Horizontal Relations: The South Project goes to Santiago

By  Pamela Zeplin (Australia)

In 2006 Peter Hill lamented Melbourne’s failure to produce a ‘Biennale International Club Class Art’ (BICCA) event comparable to The Biennale of Sydney or Brisbane’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT). With Australia’s second city ‘sliding off the international art map’, he proposed that it was time to invent an event where ‘so-called rival cities in the region’ could ‘work together inclusively rather than facing off at each other as if at a sporting match’. This would, he suggested, ‘fully integrate the region within the global art world’ (Fuller, in Hill, 2006).  

Albeit in a postscript, Hill (2006) identified a Melbourne-based organisation which nevertheless ‘promise[d] to provide Melbourne, and the world, with the international art event it so richly deserves’. This was the South Project which, despite connecting hundreds of artists, makers, writers and curators since 2004, is, unlikely to qualify as a crowd-pulling, fully global art enterprise in the manner of conventional biennales and triennials. In the first place, this organisation has ambitiously targeted the southern hemisphere as its main, but not exclusive, theatre of operations. Secondly, rather than staging regular and peak one-off events, the South Project encompasses a vast practitioner-based program. This operates throughout the Antipodes as a continuous web of exchanges, exhibitions, residencies, symposia, workshops and publications, and includes a children’s program. While holding annual ‘Gatherings’, this complex organisation focuses on relational aesthetics and, in this way, is more akin in spirit to Manifesta events (Hughes 2000) than those conventional art ‘big-hitters’ in Australia and the northern hemisphere.

Moreover, South Project’s embrace of the dreaded ‘c’ word through its Craft Victoria base from 2004 to 2007 would seem to disqualify it from narrow art world acclaim, as would its use-by date of 2011. Biennales, on the other hand, are supposed to continue. The final event  back ‘home’ in Melbourne (2010/2011)is planned to occur after the major South Project gatherings have journeyed from Melbourne (2004) to Wellington (2005), Santiago (2006), Johannesburg/Soweto (2007), Indonesia (2009). Rather than operating as a cultural cruise ship or caravanseri, a complex mesh of intersecting activities positions this enterprise more like an artistic amoeba. Oscillating across the bottom of the world, it constantly connects and creates diverse networks of artists in craft, art, performance and literature.

Such a project, then, invites conceptual as well as geographic interrogation of ‘south’ and what it means to be ‘southern’, apart from an accident of geography. To what extent could South Project’s impetus be read as provincialism writ large, its horizontality understood as a defensive resistance to, or simple inversion of, the ‘north-centrism’ that has dominated all aspects of Australian life for more than two centuries (Murray 2005)? Certainly South’s program swirls unapologetically across the southern part of the globe, discovering and debating differences and commonalities - chief among these colonialism’s economic, social and political legacies - but this venture proposes more than latitude. Equally concerned with attitude, South Project participants and organisers are concerned to critically navigate beyond the hazardous shallows of ‘territorial circumscription’ (Edelsztein, in Holubizky 1998: 34) or utopianism while inhabiting the ‘currently fashionable geopolitical locale of the global South’ (McPherson 2006). With the exception of the APT and a small section of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, this fashion remains largely as a literary vogue, yet to be manifested in mainstream Australian art circles.

According to founding South Project Director, Kevin Murray, notions of ‘south’ transcend the bounded spaces of global geographies. For western mindsets this term comes historically loaded with negative connotations of general inferiority - underneath-ness and corporeality. While our heads, literally and metaphorically remain in the north (Murray 2006A: 3), the remaining eighty per cent or so of human ‘body’ mass becomes separated from and designated as ‘below’ the mind, a condition confirmed by gravity and time as our bodies inevitably ‘head south’ with increasing decrepitude. Philosophically, Murray reminds us, such lower status emanates from a longstanding (northern and Christian) premise, from a ‘proper moral sense about ... points of the compass’, determining that ‘North must seem the ‘good’ direction... South the way to ignoble ease and decadence’ (Davidson in Murray 2006: 6).

Once a site of great and fabulous imaginings by curious Europeans, this half of the globe nevertheless remains - like the nether parts of the human anatomy – a tantalising site of exotic desire, spectacle - and danger. Sybarites and scholars from Northern Europe and North America are still captivated by these southern parts, swarming throughout holiday resorts from Rio to Raratonga and colonising ethnographic field work, museum research and learned journals, particularly with regard to Oceania.

