These are some of his comments:

Asia and Asian have always been categories. Those two categories 'Asia' and 'Asian' are becoming increasingly re-constituted by the processes of globalisation and that means that the work that we've been doing about defining Asia, understanding Asia and thinking about Asian has to continue and will probably continue as we try to understand the new formations that are emerging. The increasing movement of people, ideals and money across the globe has created new diasporic spaces that are neither here nor there. There are a lot of people who live and work in places that are not definitively and very clearly and unambiguously located in a particular geographical space.

Geographical space itself is an abstract context, as indeed is the idea of Asia and I think we need to actually understand that, so that we can work with the dynamics of community across not only geographical spaces but also other formations of spaces and times as well.

Diasporic spaces have many different forms as a result of many different histories and many different characteristics. The links are multiple and complex. I think artists have been at the forefront of trying to explore what those links might be, and how the diasporic space itself defines their own identity, their own way of working, living and relating to all kinds of factors around us.

Let me give you some examples of that in order to make the point a little bit clearer. Diasporic Asians, for example like myself, are major consumers of the art produced at home. We are hungry for the kind of art that connects with our homelands. Whatever place we regard as the place where we come from has an important place in our identity formation just as in Australia, an Australian landscape and ideas and cultures are as important to us as well as, memory, nostalgia, desires. We want to remain connected, but that connection is not the only connection. It is a multidimensional connection through which we understand ourselves as being connected to both lands, both here and there at the same time. And I think more and more people are beginning to recognize that. But at the same time the arts produced in diasporic spaces have profound impact on practices at home. I was in India recently and saw how much influence the diasporic Indians working in Britain, in Canada, in Australia and other places are having on arts practices in India and I think that is also the case in other places like Singapore, Korea, Japan and so on.

These processes are resulting in new hybridized arts exploration and practices, both within and outside arts organizations and that's where community comes in. Strangely enough people, who never gave two thoughts to the arts, in a diasporic space suddenly become interested in arts as a way of connecting, as a way of relating, as a way of understanding themselves in both the old and the new location. So art plays a very important role in defining people's identity, in a way that I think the diasporic spaces nurture and help us to understand.

The extensive movement of students of arts between Asia and Australia for example have resulted in a kind of diasporic space that is characterized by a great deal of energy and creativity. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that the 600 - 700 or so arts students, who are at RMIT, are producing works that are helping forge the kind of relationship at the community level and the elite. Altogether, I understand there are something like 5,000 international students here at the moment in Australian Universities that are in these arts related fields. Now that is a huge number, a number that often gets ignored when we are thinking about these kinds of relationships.

Now these considerations in my view highlight the importance of thinking about Australia-Asia relations beyond the kind of bilateral ways in which we have done traditionally. I think that the bilateral way of looking at Australia-Asia or Australia and any other country is fairly misleading because it's always mediated by a whole range of global forces including the movement of students. I think we need to understand what is happening and how globalization and global processes are mediated, the kind of relationship that we have at the community to community level between Indonesia and Australia or between other countries in Asia. Let's start thinking about the movement of people; let's start thinking about those places where people are both here and there at the same time and use that as a major resource for trying to think about how those community links, how art and community relationships can be enhanced.
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I'll give you my five issues and then talk about the strategies as we go.

I went back to look at last year's Asialink Forum to see what issues came out and strategies which I'd like to pick up on. One was to consolidate programs. The second was to continue to learn. Third was collaborating across art forms and cultures. The fourth one, which I'm interested in, is about what I hope should be a disjunction between cultural power and economic power which is not always the case in dealing with any other country; and the fifth one is about how, for some sections, community cultural development is really coming into its own in Australia in a very, very big way, and how it is really very fortunate that this is one way in which we can engage meaningfully with the countries in our region.

Going back then to the first one, consolidating programs, and, picking up Carrillo Gantner's point and the point he made last year about diminishing energy and commitment to engage in Asia by the Australia Council. I think we have gone too far down another road. There were reasons for this which have been part unforeseen.

Last year we certainly tried to get the International Programs of the Australia Council into focus. When I began as Chair I wondered for our international work: why and where was the funding coming from, and what were the intended consequences of that funding? So we asked a small group to sit down and look at the framework for our international operations, because if there isn't some sort of framework, those of you who are in the field would be quite justified in saying Why did you fund those people and not those people and what is the criteria?

