Entangled Labours

Who can make art in Australia, and under what conditions? In so-called Sydney it's becoming harder for people in precarity to live and create. High living costs, unstable housing, limited funding for artists, and weakening social-safety nets are precluding working-class artists from participating in the art and new music worlds. Entangled Labours sheds light on these gaps and sounds out the rich lives and experiences of working-class people making-do in the margins. In these ways, Entangled Labours provides a voice, conversation, and a radical forum to explore these issues.

The playful, union-meeting inspired program includes the premiere of a new video work by the Class Actions Collective, High Rise; Low Rise, which interrogates the selling off of social housing and the hauntologies of gentrification in Redfern; a drag performance set in Mount Druitt by underclass Queer theatre maker Kaz Therese; a series of poems and songs by Gadigal/Bidgigal/Yuin Elder Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor and a new score for working-class vocality, electronics, and brass trio performed by Poor-Para-Opera, exploring the shape of structural poverty on the grain of the voice. Also featured is a "laboured" action using amplified shovels and bells, inspired by Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 9, and an avant-garde reworking of political composer Cornelius Cardew's revolutionary, anti-imperial folk songs for the 21st century.

By showcasing the unique ways working-class people create, improvise within precarious conditions, Entangled Labours invites us to reflect on the systems that determine who gets to create art and the poetics that emerge in the spaces in- between.