Geographical south, then, is a site of transience, somewhere to visit and/or vacation for vast numbers of northerners, but increasingly, a place to vacate for numbers of southern residents. Inhabiting an essentially unstable identity, the southern hemisphere consists mainly of water and Pacific island countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu face inevitable inundation from rising sea levels (Donald 2006). Since the 1950s, as well, many southern regions have experienced political destabilisation through war, poverty and religious turmoil. Indeed, populations in Africa, Latin America, India, Burma, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are continually heading north – or anywhere else representing safer ground. For recently troubled Pacific islands such as Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, the ‘northerly aligned’ countries of Australia and New Zealand provide a closer refuge. It should be noted, however, that such events do not represent the whole Pacific story, as the previous Australia’s government habitually suggested, regularly describing the region in terms of ‘BACs’ (‘busted arse countries’) (McLeod 2001).

As well as diverse threats and poverty, southern countries still supply, in a physical sense, most of the world’s food, raw materials and emigrants ‘up north’. In a cultural and intellectual sense, therefore, south signifies ‘raw’, traditional societies, no matter how desirable these may appear as exotic, postmodern or hybrid ‘stimulants’ for jaded northern palates. As late as 2006, with the opening of celebrated Quai Branly museum in Paris, indigenous antipodean cultures were still being represented as stereotypically ‘primitive’, ‘other’ or darkly mysterious - even though such terms are, of course, no longer in official use. Former French president, Jacques Chirac (2006) explained, in somewhat patronising terms, this sexy new museum’s noble mission. It was

designed to ‘render justice to extra-European cultures.... [and] [b]reaking with a long history during which these expressions have been looked down upon, it will give a just place to arts and civilisations that have been too long ignored or poorly understood, giving dignity back to peoples too often humiliated and oppressed’.

‘Certainly’, it has been claimed (Tresilian 2006),’there is nothing like it elsewhere in Europe’. Despite this august institution’s ‘setting [of] new standards for the world's anthropological and ethnographic museums’ in showcasing ‘extra- European’ collections of art and culture - predominantly from Africa, Oceania, Mexico and pre-Columbian South America - the vast part of its collection has been, unapologetically, obtained through colonisation of the south. A European leader in the field it may be but Tresilian notes that critics of the Quai Branly have stated: ‘it is hard to imagine why it has taken so long to build an institution of this kind dedicated to non-European traditional arts and cultures’. In contrast to this conservative approach, issues of repatriation and post-colonialism have long provided challenges to museological practice in countries of the south, Canada and the US.

In terms of the contemporary visual art discourses attending global art circuits, artefacts and cultural expressions emanating from the south - whether indigenous or non-indigenous - are subject to varying kinds of reception. Oscillating problematically between categories of ethnography and art distinguished by a capital ‘A’, what might be considered merely craft or kitsch (read ‘traditional’ artefacts - is assiduously excluded –  unless, of course, it is theorised as ‘hybrid’ and/or ironic.

Yinka Shonibare (2003) suggested that we ‘should without question applaud recent attempts’ by transnational exhibitions like documenta X (1997), and documenta XI (2002) ‘to challenge a very tired, Eurocentric view of art’ but warned against the hazards of ‘defining artists by the narrow confines of nationality’ and origins. Where do we then situate indigenous art – using those slippery terms ‘contemporary’ or ‘traditional  - or craft, within an expanded frame of reference? What of work that emerges from or insists upon the local and particular, as is the case with much indigenous practice from southern regions? Must this be relegated to the ‘field of minor knowledges’ (Griffin 2003) rather than blockbuster events? And does really this matter? Do we always have to take our bearings from the ‘Club Class’ events?

