Portrait of Community 2024

What does community look like?

Blue spiral signifies flows of Indigenous knowledge that come from lands and waterways. Orange grid signifies colonial frameworks opening up to two-way learning and teaching through cultural arts and the scientific method. Icon co-authored by Cat Kutay, Robyn Murphy and Lisa Roberts (2021-08-19)

Humans benefit from communities they interact with. Benefits for humans from human communities can be physical, emotional and financial. Humans also benefit from communities of other species from whom they get resources such as food, timber, fibre, medicines, and ecosystem services such as oxygen, water purification, waste dispersal and nutrient recycling.

Other organisms also benefit from communities they interact with, such as coral reefs, schools of fish, swarms of krill, pods of whales. Communities can be multi-species such as an ocean ecosystem - or a rainforest with its myriad of interdependent organisms.

Immerse yourself in a video installation of aquatic music, song, dance, cinamatography and animation. Experience the rhythm of the sea and the choreography of ocean life.

Explore cards with messages held in plankton mesh used by Antarctic scientists to measure ocean health - the same mesh used to measure health of fresh and salt water systems worldwide. 350 cards signify 350 parts per million (ppm) of C02 in the atmosphere that is considered safe for communities of organisms such as corals, krill and fishes, that we humans depend upon. We're now over 420 ppm.

Interact with a coral scientist to create an installation that shows how individual polyps work together to grow and sustain a coral community.

Make your own message card at the art table, in response to this new and ancient knowledge of self-organising, self-sustaining communities upon which humans depend.

350+ messages appear in the winged TV, fully documented with links to all contributors.

Hosted by Gallery 371 371 Enmore Road, Enmore, Sydney

Opening 6pm Sat 8 June and open daily 10am to 7pm to Fri 14 June

	Estuaries Freshwater in-flows
	Barkindji Story Sharing and growing knowledge

Views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect my own, nor those of institutions to which contributors are affiliated.

Lisa Roberts, Sydney, 2024