Soft Infrastructure

Connie Anthes and Julia Bavyka

Opening 06.02.19 6-8pm
Artist Talks 28.02.19 6-7pm

The Institution is now tangibly present in all parts of our lives: IT’S IN US. The Institution frames negotiations with public and private spaces; it controls how we interact with our community; it makes decisions about our bodies; and now it’s even in our inbox. Connie Anthes and Julia Bavyka have been trying to actively dismantle or ‘think away’ from The Institution as we know it for some time now, via their association at Frontyard [http://www.frontyardprojects.org/]. As we think away from The Institution, what are we moving towards? What will replace it? A few warm hugs, chai tents and groupthink? Not bloody likely.

Soft Infrastructure* offers a series of speculative prototypes for instituting ‘softness’, developed through a series of conversations that imagine the kinds of mis-processes, ‘leaky’ spaces and shared tools that might be needed in The New Institution, if institutions themselves are still needed. In these spaces, the artists hope to mis-communicate more deeply, encourage retreat and refusal, collectively generate excuses for not doing, disagree among the weeds or disappear into the wall. The exhibition will culminate in a physical retreat which will take place offsite in the final week of the exhibition, with an audio feed being live streamed into The Gallery.

* Soft infrastructure, as defined by groupthink, is ‘all the services which are required to maintain the economic, health, and cultural and social standards of a population. It includes both physical assets such as highly specialised buildings and equipment, as well as non-physical assets, such as communication, the body of rules and regulations governing the various systems, the financing of these systems, the systems and organisations by which professionals are trained, advance in their careers by acquiring experience, and are disciplined if required by professional associations’. Anthes and Bavyka would add to this definition: ‘the dreamy and ridiculous stuff that occupies and feeds us when it all gets too hard’.

Much of the conceptual work for 'Soft Infrastructure' has been developed in collaboration and conversation with people and spaces at Frontyard [http://www.frontyardprojects.org/], which is supported by Inner West Council and the community who donate time, money and other stuff.

Image
Connie Anthes & Julia Bavyka. 'Soft Infrastructure', 2019. Image courtesy the artists.