It is across this minefield of perplexing possibilities that the South Project’s theatre of operations lies. What further differentiates this enterprise from the conventional ‘super’ structures of contemporary art world apparatus is a slower and, if you will, a thicker pace than the furiously escalating machinations of global glamour and prestige that shuttle from Venice to Shanghai and ever expanding venues. This is despite the often intellectually hefty catalogue essays that accompany such shows. At the 2006 Santiago Gathering of the South Project South African curator Khwezi Gule acknowledged this hegemony and  exhorted his fellow ‘lucky turkeys’ to direct attention to the appalling conditions besetting most southern practitioners. Australian artist Pat Hoffie reiterated South participants’ immense privilege as trans-national cultural nomads. Many other speakers - including expatriate Mexican artist/facilitator, Jesus Macarena-Alves, Gule and Argentinian activist, Marcelo Brodsky - addressed the vertical north-south hierarchy of asymmetrical wealth distribution, not only below the equator but in the northern hemisphere as well. ‘Southern’ communities of Latino/as and Chicano/as, for example, populate Chicago and cultivate California while millions more remain excluded by the Bush administration’s most recent Mexican ‘standoff’, the border wall. This issue galvanized much discussion in Santiago.

Lateral transactions with the ‘neighbours’ have been discouraged in Australia where various forms of colonialism, including ‘political paralysis’ (Birch 2006 103), continue to privilege Euramerican models. This situation is aptly represented by the flightless birds unique to our hemisphere and which constitute a key South Project symbol. In particular, Australian cultural institutions have demonstrated little interest in surrounding cultures of the Pacific and Indian oceans, Southern Africa or Latin America beyond generalised impressions of military juntas, poverty and political volatility, or WomAdelaide, the salsa and the tango. Despite recent interest led by the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Indigenous Maori art, for example, there is little curiosity in Australia about the broader – including non-Indigenous - cultures of its smaller neighbour (Zeplin 2004).

Given recent positive developments in democracy and reconciliation throughout the southern region, cross-cultural dialogue of this sideways kind is timely. Or so it seemed until my first day of the 2006 Gathering in Santiago outside South Project’s administrative base at Centro Cultural Estación Mapocho. Here, historical reality replaced rhetoric as I was almost caught up in a student protest, violently quelled by (heavily pitted) armoured vehicles, tear gas and the might of military uniforms. Despite the incendiary atmosphere, I have to admit to being impressed with Chilean uniforms, which at least in sartorial terms, are ‘to die for’. Notwithstanding recent liberalising changes throughout South American politics, this incident presaged more sobering accounts of Latino politics that were referenced throughout the Gathering’s program. This was to be heard in Marcelo Brodsky’s urgent memorialisation of ‘the Missing’ for Argentina’s younger generation ‘Y’ for whom these absences now bear little meaning. 

A number of robust, artist-run organisations across Latin America that are predicated on socio-political activism also gave voice to urgent local and global concerns. With negligible state support – unlike Australia and New Zealand - art becomes largely DIY for Argentinian-based network Trama and Chile’s Hoffmann House, the latter consisting of a mobile prefabricated shed. Another extraordinary tin shed situated in Santiago’s less-than-salubrious outskirts, Galeria Metropolitana is a neighbourhood centre facilitated from the modest home of Luis Alarcon and Ana Maria Saveedra where it connects broader artistic communities across the world. Images of this gallery’s red neon sign had resonated like a beacon at Wellington’s Gathering in 2005; now we were there as it hosted part of South Project’s Trans Versa exhibition. Outside on the footpath New Zealander, Daniel Malone’s convivial hangi of earth-baked sweet potatoes belied its political reference to the ‘hot potato’ of gastronomic colonisation.

Entrance to Centro Cultural Estación Mapocho, October 2006. Photo: P Zeplin

Featuring the local Chilean variant of New Zealand kumara, these root vegetables were accompanied by an installation of ceramic kumara facsimiles, referring to recent discoveries that Mexican ipomoea share the ‘Gondwanaland origin of the plant’ (Anon. B 2006: 23). .Assisted by Lonnie Hutchinson, Malone’s spontaneous and ‘earthy’ performance contrasted with cooler videos of staged street ‘marches’ by Melbourne artist, Tom Nicholson, which in turn contrasted with more vibrant Chilean street demonstrations taking place a few suburbs away.

