pvi collective
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t e k r a m k c la
pvi collective BLACKMARKET
This catalogue was published to accompany blackmarket by pvi collective presented by Performance Space in association with Alaska Projects, 27 May – 6 June, 2015. Published by Performance Space 245 Wilson St Eveleigh, NSW 2015 www.performancespace.com.au Contributors: Jeff Khan, Rebecca Conroy, Tulleah Pearce and pvi collective Design: Sanja Simic Photography: James Brown Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and activist based in Sydney. Jeff Khan is the Artistic Director of Performance Space. Tulleah Pearce is the Associate Curator of Performance Space. pvi collective are a tactical media group based in Perth. www.pvicollective.com Š Performance Space, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Carriageworks and Performance Space.
contents foreword jeff khan
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the blackmarket experience tulleah pearce
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the dark matter of black markets rebecca conroy
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blackmarket statistics 22 blackmarket credits 24 performance space staff 25
we believe its time to take proactive measures. we need to create a new value system and in order to do this, we have to reject the old. this may make you feel powerless and confused at first, but you will gradually become resilient and begin to discover your true worth.
foreword jeff khan
performance in Australia. I am always awed by pvi’s ability to create work as blackly humorous as it is culturally urgent. pvi’s work engages audiences in discussion and debate about the most pressing issues of our time, never letting go of the brilliant artistry and imagination that lies at the core of their practice.
In May 2015, as the streets of Sydney slowly surrendered to the chill of winter, Performance Space presented the world premiere of blackmarket by pvi collective. Addressing the impending financial meltdown that governments worldwide are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to forestall, blackmarket dared to imagine a likely future, and to place audiences within it to fend for themselves.
blackmarket is a pivotal project in Performance Space’s site-specific program in 2015 – an area of artistic practice we are deeply committed to and continue to champion. Our sincere thanks are due to pvi collective for their ingenuity, tenacity, and generous spirit in what has been another brilliant collaboration between our organisations.
blackmarket is pvi collective’s most ambitious work to date, articulating a complex conceptual world that is played out through an equally intricate network of performers, participants and technology. Performance Space is proud to have commissioned and premiered this work, building on our ongoing relationship with pvi collective: artists who are truly at the forefront of sociallyand technologically-engaged
Alaska Projects have been critically important partners in presenting this work and we are very grateful for their generosity and collegiality
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throughout the season. Rebecca Conroy has written an insightful and thought-provoking essay to expand on blackmarket’s themes, published here for the first time. This publication has been designed to reflect on blackmarket and provide further insight into this challenging and important project. Our final thanks are due to our brave and adventurous audiences who, through inhabiting the world of blackmarket for 90 minutes in its premiere season, played a pivotal role in creating the work.
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it’s time to enact the history of the future. on the mental count of one, the hustling begins. at the count of one you are a hustler. ‌one.
the blackmarket experience tulleah pearce
let us tell you this. your secret suspicions are true… we are on a collision course for a social, environmental and economic meltdown the likes of which has never been seen before. the party is nearly over.
Your number is called and you exit the room, approaching a makeshift counter where members of pvi collective request your items, then appraise and catalogue them. The possessions are bundled into a basket on the ‘stockmarket trading floor’, and uploaded into the app that runs the black market. You are given a smartphone with headphones and some brisk instructions that direct you out of the car park and onto the winter evening streets of Kings Cross. As you ascend the stairs, that voice from the induction room begins to speak slowly into your ear…
These are the opening words of blackmarket by pvi collective, spoken to the audience in a gritty induction room 3-storeys underground in a public carpark. They – the audience – are patiently waiting to offer up five items to barter in a game of survival that will stretch their instincts and comfort zones over the next 90 minutes.
keep moving hustler, i am going to count slowly from ten to one. with every word and every number you will feel a sickening sense of inevitability. your life as it is now will fade and your future self will slowly come into focus.
The tone is matter-of-fact and its directness delivers you straight into the premise of work; financial collapse has occurred, society has broken down and you need help from pvi’s traders to navigate this brave new world.
