual program, Karim Kamara, a young Sierra Leonean, is planning a month of extra schooling and nutritious meals for 125 students at the King Kama primary school in Lunsar. Five teachers, including head teacher Mr. Alie F. Kamara (no relation to Karim), will be employed to teach the children—many of whom are orphans, and all from poor families where one meal a day is the norm for August.”

The 2020 Nourishing Young Minds and Bodies program starts this week and needs your help to raise $3, 100 to make this program happen.

Donate here

This program is a remarkable example of a grassroots community-driven initiative made possible by Stylish – a person whose first love is bicycles, but who saw a need and took action to make positive change for those who need it the most in his community.

Husband and I have supported this program and we are rallying others to do the same.

Please give generously and support Stylish and the children of Lunsar.