This exhibition wants to do a few things. In the essay that follows, I try to explain what those few things are. I use words like ‘want’ and ‘try’ because at the time of writing, in April 2022, the exhibition is yet to happen. It’s entirely in the realm of the propositional. But its propositions are, I think, worthwhile. After attempting to lay this groundwork, I turn to the seven projects included in Take Hold of the Clouds. One by one, I describe them, as best I can, for you, my reader. I imagine you, inside Trades Hall or the Victorian Quaker Centre or the Mission to Seafarers’ Norla Dome, or one of the other sites included in the exhibition, wanting to know more about what it is that you’re experiencing. And so I’ve written a brief entry on each project in the spirit of a short guide, and with what I hope is a generosity of intention. By this I mean I’ve written what I would like to learn about each of these projects, if I were there, on a winter’s day, wanting to know more. But Take Hold of the Clouds is an incredibly brief exhibition – just two days, over the Open House Melbourne Weekend, 30–31 July 2022 – and so you may well be encountering these words afterwards, in which case the strangeness of my use of the future tense is a real possibility. Though it’s not one I mind.

The ideas that inspire this exhibition are unwieldy and messy and too big. I kept returning to a phrase by the artist Ruth Buchanan, who is also a beautiful writer: ‘where architecture meets mothers meets the words of others meets cities meets bodies meets these words of mine’. The staccato assemblage of her words resonates with the character of this exhibition, which is ultimately about the unbuilt as well as the built environment. Here unbuilt means the porosity of buildings; their prehistories and afterlives; the bodies they render invisible or obsolete and in turn, the use and misuse of space by bodies; the natural world that they eclipse or historically have stood in opposition to; and lastly, the atmospheric effects of the man-made. ‘Outside architecture is always inside bodies, sexualities, history, culture, nature,’ Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘all those others it seeks to exclude but which are the constitutive edges, the boundaries, of its operations’.

I found myself being held and buoyed by other voices – those of the artists, first and foremost, but also those of the writers commissioned to write experimental wayfinding texts on each site included in the exhibition. To make more visible this community of voices, and the nourishment it has provided, each artist’s project that follows is introduced by an epigraph. Even the exhibition’s title is not my own. It’s drawn from a line in Cauleen Smith’s 2018 video Sojourner, which is to be shown at the Victorian Quaker Centre over the weekend. Smith’s film is narrated by the voices of women, who speak words of wisdom and power, including Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, the Combahee River Collective, and Rebecca Cox Jackson. Jackson is an extraordinary figure: a freeborn African American woman who lived during the 19th century and was a visionary, a preacher, a lesbian and founder of the first Black Shaker community in the United States. In Smith’s film, we hear her recounting a dream in which God tells her, ‘you have climbed to the heavens and taken hold of the clouds’. The line is an admonition, for her too-lofty ambitions and lack of humility, but it’s also a call to recognise her own power. She has agency over her situation. While written two centuries ago, this line, especially its Icarus-like narrative of climbing too high, of tremendous achievement but also hubris, rings so true to the world we live in.

It’s impossible to take hold of the clouds, of course. And yet the atmospheric, however elusive, however unlike the built environment at first glance, has never been more significant. Think of the invisible, unbounded virus that kept some of us in our homes for two years. Art historian Caroline A. Jones provocatively calls the virus ‘sovereignty-shaped’, pointing at the way in which it single-handedly reinforced both the state and its borders. Or think of the catastrophic bushfires that raged across Eastern Australia in the Black Summer of 2019–2020, burning 24 million hectares of land, causing 33 human deaths, and killing or displacing almost 3 billion animals.

Over the years a number of writers have become enchanted by clouds, including amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, who first attempted to classify them in his 1803 treatise, Essay on the Modification of Clouds. Like Howard, poet Lisa Robertson and semiotician Hubert Damisch were drawn to the unrepresentability of clouds, the way in which they are in a constant state of transformation. It’s an unexpected, but perhaps generative metaphor for a festival focused on the built environment – like Open House Melbourne July Weekend 2022. It’s generative for the way it insists on mutability and temporality as givens in architecture, what literary theorist Laurel Peacock, writing about Robertson’s book The Weather, describes as ‘a soft, viable architecture lining the movement of days and weeks and years’. It’s generative for the cloud’s ability to remind us of our own porosity and interconnectedness. Damisch captures this quality well, when he writes, ‘A cloud belongs to the class of “bodies without surfaces”, as Leonardo da Vinci was to put it, bodies that have no precise form or extremities and whose limits interpenetrate with those of other clouds’. The porous nature of bodies, their lack of precise form or limits, is something that quantum physicists and feminist new materialists agree on.

It’s further proof of the profound relationality of all life on this planet, which is something that First Nations peoples have known for millennia. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people of Moreton Bay, and author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, writes, ‘In Indigenous cultural domains, relationality means that one experiences the self as part of others and that others are part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and social memory.’ Mykaela Saunders, a Koori and Lebanese writer, explains, ‘climate is intimately tied to the health of Country, which depends on the intelligent stewardship of humans – encoded in Aboriginal cultures’.