Galeria Metropolitana, Photo: P Zeplin

also involves exhaustion and occasionally, frustration.Twelve artists from New Zealand and Australia experienced dislocation and exhilaration at first hand in the exchange project, Transversa while working in situ over a number of weeks across Santiago’s major contemporary cultural centres. Co-curated by Australian-based Zara Stanhope and New Zealand-based Danae Mossman, this major curatorial undertaking constituted a significant part of the Santiago Gathering and recalled efforts by artists on both sides of the Tasman two decades earlier to forge dialogue at Mildura Triennial and ANZART events between 1970 and 1985 (Zeplin 2004). However, the Santiago project more successfully achieved Antipodean bonding than its forebears in Mildura, Christchurch, Hobart and Auckland. At least this was the impression because, disappointingly, Transversa artists and curators barely participated in the symposium, forming their own hermetic trans-Tasman art bubble – a visual and verbal separation from the wider gathering that might have been avoided by scheduling the exhibition opening at an earlier time and selecting from a broader range of of artists as regards age and experience

Given its challenging circumstances, Trans Versa as an exhibition was impressive and imaginatively interrogated its cross-cultural agenda. Fiona Jack’s immersion in the local community was evident in a dynamically poetic mural at Centro Cultural Matucana100, as were Selina Ou’s large and engaging C-type photographs depicting local Chileans engaged in trade. Although physically absent from Santiago, Raquel Ormella re-worked precious snapshots belonging to diasporic Chilean-Australians to evoke a sense of longing. In terms of exchange gifting, two works were memorable. Ash Keating’s painstakingly hand-cut contour maps highlighted conservation issues in Latin America but his performance at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo seriously lacked a sense of occasion. Following a vice-regal-like opening ceremony of South Project, the artist ‘released’ thousands of paper birds (endangered Australasian gannets) in a gesture of apparent generosity. Fluttering down from classical colonnades to hundreds of delighted guests, Keating’s ‘gifts’ were nevertheless hastily reclaimed from the audience (conserved?) and scooped up for yet another performance somewhere else. It the midst of Latin hospitality, this action appeared unfortunate. In contrast, the physical absence of New Zealander Maddie Leach’s gift to Santiago, One shining gum was a pertinent reminder of the perils accompanying global exchange, and, inadvertently, object-based preciousness. Shipped from Wellington in July and destined for Valpariso in September, her crate of logs (from a New Zealand-grown eucalyptus tree traded for Chilean wine) was shipped via Hong Kong and failed to arrive for the exhibition opening. Exploiting the vicissitudes of site specificity, the artist effectively used her work’s absence to ‘illustrate’ the devastating void caused by logging. 

South Project’s long commitment to craft was not evident in Transversa but confined to a large, separate exhibition curated by Kevin Murray, Make the common precious, which combined nineteen Australian art and craft practices. Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s enthusiasm for ‘poor’ materials, this exhibition selected makers who deployed ‘readymade’ materials, ranging from Lorraine Connelley-Northy’s wire dilly bags to Honor Freeman’s exquisite, cast ceramic domestica and Anna Phillips’ intriguing pots of jellied bath scum. Accessible and inclusive as a self contained Australian export, the exhibition might have challenged audiences more ‘cross-culturally’ by including other southern practitioners. Australians rarely experience cross-fertilisation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous craft and contemporary art such as that achieved by Paraguay’s Director of the Museo del Barro, Ticio Escobar. His long advocacy of Indigenous cultural heritage, it was announced during the Santiago event, was finally enacted in Paraguayan law.

In the nearby and breathtakingly beautiful Chilean port of Valparãiso discussions of craft were, surprisingly, relegated to day four and presented as brief sessions. Apart from numerous Latin American makers presenting at Valparãiso and large numbers attending earlier Santiago forums on alternative practice, fewer than expected local artists came to the symposium, notwithstanding crowded gala opening events attracting high level Ministerial endorsement. While opening up space for mutuality, the symposium rigorously explored difference, or what Brazilian writer, Oswald de Andrade (1928) once termed ‘that which doesn’t belong to me’. Intellectual stimulation and legitimation aside, such marathon talk fests rarely sustain large local audiences, a point that would be taken into consideration at the next Johannesburg Gathering.