The outcome was that, across our operations, we were funding in four main ways. The first was through Arts Development and that was happening through the Funds etc, and that very much engaged individual artists in residencies and exchanges and so forth. The second was Market Development which was where we funded the companies and organizations to travel overseas to actually build their own market place. That was largely happening through our Audience Development Division. Third was cultural diplomacy and I guess that is mixed up with cultural relations which was very much where Government asked us to do things; a strategy such as New Horizons in India or New Images in Britain, which was a whole-of-government issue not just an arts issue. The other was really where the Foreign Affairs Department asked us to manage certain projects for diplomatic reasons. We reached a conclusion that we would only do the latter if they gave us the money to do it. And the second last only if there was a positive outcome for artists in Australia as well as for those countries.

On the marketing side, and I think this is where the problem has begun, we decided that we would fund companies to expand their market place. And the problem with the Asian downturn meant some of the companies said I went to China last year and we came back with a poor financial return. The decision came to focus on the areas where people could at least keep their bottom lines in the black. It wasn't a matter of choosing America or Japan because we wanted those countries, but because those countries had consistently helped create a reasonable bottom line. And that of course could well change. England could go into recession. Even countries like Japan have not been as dynamic as they were. It might be a country like India might move up on its level of interaction economically.

The other thing that has happened is that in the artists' side of the proposal. In Artists Development it seems that funding for this has also dropped for Asian ventures. That is not our doing as such. We haven't said you can only get funds to go on a residency to Switzerland.

We have certainly not communicated the message clearly enough and we have not taken the care to make sure the other side of the Council's operations would continue the notion of engagement for major cultural reasons, which was not what the Audience Development side was doing.

Now to talk about strategies. Yesterday at our Council meeting in Canberra we decided we are going to do an audit (Community Cultural Development have done one already) through all the funding that has been going through the Arts Development side [about engagement with Asia] and if the track record is looking as grim as we all think it might be we need to take some adjusting measures. We will start doing this by October.

There was another point that David Williams made some time last year: that Council was privileging the new over the old. Certainly it has transpired because of the particular focus on the Emerging Artists Fund, but if you remember it was a Government program - they gave us some money for emerging artists. We do believe it is very important as we have many more graduates out of our tertiary institutions than we had 15 years ago and we haven't got the same growth in jobs as we have in graduates. We could have many disturbed, turned-off and alienated people at that level, so we have regarded the Emerging Artists as a very important part of transition.

We have had this accusation from a number of people in the field and we have gone back and looked at the records and I think you would be surprised how many older people use the funds particularly in the Individual Artists category. But I do recognise that our funding has become limited and this is being felt.

But this issue of the young and the old leads on to my second issue of continuing to learn. This is an issue for us at Council and the staff: continuing life long learning for artists. It is something we can do very strongly with our colleagues from our region. Professional development for artists, including arts management: I feel it is so productive to do this together. In talking in South Australia about new summer schools for arts management and so forth, there has been a lot of clamouring from the schools for arts management techniques, CCD techniques, for new technology techniques. But rather than just doing it for Australians, it seems to me it would be a very strong way of engaging.

Let us look at the internationalizing of the curriculum. I have been doing some work for South Australia which looks at tertiary arts courses around the country in a range of disciplines. It is very variable around the country in terms of the internationalisation of the curriculum. A DEETYA report of 1997 in conjunction with the Tasmanian School of Art looked at the aspirations of Asian students for a reflection of their own cultures in the Australian curricula when they come. I know that some schools of art, music, ballet are doing this very strongly but I also know that others are in the doghouse on this one. They have had a number of Asian students but made absolutely no attempt to internationalise the curriculum for them. We have had a lot more pressure in Australian universities today about internationalization of the curriculum but clearly it is a buzz word and it's about exchange of staff. The energy for all of us to get our curriculum into shape is failing. It is an important strategy to continue to learn. It is for us as much as it is for the students of tomorrow and for Australian students as much as for overseas students.

It does relate to my fourth issue of cultural power and economic power. I do have a concern about this. We do have the juggernaut of American economic power some of us talked about at a conference this morning. We also talked about the cultural powers of the US juggernauts. It has been one of the problems of the colonization process of the economic power driving a cultural power down onto the people who are being colonised. I see us being colonized. Given that we are in the process of this happening to us, we should be alert we are not passing on that relationship to others.

