Cauleen Smith
Victorian Quaker Centre
Feature image description: Inside a room with cream walls, three people sit on stools watching a screen mounted on a pole; the frame captured at the moment of documentation shows two women holding a banner, the blue sky behind. The banner reads "at NOON", the "at" in cursive script, the "noon" in blue capitals. The carpet on which the stools have been places has circular forms in pink and red; the circular forms echo a circular skylight above. Translucent coloured films cover the glass windows of the room, casting pink, blue and purple light across the carpeted floor. [Other image descriptions embedded in alt text.]
Sojourner
📍 Victorian Quaker Centre
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
— Combahee River Collective
Installed in the Worship Space of the Victorian Quaker Centre, artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s 2018 video work Sojourner imagines the possibilities of a deeply generous, feminist, and Afrofuturist community through a pilgrimage to sites of utopian community-building in America. The video opens with Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda singing ‘Om Supreme’, as the filmmaker trains her camera on several historic sites in Philadelphia. Smith captures 16mm footage of the home of African American jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane (husband of Alice), as well as African American jazz musician and composer Sun Ra’s residence, the purported site of the Eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Urban Shaker Community, and the Shaker Historic District in upstate New York.
As Alice Coltrane calls us to California, so too does Smith shift to her home state, filming at Coltrane’s ashram and California poppy fields, before switching to 4K video for an aerial view of Los Angeles that slowly reveals the Watts Tower, one of the most visionary, expansive works of so-called outsider art in America. This community artwork was built in the evenings over 25 years by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, in what was then a predominantly African American community. Rodia finished the work and simply gave it to the community, in what Smith describes as an act of ‘radical generosity’. There have been moments in human history when we have aspired to, and even achieved, acts of radical generosity towards each other – this is the history Smith sets out to document in Sojourner, even as she is equally gesturing to a future world-building.
The video’s final act is in this register of imagining a future world, a better world, through a lens onto the past. Smith changes location to another extraordinary work of art and architecture, the outdoor desert art museum in Joshua Tree built over 15 years by African American artist Noah Purifoy and comprising more than 100 works of assemblage and environmental art. Here a group of women, listening to the staunch, visionary statement on black feminism published by the Combahee River Collective in 1977, gather at dawn to re-enact an image by Time-Life photographer Bill Ray which originally featured young men. Of her misappropriation, Smith explains: ‘the actual manifestation of change has always been the work of women. I wanted to make it really visible that Black women have been imagining a better world – and not only imagining it, but making it so’.
Smith is well aware of how maligned utopias are, and how cynical we’ve become about them. And yet, she argues convincingly that our current systems – most notably capitalism – aren’t working. ‘Why not strive for something more perfect?’ she asks. ‘Maybe the sporadic immersions, arrivals and erosions, presentments and dissolutions, of these utopian gestures is perfectly natural, almost geological, and maybe we should embrace the ebb and flow of human efforts to build systems that really sustain and nourish them.’—TM
Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/, accessed 27 April 2022.
Cauleen Smith, “Artist Talk: Cauleen Smith,” Berkeley Arts + Design, 29 April 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1NoDx52T8&ab_channel=BerkeleyArts%2BDesign, accessed 27 April 2022.
Cauleen Smith, “Artist Cauleen Smith on Black Feminist Utopia in California” KQED Arts and Culture, 5 February 2021, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13892105/artist-cauleen-smith-on-black-utopia-in-california, accessed 27 April 2022.
Cauleen Smith, “Artist Talk: Cauleen Smith”
Image Description: The words "A Space-object for Peace" are formed with an organic typeface in which each letter connects to the next, like a long, looping thread . Typography designed by Lorena Zapiain Porras.
Audio production by Simon Maisch. Supported by SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University
The following text has been commissioned to reflect upon and respond to Cauleen Smith, Sojourner at Victorian Quaker Centre. The text is intended as a form of experimental wayfinding when engaging with the work.
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The Victorian Quaker Centre was conceived as a zone for the contemplation of peace and peacemaking activities inserted into the edge of the city of Melbourne, in a triangular wedge between the two city grids. We were asked to avoid normal church tropes and iconography, so the desire was to investigate how to reconceptualise a new type of religious space. The space is for everyone, not only believers. All that is encouraged is honesty and the desire for peace.
The worship space is conceived of as a ‘space-object’ inserted into the triangular shell of an existing 1960s office building, like a zone of peace in the city of space-junk. The spatiality plays between the virtual and actual and is defined (avoiding the use of walls) by a virtual circular zone inscribed by light and markings on the floor and ceiling, centred on the view to the sky above. This zone is under a tent-like structure, a reverberation of the primitive architecture of the ancient church. This is inserted into the building like an alien space-object in the urban landscape, not only alien to the contemporary city but acknowledging that the city itself is alien to the traditional ownership and culture of the site.
The centre establishes a relationship between its zone and the context – spiritually and physically, in order for us to understand and experience our reality, and our positioning in space and time. The site is a triangle of leftover space between the north–south orientated greater Melbourne grid and the city grid, which is rotated approximately 28°. A number of shifting asymmetrical circles have been inserted within the space to detonate the shift between the city and surrounding suburbs, notating a subconscious sense of our placement in the wider environment. The circle is a Quaker symbol and Quaker meetings begin with an hour of silence while the group sit in circular formation. The various size circles allow for varying group sizes and a casual informality.
These formations are informed by Quaker astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s 1927 seminal lecture in which he describes a single table in front of him as two tables. The table co-existed as actual and virtual duplicates – an object of everyday reality and, simultaneously, as an object of scientific matter. Eddington’s lecture was influential in considering how to create a multi-dimensional space that embodied simplicity in all its complexity.
Religious spaces have defined much of architectural history, however, for Christianity they often tend to encourage a singular vision of existence. A modest attempt was made here to see how we could move beyond this tradition into a freer space. As examples of modern spirituality, we looked towards John and Alice Coltrane (a happy coincidence with Sojourner), Sun Ra and the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp to investigate how to encourage peaceful thought and thoughts on peace, an oscillating space of no hierarchy.
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Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California, and lives in Los Angeles. Smith is in the Art Program faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She received her BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and MFA from University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith’s short films, feature film, an installation and performance were showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019. Smith has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and MASS MoCA and LACMA. Smith is the recipient of the following awards and grants: Rockefeller Media Arts Award; Creative Capital Film /Video; Chicago 3Arts Grant; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Chicago Expo Artadia Award; Rauschenberg Residency; Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video 2016; United States Artists Award 2017; 2016 inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award; 2020 recipient of the Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; and 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Toby Reed is a director of Nervegna Reed Architecture (NR), an award-winning, multi-disciplinary architectural practice, working on projects spanning all types of architecture, urban design and media. Recent projects range from the Maryborough Art Gallery to large-scale urban design in China. NR’s projects include the Melbourne Quakers Centre, the Arrow Studio, and the Precinct Energy Project (PEP) in Dandenong (all in collaboration with pH Architects). PEP Dandenong was the first precinct in Australia to be powered by co-generation, leading the way in Australian architecture and urbanism for green district energy. Reed extends his architectural dialogue with writings and the production of architectural videos and video installations for exhibitions.