Political differences manifested early in the program, noticeably around reconciliation. Eschewing South Africa’s truth and justice model, Marcelo Brodsky and Indigenous Australian writer, Tony Birch formed a spontaneous alliance following a reading of the latter’s gut-wrenching poetry incorporating correspondence between Aboriginal petitioners from ‘the stolen generation’ and stony Australian bureaucracy. After five centuries of European settlement, the issue of indigeneity seemed curiously absent from Latino presentations, local artist, Pablo Rivera (2006) noting that inter-cultural discussions are ‘so distant from [Chilean] ‘endogam[y]’. He commended the South Project for bringing ‘this to our lost lands’. Unlike many Australian art events, Indigenous Mapuche participation at Santiago extended further than the formal Rogativa opening ceremony, creating social connections as well as specific cultural alliances with Maori delegates including eminent ceramicist, Manos Nathan. This is the common ground on which South operates most successfully, enabling capillary-like interactions between people that, even in situations of acute discomfort, can transcend the thickets of theory and rise above rainbow-hued rhetoric. As Clifford Geertz (1988) once observed, ‘the next necessary thing’ is

... to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where, tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.

As Birch notes, such terms as ‘common humanity’ (ubuntu in South Africa and tandurrum in Australia) don’t cut the intellectual (or visual art) mustard in western arts academia, even though for Murray (2007) these ideas palpably ‘charged the first 2004 South Gathering in Melbourne with a powerful chemistry’. Tandurrum nevertheless ‘holds the potential to defy the politics of pessimism and defeat’ despite such terms being ‘most likely received with quaint regard (at best) in a global environment dominated by neo-cons, mass deception and moral isolationism’ (Birch 2006 : 104).

There is difficult work to be done and this lies largely outside the remit of large and prestigious global biennales. Since the 2006 Santiago event, a South Project Gathering was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in October 2007 and given a history of ‘shape changing’ determined by the needs and resources of each different host location, this event saw a radical change of contour and content from the previous Gathering. After listening carefully to audience responses, the latest congregation of South Project artists, writers and makers dispensed with formality and tightly packed conference schedules to come together for a week, to talk and to reside in the humble and community proud surroundings of Soweto’s Orlando West township. Resonating with a recent and bloody history of apartheid, this district was selected and the event co-ordinated by local artist Clifford Charles and his South African team. Without a formal administration base, this was achieved using mobile phones and an astonishingly effective community network. Unlike anything many visiting Australian participants had experienced, we were plunged into dialogue dominated by issues of communication and economic and ethical sustainability. A series of intensive workshops at Uncle Tom’s centre were unexpectedly swamped with children from the local Belle primary school which had, the previous day, generously hosted a children’s art workshop convened by Melbourne artist, Sara Thorn. Here African students enthusiastically responded to art works by Melbourne schoolchildren and the workshop was followed by performances by students and formal addresses by staff. A spontaneous and informal exchange also took place post-event outside Johannesburg in Jagersrus (via Durban) between local craftspeople and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian visitors, including Nalda Searles (2007) who explained:

…in a way it epitomises the meaning of South for me. Put together with the workshops where there was lively and democratic exchange of many kinds what more can one desire. except of course more of it. It could be a way of life for creative people…[sic].

Even though the Johannesburg-Soweto event was anything but object or theory-centred, many other participants also found this Gathering to be the most successful to date in terms of connection and learning and one which deserves closer analysis in future reviews.

The South Project has now reached the two thirds mark of its planned ‘use-by’ date, following a tremendously diverse and emotional 2004 Melbourne gathering after which a more intimate event was convened in Wellington in 2005 focusing on Maori and Pacific culture and contemporary collective art practices. 2006 witnessed a splendid, if over-abundant talk, residency and exhibition fest in Santiago. Here, extraordinary Chilean graciousness and superb organisation warmed and dazzled visitors while providing the exquisite discomfort of bi-lingual translation, so necessary for real cross-cultural encounter. Finally, the South African encounter, which echoed the ubuntu spirit, if not the structure, of the original Melbourne gathering also provided profound experiences and opportunities to re-think how we can ‘do’ art and craft.

Since its inception, South Project has maintained a capacity to re-fahion its contours and direction according to each new circumstance. This is not required of major art or craft events and requires enormous flexibility and effort by a relatively under-resourced organisation. In 2007 the organisation underwent structural changes which created autonomy from its former parent body, Craft Victoria and this ‘re-launch’ promises to see even more exciting developments, especially along the lines of collaborative ventures.