On the issue of continuing to learn, I'd like to specifically mention the relationship which the Community Cultural Development Fund and Asialink are about to embark upon because this also relates to my third issue about collaborating across art forms and cultures. This will be about long term exchanges rather than short term ones we have had in the past through Australia Council funding. It is much more about building long, on-going infrastructures so that after people have left here or left Indonesia (and this has a very strong Indonesia focus), the physical and cultural impact will remain. This is about a relationship that will be built up through community cultural development practices in Indonesia and Australia. At the June meeting of Community Cultural Development Fund, the project was submitted by Asialink and the Fund saw this as something to agree to take on. The first stage will be an analysis of what we are doing now and then for the relevant funding partners to build up these long term relationships. The program will run over three years and there will be about 10 major projects including exchanges and relationships across the two countries. We are the economic power at this particular time. We may not be in fifty years but we are now. I think it is very important we have worked out the morals of handling how we are the economic power without letting that impose on the cultural relationship which is happening here. This is also outside the institutional frameworks and that is the real driver of this project.

I am coming to my final issue, I do believe that Community Cultural Development is the future. If it is not, I don't see we are going to have the support of governments, big business and our wider community. I do see CCD is very much coming into its own at this time in Australia for a whole lot of unusual reasons: issues about regeneration, about regional communities; there is clearly a political imperative about regeneration. It is about some of the social ills and social divides in our community, it is about the aspirations that normal people have about society where well-being is being considered. Australia in the last two years is clearly struggling about the issue of a divided country. There are very few mechanisms we can use to regenerate communities and re-establish social well-being and to help recreate civil societies. There are such a multiplicity of benefits and engagements with the community in so many ways. That is why I believe it is the age of the CCD.

At the Council we are catching up. As a society we are catching up many non-Western societies which actually engage with culture as a very meaningful part of the community. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and I'd be happy to tell you next year about how things go on our audit on our engagement with Asia.
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I will be talking from my experience of working with the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) since 1994, and my focus this afternoon will be the visual arts.

My first point concerns definitions. So of course in looking at the idea of art and community in the visual arts, the term has a rather bad name. Art and community is often associated with murals on buildings that should be pulled down long ago (or not pulled down at all). So, with art and community as the topic for today, I immediately began thinking about what is community and started attempting to define this for myself.

One definition could be community by locale or geography. As an example, at the QAG we worked with local Brisbane communities (particularly Samoan and Indigenous Australian communities) for a powerful performance by the Aotearoa/New Zealand artist, Michel Tuffery for the Third APT. We intervened with the traffic near the Gallery and so invited/demanded further involvement from the local South Brisbanite community as the noisy procession travelled for a hour or so through the streets in this busy part of town. Another definition could be community by artistic practice. For example the work of Sonabai (an extraordinary tribal artist from India) is very rooted within her community. A further definition could be community by shared concerns - locally/globally located. For example the Home sweet Home project of Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth included community participation in Pakistan, Brisbane and elsewhere. And finally, another definition could be community by specific interest, for example the 700 delegates who traipsed along to the Third APT conference, or in terms of audience, the common thread that drew 150,000 visitors (57% from Brisbane, 12% from Regional Queensland, 15% from interstate and another 16% from overseas). In this way, a community across wide terrain is created - linked by shared interests.

I was thinking about all those communities and having much difficulty defining them (and of course, definitions are dangerous things). So then I started thinking about what art can do within these contexts. My second issue concerns the practice of community-to-community projects. I want to refer briefly to a terrific project, one of the subtlest, yet strongest I think, from the Third APT. The project grew from two established artistic communities and involved dynamic relations between these communities that have continued for well over the past ten years. The two communities are the Brahma Tirta Sari Studio in Yogjakarta and Utopia Batik in the Northern Territory and involved batik workshops that began in the 1970's. There was a specific workshop in 1994 in Yogjakarta that was nurtured and attracted tremendous support from artistic and broader cultural groups in Australia, and resulted in a large scale workshop in 1998 in Alice Springs. This workshop produced some 30 collaborative cloths - a number of which were shown in APT3. (I shall refer to this issue later as one of my strategies - that is the community-to-community aspect of projects being based on existing relationships. Sometimes those relationships may grow from existing liaisons, on other occasions the relationships may come from an arranged marriage situation. The later can often work, but can also bring with it associated difficulties).