Intelligent stewardship of Country, of cities, of communities and culture, has never been more urgent. One of the things this exhibition wants to do is to model sustainable, resource-sensitive exhibition making for the art, design, and architecture community. Rather than freighting artworks or building walls, we have chosen to design an exhibition that relies on existing resources. In other words, found architecture. Or perhaps, the city as gallery. We invited artists and architects to select a site from the Open House Weekend July 2022 program, and to work within that site to generate an encounter, or conversation between creative work and built form. The projects are intended to be modestly resourced, with light carbon footprints. It is an intense exercise in resource sharing, rather than resource extraction or acquisition. As a form of curatorial labour, Fleur Watson, Executive Director & Chief Curator of Open House Melbourne, and co-curator on this iteration of the project, and I have functioned more like mediators. We own nothing, and we control very little. Instead, we have had to rely on the generosity and goodwill of each building’s stakeholders, of councils, of the creative practitioners themselves, of architects, of staff and interns and technicians and small businesses. In a sense, the entire exhibition is borrowed – from its locations to its equipment. This creates a web of interdependence and obligation to one another that fosters community in a long-term sense, and it refuses the capitalist logic that would make everything we do purely transactional. Not for nothing was the pandemic called the Great Separation. Refusing separation, and rebuilding relations, to each other and to place, is an underlying value of this exhibition. Resource-sharing is a curatorial ethic, I would argue, and is crucial to sustainable exhibition-making for the future.

Take Hold of the Clouds features seven projects: Forensic Architecture at The Capitol, RMIT University; Ying-Lan Dann at Mission to Seafarers; Alicia Frankovich at the Brunswick Baths; Julia McInerney at the Villa Alba Museum; Kent Morris at the St Kilda Foreshore Vaults; Cauleen Smith at the Victorian Quaker Centre; and Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) at Victorian Trades Hall & Literary Institute. The exhibition also includes an access consultancy with Fayen d’Evie and design program by Luke Rigby and Yue Yang.­

On each project page, the wayfinding texts that accompany the works are introduced by a typographic treatment by students from d’Evie’s Experimental Typography class. Over the course of the semester, the students responded to the exhibition’s themes and projects, and the commissioned texts and titles, to generate typography deeply attuned to subjectivity, class, ethnicity, life experience, and access.

References:

Ruth Buchanan, Where does my body belong? From institutional critique to infrastructural transformation, Or Standards and Mothers (Vancouver: Artspeak, 2021), 5.

Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), xvii.

Caroline A. Jones, “Virions: Thinking Through the Scale of Aggregation,” Artforum 58 (May-June 2020). https://www.artforum.com/print/202005/caroline-a-jones-82828. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Royal Commission (2020), The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements Report, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. https://naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/royal- commission-national-natural-disaster-arrangements-report. Accessed 27 April 2022.

My brief foray into cloud research has benefitted from Ada Smailbegovic’s beautiful and timely book, Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

Laurel Peacock, “Lisa Robertson’s Feminist Poetic Landscapes,” Open Letter 14, no. 5 (2011): 89.

Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 124.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, 20th anniversary ed. (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2020),16.

Mykaela Saunders, “The Law is the Land: on climate fictions and relational thinking,” Art + Australia 57.1 (2021): 26. In this powerful essay, Saunders also notes (echoing Tony Birch), that ‘The climate grief many Australians increasingly feel in the wake of local bushfires and global warming has been felt acutely by Aboriginal people since 1788, when the first swathes of forest were cut down to make houses and farmland in what is now Sydney’.

These ideas are indebted to Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (New York: Viking, 2013), and David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated and Expanded, 2nd ed., (New York: Melville House, 2014).

Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021): 59.

Fleur Watson (PhD) is Executive Director and Chief Curator for Open House Melbourne. From 2013–20, Fleur was curator at RMIT Design Hub Gallery, an exhibition space dedicated to cross-disciplinary design exchange and research at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she is currently Honorary University Fellow. She has held senior curatorial positions in Australia and internationally including executive curator of the Lyon Housemuseum Galleries (2018/2019); invited architecture curator for  Melbourne Now at the NGV (2013/2014) and program curator (architecture) for the European Capital of Culture (Maribor, Slovenia, 2012). Fleur is the author of The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture & Design (2021) and the series editor for Editions: Australian Architectural Monographs (Thames & Hudson, 2021).

Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She publishes and lectures frequently, and has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her recent books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which was awarded the Millard Meiss Award and was a nominee for the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Tom Ross is a photographer living and working in Naarm Melbourne. Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, and Massachusetts College of Art, he works with architects, and storytellers, and has been published internationally.

Thank you to the project partners and supporters including Monash University, Creative Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, City of Melbourne, City of Port Phillip, Create NSW, Moreland City Council, All Are Welcome, RMIT Architecture & Urban Design and RMIT Culture, Ellikon Fine Printing, Boom Studio and Zilla and Brook.