At all costs, however, South Project must strenuously avoid becoming a diplomatically accountable ‘ship of state’ steered by bureaucratic compliance; this is not easy for such ‘floating’ institutions, given the excessive demands of Australian art administrative bodies. Given its vision and audacity, this extraordinary cultural project might well have foundered on the rocks of state intervention or good intention were it not for savvy political connections, meticulously researched cultural alliances and the good faith of its organisers, participants and sponsors. These factors have steered the good ship South Project through a number of successful ‘stopovers’ along its seven year or, perhaps, longer, horizontal itinerary. The project’s ‘hidden’ strength, resides, ironically, in its flotilla of micro programs; uncovering south-south histories and facilitating residencies, exchanges, publications and, most importantly for the future, creating a significant place for children. It continues to connect people across southern spaces.

Admittedly, this is not the stuff biennales are made of and it is these ‘people-before-pictures (or pots)’ networks that differentiate South Project from other mega art events that ‘put cities on the map’. Nevertheless, history has demonstrated that such smaller scale and sometimes unimagined connections are more likely to endure when South Project-as-entity ‘goes under’, as planned, after 2010. Beyond this date it will be interesting to see whether southerly exchanges even include Australia; in becoming redundant, South Project’s Melbourne base might have fulfilled its role as catalyst of southern connections and acquaintances.

Postscript

In the meantime, Antarctica slowly continues to melt - so who knows what ‘south’ may eventually mean in a globally challenged future – or, with rising sea levels, where Melbourne may end up.

Dr Pamela Zeplin PhD, MA, BA (Hons)

Committed to cross-cultural and collaborative research, Pamela has initiated new programmes in Asia-Pacific and Indigenous art and culture to SASA postgraduates and undergraduates and in 2001 –2002 developed a Student Support & Equity (International) Portfolio. From 1998-2004 she co-convened the successful Public Forums in the Visual Art programs with industry partners, Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre and Helpmann Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts. In 2007, with Olga Sankey, Pamela co- coordinated a major cross-institutional residency by renowned Indonesian artist Heri Dono and curated his exhibition at SASA Gallery, The dream republic. For her research and teaching she was awarded a University of South Australia Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning in 2007, and in 2008 an ALTC (formerly Carrick Institute) Australian Award for University Teaching.

Works cited

Anon. (A). “Research and creative work in the Elam School of Fine Arts”. The University of Auckland  2006 Annual Report. The University of Auckland. (2006). 22 February 2008.

<http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/fms/default/uoa/about/uoa/docs/Annual%20Report%202006.pdf>

Anon.(B). “US-Mexico Border Fence/Great Wall of Mexico Secure Fence”. (n.d.). 22 February 2008. <http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/systems/mexico-wall.htm> .

Birch, Tony. Cited  in Murray, Kevin. “Getting to know the Latin neighbours”. Art Monthly. (March 2007: 24). 2 February 2008. <http://www.kitezh.com/texts/latinneighbours.htm>.

Birch, Tony. “’Finger prints marking time’: A Tandurrum for contemporary Australia”. Common goods: Cultures meet through craft.  Melbourne: Craft Victoria, 2006. Exhibition Catalogue, Melbourne Museum, 28 February – 7 May 2006; Craft Victoria, 9 March – 1 April 2006.

Chirac, Jacques, cited in Tresilian, David. “Museum of the oppressed”, Al-Ahram. No 801 (29 June – 5 July 2006).  22 February 2008. < http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/801/cu2.htm>.

Davidson, Peter, The idea of north. 2005. Cited in Murray, Kevin. “The South Project: A conference of flightless birds”. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. 6. 2 (2005).

de Andrade, Oswald. Manifesto Anthropófago (1928). Cited in Holubizky, Igor. “São Paulo Bienal”. Eyeline No 38 (Summer 1998/1999) : 33.

Donald, Peta. “Rising sea levels threaten Pacific Islands”. AM, ABC Radio (radio transcript). (5 January 2006). 22 February 2008. <http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1542124.htm>.

Edelsztein, S, in Holubizky, I. “São Paulo Bienal”.  Eyelne. No 38 (Summer 1998/1999) p. 34.

Edson, Gary (ed). Museum ethics: Theory and practice. Routledge, 1997.