My third issue concerns the empathetic force that can draw communities together. One artist who offered APT audiences something more was Dadang Christanto during the First and the Third APT's. This is perhaps my main point. I believe that through art, we can establish new communities. The work that is produced by artists does offer a tremendous power, does offer something unique, does offer us the opportunity to be moved, to be challenged, to be informed, and consequently to be offered empathy with sensibilities that are universal. (Even though these sensibilites may be emanating from very specific situations). Dadang's work for APT3 was called Api di bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998) and involved the burning of 47 papier mache figures during the opening of the exhibition. The 13th,14th and 15th May (the 5th month) being the dates of escalated violence in Jakarta in 1998 (ie. 13+14+15+5=47). In September 1999, there was considerable reaction in Australia to the (then) recent events in East Timor. Hundreds of members of the Australian arts community approached the QAG by email and urged the Gallery to make some gesture in response to the violence on the occasion of the APT. (The Gallery did so, and passed on these expressions to both the Australian and Indonesian Governments.) There existed a large community in Australia that felt strongly and deeply about what was occurring in Indonesia. But simultaneoulsy, what Dadang was doing through his performance that evening on the 10th September 1999, created a powerful shared feeling that connected very directly to that particular moment (and beyond).

The fourth issue concerns artists whose practice, at its heart, deals directly with community. Of course not all artists are particularly concerned with community - and that's fine! I think artists such as Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan (a husband and wife duo who work together in The Philippines and other locations) are working closely with the idea of family and home. So community is very much at the heart of all their activities. Their project for the First Fukuoka Triennale in 1999 involved the contribution by local communities of used tooth-brushes, forming a unified, classless world of tooth-brush heaven. In the Havana Biennale, an ocean of donated tooth-brushes were accompanied by the sounds of squelching plastic as audiences walked accross a ramp that spanned the ocean. In Brisbane for the Third APT, they asked questions. Questions concerning the power and significance of objects, questions about migration and about personal choices. The artists' cousin lived in Brisbane, a Ricardo Aquilizan who they asked me to help find. Much to my surprise, I knew him well, as Ric Aqui, the Insitute of Modern Art designer. The artists were interested in questions - why he had changed his name, why they had (at that time in 1998) so little contact with him etc ... . So, Alfredo and Isabel embedded the unsuspecting Ric into the midst of the Filipino community of South-East Queensland. Invitations to the Fiipino community to participate in the project were made through the Filipino community newspapers and hundreds of interviews were conducted by Ric who then borrowed from each family, one item that had been brought with that family from The Philippines. Ric interviewed each family about the reasons for their choices in bringing each particular object to Australia. The objects were then individually labelled by Ric to include where the object was originally from, where the family lived now, and the names of the owners. (An interesting discovery was the number of illegal entries (object-wise that is)). It was an extraordinary and quite voyeuristic insight into the lives of these families. In the exhibition, the objects were presented on a bed of salt. At the close of the exhibition, all the objects were returned safely to their owners. (The project links I think to Fazal's comment about the actualisation of their space.) Alfredo and Isabel were very clear about pursuing particular questions through this project, questions about family. In fact, things were quite different, much closer, between Ric and his cousins in Manila afterwards. To me this was a very beautiful work that really linked back to the idea of community being at the heart of particular artists' practice.

In a similar vein, another project I want to discuss was Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth (a Pakistani and Engish collaboration, and another husband and wife duo) who are based in Karachi. Their work,Very very sweet Medina (Home sweet home) asks questions about the notion of home. The artists presented bookets and invited individual audience members to complete forms concerning their notion of home. This is an endless work that expands each time it is presented. Interestingly, their work also raises further questions concerning the layers of artistic communities and practices. I have heard criticism of the work from a Singaporean curator in terms of the non-naming of the many truck-painters and film poster-painters who participate substantially within their work. The questions are raised - Are these truck and poster painters collaborators? Are they paid artisans? Are they artists? What are the differences? At the Fukuoka Triennale, Kazi and Alesworth brought truck and poster-painters with them from Pakistan. The local Fukuoka audience/ community was invited to bring to the museum household objects for decorating by the painters. Fridges were brought in but the most popular item to be adorned in Pakistani fowers were mobile phones. So again, interesting and important questions are raised here concerning the participation of various communities in art projects and their respective levels of engagement with the ideas raised. I think Kazi and Alesworth are indeed acutely aware of these issues and in fact are raising them for contemplation and discussion within these contexts.

