CURIOUSWORKS’ THIS CITY IS A BODY
The CuriousWorks folk don’t call it social justice – they call it innovation for everyone. You may not have heard of CuriousWorks – but they’ve probably heard of you, or your suburb, your people, or a story very similar. They’re all about stories. And it’s not just recording those stories, but, according to their mission statement, empowering people to tell their own stories in their own ways, for the long term. And if someone’s got a story to tell, it’s Sydney – a city of ‘tourists’ who are welcomed for decades, displaced locals who’ve belonged for centuries, and many more who fall in the gaps between. We spoke to CuriousWorks’ Shakthi Sivanathan about his documentary project that places itself in conversation with this slippery notion of Sydney …
Where does the name, The City is a Body, come from?
The name references two overlapping ideas. Firstly, there is the idea that we have a more progressive understanding of our bodies than our cities. We instinctively know that I can type to you, listen to music, think, breathe, think about what I will write next, sit, point, look up, etc, all at the same time. All that is something I do; each of the pieces that make me up fit together to form an overall me. But we do not investigate our cities in this way enough. How might a city’s different parts fit together to form a whole? How might it stand up, move, sit down? What would have to happen in the city for it to work as a whole?
Secondly, there is the idea of imagining the city as a body. Where is Sydney’s head, feet, knees and belly? Where are its breasts (we made Sydney a kind of woman)? How might its rivers be seen as its blood lines, it rows of terrace houses sit snugly as it guts? Robin Dixon wrote for the project: “This city is a body, sprawled and slumbering between mountains and ocean…”
These ideas allow us to bring all the different material created for the project together into one framework.
What is uniquely Sydney about this story?
Many cities have cosmopolitan populations. But only in Sydney have all the migrant populations (since 1788) gone so damn far to get here – and that sense of isolation and distance from the homeland persists for all of us, to varying degrees of course. And only in Sydney do we have this wonderful, troubled, amazing relationship between the Indigenous mobs that were the first Sydneysiders and all those who have travelled here since. That exchange is ours to celebrate, challenge and work through alone.
Could this story be told about any city?
Ever flown into a city and seen on the way down all of its houses, cars, roads and lights, the pieces all moving about in a giant jigsaw, and wondered what the hell is going on? This movie rides on the impulse to investigate that a little more.
What does ‘part documentary, part fiction, part other’ mean?
Part of it is documentary of how the project developed – arguments in rehearsals, for example. Part of it is documentary about Sydneysiders – interviews and pictures and so on. Part of it is actual short films or music or dance pieces on film developed for the project. The rest of it is a strange, binding mix of all of this – the narrative that drives the film along. I couldn’t think of a better way to describe the strange beast that is this work.
Debut screening Fri Nov 13, 7-10pm, CuriousWorks Studio, 402/11 Randle St Surry Hills, $15, RSVP essential, migrant@curiousworks.com.au, for more information go to curiousworks.com.au