Geertz, Clifford. Works and lives: the anthropologist as author, 1988. Cited in Anon.”Santiago postscript”, Undercurrents. (5 November 2006) 2 February 2007. < http://south-undercurrents.blogspot.com/2006/11/santiago-postscript.htm> .

Hill, Peter. “Build on it and they will come”.  The Age (Arts Reviews) (1 July 2006).. <http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/build-on-it-and-they-will-come/2006/06/2911511 >  Cited in Murray, Kevin.  Undercurrents; news related to the South Project . (6 July 2007). <southproject.org/blog/2006/07/build-on-it-and-they-will-come.htm>.

Hughes, Henry Meyric. “A Short History of Manifesta”. Manifesta: International Biennal of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 23 June – 24 September 2000. (2000). 12 January 2007.

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McPherson, T. “On Wal-Mart and southern studies” American Literature (‘Global contexts, local literatures: the new southern studies’). Vol 78, No 4 (December 2006). Cited in Murray, Kevin. Undercurrents; news related to the South Project. (26 January 2007).  2 February 2007. <http://south-undercurrents.blogspot.com/200701/global-south-issue-of-american.htm>.

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Murray, Kevin (A). “Preface”. Crossing South: The South Project 2006: Platform in Latin America. Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 2006. p. 3.

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Murray, Kevin. “South of helpful”. Undercurrents; news related to the South Project. (2 September 2005). 2 February 2007.< http://southundercurrents.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_archive..htm> .

Rivera, P, South Project participant feedback (2006) (n.d, n.p.).

Searles, Nalda. ‘south gathering…after and during…nalda searles’[sic]. Email to South Project participants. 2 November 2007.

Shonibare, Yinka. Cited in Griffin, Tim. “Global tendencies: globalism and large-scale exhibition” [sic] (Panel Discussion). Artforum International. (November 2003). 22 February 2008. <http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-1170737/Global-tendencies-globalism-and-large.html#abstract>.

Simpson, Moira. Making representations: Museums in the post-colonial era. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Tresilian, David. “Museum of the oppressed”. Al-Ahram. No 801 (29 June – 5 July 2006).  22 February 2008. < http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/801/cu2.htm>.

Zeplin, Pamela. “Lost white tribes of the Tasman-Pacific: an archaeology of Australia – New Zealand art exchanges of the 1970s and 1980s'”. Image and Text: Conceptual Art Online. (2004). pp. 1-8. 4 February 2007. <http://www.imageandtext.org.nz/zeplin.htm>.

‘P.S. The South project promises to provide Melbourne, and the world, with the international; art event it so richly deserves’.

‘Manifesta was a Dutch initiative for a new, pan-European Biennial of Contemporary Art, whose concept was developed from … the perceived inability of traditional large-scale events, such as documenta and the Venice Biennale to respond adequately to the new circumstances. Manifesta was to be a nomadic event, whose operational base would move from one city to another within Europe, every two years -- … to provide a platform for young artists, who were already launched on their professional careers, but who not yet been given widespread international exposure or commercial backing. (In this sense, Manifesta was intended, in part, to fill the gap left by the demise of the Paris Biennale des Jeunes). It was to be interdisciplinary and cross-cultural …[ emphasising] inclusivity … and collaboration between artists and theoreticians, rather than … factional representation, competition, commercialisation and prizes. It was to be a process, as much as a product, … building up a cumulative network of contacts and activities.’ Manifesta was held in Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002) and San Sebastian (Spain) in 2004. The 2006 Nicosia (Cyprus) event was cancelled due to political events. See, for example, a variety of these issues addressed by Edson, 1997 and Simpson 1996.

The artistic director of documenta XI in Kassel, Germany was Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian critic and independent curator who lives in New York. See Anon (B). for further information about the 2000 mile border fence between Mexico and the US. It is estimated that ‘each year between 400,000 and 1 million undocumented migrants try to slip across the rivers and deserts on the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) US-Mexico border. In 2005 over 1.2 million illegal immigrants were apprehended by the Border Patrol…. As long as the per-capita income differential between the US (over $30,000) and Mexico (less than $4,000) continues to be so wide, it will be difficult to stop immigrants’.

WomAdelaide is a major biennial music festival held in Adelaide featuring diverse ‘global beats’, including music from Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, New Zealand and various cultures from the northern hemisphere .