About

Event: HOIST by not yet it's difficult
Venue: Upper Concourse, Federation Square
Dates: August 27- September 9, 2010
Time: Monday- Thursday 10am-10pm, Friday- Sunday 1.30pm-10pm
Artist’s Talk: Sunday 29th August 4pm- NGV Potter Theatrette
Price: Free

Transferring a large Hills Hoist from Melbourne’s suburbs to Federation Square, not yet it’s difficult’s David Pledger brings the narratives of suburbia into the city in a visual essay to ‘re-entangle’ the division between suburbs and city and inquire as to what separates them and what connects them.

Using film, object and text, HOIST is a participatory installation created through the prism of the iconic clothesline, the Hills Hoist. In White Australian Dreaming, the Hills Hoist is a multiple signifier - of home ownership, domesticity and socio-economic class. It has a unique social, architectural and design integrity that makes it a rich locus for the storage and retrieval of memories and associations around growing up and living in Australia.

The suburbs have long been of artistic interest to Australian artists and writers probably because the vast majority of us were raised ‘out there’. In part too, because the suburbs represent the liminal space between the coast and the interior and as such they defend and protect us from whatever is ‘further out there’. So the suburbs mark out a number of cultural and imaginary frontier spaces. Concepts of civilisation, survival, border, race, fear are all deeply rooted in the evolving suburban space.

Even as the outer becomes the middle, the history of once being at the edge is retained in the architecture, the town planning and the concept of community. This is why the suburbs are such a vital, contestable site of investigation in any examination of contemporary Australian identity.
Pledger says, “The iconic Hills Hoist is in every other suburban backyard. By relocating it to Federation Square, and using it as a receptacle of images and memory, the project asks us to re-connect with this everyday object and by doing so, to feel the reach of the suburban into the heart of the city.”

In addition, Pledger has proposed creative briefs to photographers, digital and visual artists, and featured authors participating in Melbourne Writer’s Festival which will be pegged onto the clothesline. Tales will be hand-written on pillow-slips, tea-towels and sheets to accompany musings in object, image and text.
The general public is invited to write their own tales of the ‘burbs and peg them onto the Hoist. Stories can be read and recorded in the adjacent ‘laundry’ to be shared and viewed online. A selection of these tales will be screened episodically on the Big Screen at Federation Square.

Night-time screenings of Pledger's videos of suburban scenes and landscape are scheduled from 5pm.