disorganising is a project between West Space, Liquid Architecture and Bus Projects; an open and expanding conversation that looks to experiment with divergent ways of organising and creating. It is a practice of interdependence.

disorganising is supported by Creative Victoria’s Strategic Investment Fund, City of Yarra Stimulate Fund and VicHealth Everyday Creativity Partnerships.

A promise was made: our three organisations bound together for six months, sharing resources, skills and time to experiment with practices of interdependence.

Questions were devised. Proposals were assembled.

Something less than an organisation emerges: a disorganisation? Or even less, simply an organ. Rather than building anew, the organ asks us to remember that we are breathing, pulsing and in relationship to a larger living organism – we cannot thrive on our own.

Independence fuels competition and narrow thinking. Our systemic and institutional structures favour criteria over spontaneity, competition over collaboration, newness over return. Interdependence becomes a demanding yet imperative and generative practice.

Interdependence requires a level of attention that is generous. Deep listening is a practice of interdependence, wherein relationality is key to a ‘deeper state of awareness’. Daniel Browning remembers his first trip to Lake Mungo in far south-western New South Wales. He remembers the ‘dramatic soundscape’ of a dry, bone-coloured trackway. The sonic clues to Country become what he describes as a text, imprinted ‘thousands of years ago’ by ‘several ancestor groups’ moving across Country to track kangaroos, ‘a family with a wandering child and an agile one-legged man’.

Text and texture are inscribed into the lands we reside on. This is not a flat view of our world, our artists, our community—instead it becomes a capacious organ, alive and singing. Yet in an arts landscape where attention is demanded and often echoed in the white chambers of institutions, where does one offer their attention? Where do we deeply listen?

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Listen to our first disorganising audio above.

On the 18 May 2021, we gathered at Hope Street Radio to host our first disorganising dinner for the tenants of Collingwood Yards. A toasty fire sparks conversation among new neighbours. There’s delight in the air as Hope Street Radio is filled with chatter and a tasty pile of funky and soulful 45s, 12’s and LPs by Gavin Purdy, from Licorice Pie. Blak Metal sells cultural capital while Scarlett So Hung Son shuffles Mah Jong tiles across the table. Promissory notes are exchanged.

We begin by immersing ourselves in the mess. Fred Moten says that ‘Revolution or anti-colonialism, as [Frantz] Fanon says, is a program of total disorder, and museums and academic institutions clean up messes. I mean, really, the history of the modern subject, as codified by Kant, is about the cleaning up of mess. It’s about the eradication of swarm, and of fuzz and buzziness. He just hates that shit. And politics is meant to regulate that. But what if this got to be a mess that the Museum chose to present, rather than clean up? There’s a poetics of the mess, you know?’

The thing about poetry is that it is unpredictable, it can be slippery and opaque and as Ocean Vuong says, it is ‘an art of disorientation’. Fumbling and learning together. disorganising in the mess.

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