The fifth issue I wish to raise concerns the whole idea of audience, something that I care about very deeply. I have thinking about the whole issue of the inclusion of both Sonabai's and Weerasinghe's works in APT3. I shall speak about Sonabai very briefly. Sonabai is in the vicinity of 70 years old. Jyotindra Jain, the Director of the National Handicraft and Handlooms Museum in New Delhi, was the curator responsible for her inclusion in APT3. (A point should be made here concerning the critically important community of arts professionals. For APT3, the support of these individuals, based in specific locations/contexts, is an invaluable strength within the project. For example, Jyotindra Jain organised two of his staff to travel the three day journey by bus and taxi to the remote village where Sonabai lives to explain the project to her, and to discuss with her the implications of the long stay in Brisbane with her son to complete the work. This journey was done on three seperate occasions. Without Jyotindra Jain's extensive support, the inclusion of Sonabai would simply not have been possible.) Jyotindra Jain wrote for the catalogue about Sonabai's practice;

For historical reasons, in the writing of western art history, anonymity has been considered to be the chief characteristic of the artistic ethos of non-western societies. Here 'individuality', set in opposition to the 'anonymity', is almost directly linked with the so-called 'elite', set in opposition to the so-called 'primitive'.

Jain goes on to talk about the assumption that within tribal art making, there is no room for innovation and indicates that in fact for Sonabai, there is an enormous amount of shifting and innovation that has happened within her practice, and within her influence inside her local and artistic community. The question is then raised ... How is the work to be read (by audiences not familiar with these practices)?

Jagath Weerasinghe is an artist whose recent work relates to issues of violence and innocence. His work for APT3, 'Yantra Gala' and the round pilgrimage deals very acutely with community. He is dealing with the community of parents, the parents of children who were massascred in 1989 in a schoolroom in the south of Sri Lanka. He visited the village in 1996 and invited the parents of those children to participate in an art project, engaging the parents in an on-going collaborative project called Shrine for the Innocents. His work for the APT3 was an extension of that project, and while in Brisbane, he worked extensively as an artist-in-residence with local primary school students to create his piece. Personally speaking, I think for visitors coming to this finished work in the exhibition, perhaps much of the complexity of the work was not evident. There existed a rich powerful history that intimately informed this work on so many levels - information that might not be communicated on first viewing. I wanted to mention this as it raises the question of audience engagement - about how much 'information', how much 'contextualisation' one passes on, and in what form, and also raises the question of how necessary this infomation is to be articulated when it is embedded already in the fibre of the work. (These are questions perhaps more for museums to consider than artists).

So, my strategies are:

1. Work with artists whose practice rests very deeply with community;
2. Work with projects that link community-to-community and;
3. Be aware,and to be inspired by, the whole notion that artists themselves can create new communities through their art.

Thank you.
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I want to raise a few issues in working with the community in an arts project.

Racial stereotyping

I work with young people from diverse backgrounds; Vietnamese, Argentinian, Iranian, East Timorese, Ethiopian, Somalian. Our group, Mongrel Theatre at Footscray Community Arts Centre makes plays which reflect the diversity of experiences of contemporary Australia. Our aim is to give voice to stories and people who don't often get a voice in the mainstream media. One of the things which happens frequently in mainstream media is racial stereotyping. This we deliberately try to counteract. However a few years back we were doing a play called Casino City. Halfway through a rehearsal I realised that all the bad guys were black or Asian. Sure most of our cast were non Anglo saxon, but for all of the bad characters to be of the usual stereotype was a bit bad. So I went to the director and said Hey, all the bad guys are black and Asian. And he stopped and said Yes, you're right. It was totally unconscious and it had just happened that way because those particular actors were the most capable, and those roles were the most challenging. In the end we went with the casting that we had because we believed that we were not saying that the bad characters were evil because of their race. Ours was a multi-racial cast and people are people the world over - sometimes good and sometimes bad. Having said that racial stereotyping is something we constantly need to be vigilant about when working interculturally.

Community means community

For 'at-risk' young people there are many things that make it harder for them to participate in a community theatre project. Things that don't directly relate to the project itself. Last year I worked in a project at Kensington. Two of the guys were very dedicated and turned up regularly to rehearsals. They had really good story ideas too. One week to the performance date these 2 guys had to pull out of the project. The reason was they were having housing issues; they didn't have anywhere to live. As community arts workers there was nothing we could do to help them with housing which is a social work issue. So their outside lives were effecting their participation in this arts project, which they clearly benefited from and were benefiting because of their input. Every community project has to be aware of possible housing, employment, health or childcare needs of the participants. Artists aren't always the best people to manage this however and so need support from social workers or outreach coordinators.