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The game begins. Your device goes live on the black market and a list of services is presented to you. This is the time to think carefully about the value of exchange: will you barter a chocolate bar for shelter, or antiseptic cream for camouflage, or even some tomato seeds for courage? You select ‘stimulants’ and offer up your shampoo, after a few moments the trader accepts your offer. A map is shown on the screen of your device with the shortest route between you and the rendezvous point. As you begin your walk a soundscape guides your journey, with clips from news reports on the effects of drugs, merging with chocolate bar jingles and documentary audio on the origins of the cacao bean. Your interest is piqued and you are driven onward by curiosity and nerves as your icon slowly approaches that of your trader on the map. You look up from the screen, cross the street and see a darkened figure leaning in a doorway.
subterranean bathroom before locking you both into one of the cubicles. That same voice begins to whisper in your ear as the trader unpacks a lucite catapult and loads it up with cacao powder. You are instructed to position your nose over it and inhale deeply on the count of three. 3 – 2 – 1: a sharp hit of chocolate enters your airways and a rush of euphoria runs through your body. As your trader rubs the remnants into their gums, the voice in your ear continues to whisper… hold on to this sensation. your brain has now forged a link between this smell and a ‘feel good’ memory. wouldn’t it be good if you could trigger this memory when ever you need a quick fix? The trader grabs your hand, pulls you out of the bathroom, up the stairs out onto the street and into a public square. Your head is rushing and they are giggling. You are taken to a still spot, behind a wall where you are secluded from the bustle of the world around you. You are instructed to close your eyes think back the cacao-driven euphoria of a few moments ago; you breathe in and can still feel its tingle through your body. The link is set, the service is over, you
The trader nods as you approach, shakes your hand and touches their device to yours, triggering the service to begin. She takes your hand and leads you around the corner and through a door, down some stairs and into a
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open your eyes the trader is gone, its time to move on. You take out your device, look at the menu and select your next trade…
underprepared you would be to survive a total economic collapse, as well as the little you do day-today to reverse the warnings being heralded in the headlines. It is these sobering facts pvi collective are committed to communicating, hoping that each individual’s experience will cause them to reflect on the way they live and begin to realise the precarious nature of life under late-capitalism, and perhaps even begin to change...
This was just one interaction of many. There are pvi traders strewn across the inner-city streets of Kings Cross camouflaged among the dog walkers, backpackers and late-night revelers each with a particular ‘survival technique’ to impart. As the evening wears on and your resources are depleted, you are forced to make more considered decisions. Eventually you ‘trade up’ and are given your own skill to impart to other hustlers in the black market to slowly recoup some goods for barter. Back at pvi headquarters ‘the stock market’ is in full swing, the physical items that propel the game are moved between baskets tracking exchanges being made in real time. The economy being created out on the streets is real, services are in demand and you are at the mercy of the market. The world that pvi collective create for blackmarket is exhilarating, wryly humorous, shot through with a dark vein of reality. As you play blackmarket, the stark reality of your dependence on the fragile market economy begins to reveal itself and you realize how woefully
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the dark matter of black markets rebecca conroy
We have arrived at the age of perpetual doom and gloom, as the boom and bust cycle of the economy plays out like an endless perverse sit-com. In the background, the hum of crisis narratives merges with ‘disaster porn’ to generate an immense and spectacular wall of inertia.
what is known in the underworlds as System D: a term derived from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean, which stands for l’economie de la débrouillardise. System D refers to any off-thebooks unlicensed activity that makes money—it can range from a plumber who gets paid in cash for a quick job to a drug deal to kids selling lemonade on the footpath. These are part of the ‘shadow economy’: the illegal, or unreported, or unrecorded, or informal transactions that elude formal taxation.
Moreover, these feelings of powerlessness are reified by conventional science, which states the best we can hope for now is to simply mitigate the worst effects of climate change. And even this will be a complete disaster for most developing and small island nations. How then, can we talk about economy? What will the economy do in the apocalypse? Is this an opportunity in crisis—or a crisis in opportunity?
This underground economy has loads of sex appeal; it strikes a naughty chord and promises insider knowledge of the kind that marks you out as the chosen ones, the ones who know. To engage in the black market or the underground is easily recuperated into a subversive lifestyle narrative, which belies the ‘othering’ of the world that forces two thirds of the worlds
The idea of a black market conjures up scintillating images of the secret and alluring. As a concept the black market ties into
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obsession, which is perhaps not too dissimilar to the media’s obsession with catastrophe headlines.
population into undemocratic and often violent spaces of coercion and survivalism. Among many bleak examples: human trafficking, child pornography, or the flourishing of illegal recycling trade of EU electronic goods to Africa, containing toxic substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and flame retardants.
There is something in the kind of emotion generated by disaster narratives; that an anonymous mass of humanity from the privileged first world can reach out to the victims of a natural disaster in the ‘other’ world, with offers of material and financial aid. Is this a symptom of the kind of authentic compassion and relationships that are no longer possible in an political economy that measures and divides along income and earning capacity, telling everyone to have a go whilst ignoring the very unequal playing field that shapes these relationships and demands a price for absolutely everything?
