City council archives as spaces of artistic intervention: critiquing the practice of painting street infrastructure in Heritage green

Abstract

This thesis presents my artistic engagement with the city council records in Brisbane, Parramatta, and Sydney that pertain to the practice of painting street infrastructure in Heritage green. My artworks are produced by officially inserting a historical text and photography-based document into each of these archives as a means of participating in and critiquing the institutional structure of the archive. The practice of painting street infrastructure in Heritage green is a legacy of the colonial project within Australia that continues to support the ordering of the landscape. I discovered that current city council records of this practice are minimally descriptive, which indicates the obfuscation of the practice as one that supports an infrastructure of ongoing colonial violence. Research in the field of infrastructure studies shaped my engagement with these council records. By historically contextualising the parameters of the painting practice, I uncovered that colonial codes and ideologies (infrastructure space) influence it. Properly accounting for the infrastructure space inherent in these parameters activates the potential decolonisation of the practice. Research into forms of colonial mimicry shaped the performative ways I produced and archived my documents in response to the city council as the authority of this colonial infrastructure painting practice. The mimicry process allowed my documents to be assimilated into these collections of mostly “apolitical” and “bureaucratic” documents. Simultaneously, by functioning as critical artworks, my documents undermine the city council’s practices of record keeping and curation. The documents I have placed into the council archives activate a set of relations between the viewer/reader who engages with them, the documents, the council archives, and the proximate street infrastructure; thus, my works are site-specific installations. By utilising the city council archive’s system of disseminating information, my installations aim to highlight to a range of audiences the colonial violence inherent in the practice of painting street infrastructure in Heritage green.