Stakeholders

Related to this is stakeholders - we need to ask in a community arts project: Who may be threatened by this project? For example in my community theatre work some parents of the young people feel threatened because they might think, Hang on my kids hasn't go time for his homework if he's doing this community play. So someone needs to go and explain to the parents that if their kids do this play it will improve their English because they have to memorise large chunks of text and perform it in a context which is fun, and which speaks to the most important people in their lives at that time - their peers. Another example: a women's theatre group where the husbands of some of the women may feel threatened by their wives participating in a fairly independent project. Community arts is not only concerned with the artwork. The needs and experiences of the participants are as important if not more.

Some artists may find this frightening. How are they supposed to make good art that will impress their critics, their funders, their bevy of adoring fans (I wish). Nothing is more disappointing than entering into a project believing you will get certain outcomes from it and then finding that the needs of others are hijacking these outcomes. Nothing creates more animosity than overruling a group of well-intentioned, eager community participants because you, the artist, haven't thought about how to value their contribution properly.

Politics

This leads me to fairly important point about politics. What happens if you get a group of young people, say, who want to make a play with a strong statement about politics. What if the play says something against the government, or says something against a big corporation that has just built a factory in their town? This is going to stir up the dust in the local area. What do you as the artist/community arts worker do? Do you let them have their say or not? How do you as a group then deal with the resulting publicity? How will you balance between product and process?

For example an arts worker is sent to Vietnam to do a heroin play with young street people. (You are allowed to do heroin plays in Vietnam but not plays about politics) Say something comes up that is related to politics and this upsets the Vietnamese government. The play will probably not get permission from Ministry of Culture and Information to be performed in public.

Will this restriction upset your funders who might wish to get some publicity for their support? Can the play be performed privately to young heroin users?

Ownership

So we need to ask ourselves: How much ownership will the community group have in the process? Are they going to be used as live props on stage to bolster some artist's career? Or will their input be at a more significant level? If it's the first scenario then that's got to be stated clearly at the start to both funders and the community members. Here product is more important than process, which is OK if it's that kind of project and if it is stated clearly from the start.

Sustainability

The last thing I want to raise is the sustainability of the project. I don't see the point of getting artists to an Asian country for a residency to work with a community group on an art form which will just die because it is not relevant to that area. There are physical conditions, historical and cultural conditions, in a specific space, that are going to make one art form sustainable over another.
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The snapshot of FlightPaths is that we've worked across organisations, we've worked in communities, and with a number of different communities. The question, when you look at FlightPaths, that I had to ask is what is a community?.

I've become extremely wary of that word 'community' because it has a tendency to homogenize. It has a tendency to become very romantic and nostalgic. It can bring up these ideas of the harmonious and cooperative and lovely but in fact you know every community has its sense of frictions, tensions, and rivalries.

I also just keep on looking at ' the community' and I see in it communities within communities within communities. A geographical community is made up of multiple communities. I address one section: do I talk to the other? do I then talk about having engaged with 'the community'?. I suppose the role of the artist is very much about how you bring/ can bring together multiple strands, say for example, in a geographical region. How do you access the strands of community and bring them together? FlightPaths was a fantastic thing because for example, in a place like Albany or Wagga Wagga, where we did the writers' workshops, the effect of coming in as an outsider and as an artist was to bring together a whole range of strands of the community that hadn't actually been working together before. So you had people in Wagga, at the Writer's centre, who hadn't worked with the airport, the airport hadn't had an art project happening there. So the Wagga Wagga City Council, the airport, the staff sections (Kendall Airlines for example), wheeled up planes, kids got on it and they taxied them on the runways. There were the tiger moth people. We had local business involved. So it is about art being able to build and strengthen networks and work across communities to strengthen and see what a community is.

There are a couple of other points that I wanted to make. One was about local determination. The absolutely essential thing for FlightPaths is that we worked with local knowledge, local experience, with the networks that shaped the residency, so again I am referring back to the very first stage in the airports. It was essential to be able to work with people, to shape it so that it was about themselves. I came in with an idea: let's use the airport as a physical site, as a symbol, as something to respond to; to look at notions of journeys, displacement. The rest of it was filled out by the people on the ground. I worked with local coordinators. They chose the writers; they worked with the groups; they shaped the outcomes, some people decided to do exhibitions, there were performances but they made it and they owned it.

The question when we talk about local determination and community control and place it into a situation like Indonesia is we are working in a global context where local determination, community control, and a sense of cultural identity are completely political. If I was to go and work in Ambon at the moment as a community cultural development worker using art as a tool of empowerment for that community, then it becomes a political action.
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