Ideas around survivalism prompted some of the early thinking around pvi collective’s new work blackmarket. In particular, pvi founding artists Steve Bull and Kelli McCluskey considered the ‘preppers movement’ alongside a rising panic culture common to many of the disaster narratives shaping the polarised debate on climate change/deniers. The ‘preppers’, as they are known in the United States and the UK, is a term that gained greater prominence post September 11, but is bound up in a Survivalist movement of individuals and groups that goes back to the 1930s. Global events such as the threat of nuclear war, financial systems collapse, the Y2K Bug, or the mass shootings Sandy Hook, have all served as triggers for the rebuilding and resurgence of the movement in various guises.
It may be partially true that for any exchange there must be a price. You pay for love in one way or the other. And disasters really do bring people together; at its most perverse people feel good in return for donating, giving rise to such phenomena as the ‘compassion industry’. But the fear of economic collapse drives the narrative of austerity whilst masking its real intention of shifting greater amounts of wealth into the hands of fewer corporate entities and a tiny coterie of obscenely wealthy individuals. Conversely it masks a potentially liberating starting point from which the human could re-engineer what is a completely
Steve and Kelli were veritably titillated when they discovered an entire literary genre of doomsday porn: People perversely attracted to the idea of collapse—preppers—who yearn for it to the point of
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insane system predicated on unlimited growth and ecological collapse.
most neo-classical economic theory. Whilst acknowledging that neither of them are experts, it didn’t seem like rocket science to either of them to recognise that “the system is broken”.
The absurdities bound up in the fear of economic collapse reach peak irony as governments bail out banks but leave the planet to defend itself. Throwing market solutions to a crisis situation is a logic better suited to the gun lobby, which argues that making more guns available will help stop people dying from gun violence.
Kelli: We all know that it’s not working; the system is broken and current dominant economic theories do not align with most of our lives. It has to change. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect to the economy is that despite the very obvious fact that the system is broken, people continue to act as if it is not. This could possibly make the economy the world’s biggest theatrical outfit and longest durational performance piece. Considering what power there is in performance’s ability to convince you something is not what it is; to suspend their disbelief— the gig called economics might be running the biggest theatre show in town. How did we arrive at this paucity of political economic theory? Why is the only gig going in town the one that makes everything look the same in order to achieve market share and then talk about point of difference in a desperate attempt to destroy the competitor?
Working with/in the economy I was curious to know how Steve and Kelli initially approached making a work about the economy, Kelli admits it sounds rather dry and not very interesting. As if to prove this, Steve describes how their first encounter making the work with a consulting economist did indeed result in a work that was ‘artistically bland’. Moving on from their previous work deviator in 2012—where audiences were agents charged with activating the city using a combination of games and live performance interventions —pvi realised their audiences were up for so much more engagement, and became more interested to step back and really allow the audience to take the lead as participants in creating the work.
Post-Economics Economists
Both the global phenomena of Occupy movements and the rise of alternative currencies became a source of interest for Kelli and Steve in developing and collating ideas that were in opposition to
In their search for more diverse economic voices Steve and Kelli came across Sacred Economics written by Charles Eisenstein whose work deals with, among
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we decided we wanted to start there.
other things, a post-currency future where people can do things for each other outside of a monetary economy.
Kelli: This started us thinking about all of the things we were going to need in such a situation, and the kinds of experiences we crave: will we need to relearn compassion, will we still need romance when the shit hits the fan? And what services can we provide in our little black market economy that will encourage people to get rid of their stuff and preference these experiences that perhaps might in some small way equip them to survive when the economy collapses in modern- day Australia?
Kelli: This started us on the path and proposition for a world that could exist post- growth and post-capitalism, in a way returning to a gift economy that got us thinking about our relationship with our audience and the provision of a service in exchange for an object; the journey of the audience is to relinquish their objects and their crap and in exchange we provide them with a service or an experience that endures. blackmarket also presents a rehearsal situation that allows participants to practice letting go of their stuff; for allowing things to fall apart, enough to enable a different way of thinking and doing to emerge. Kelli refers to recent economic collapses around the world—Argentina in 2001, Iceland in 2008, and more recently European Union states such as Greece.
The art of role-play or use of mimetic strategies is a core component of the pvi collective experience. Using the art frame as a license for the audience to gain access to the kinds of experiences and roles not conventionally available to them, enables the audienceparticipant to play out the kinds of fantasies that trouble the boundary of illegal or legitimate behaviour and activities. Kelli and Steve both agree however that this is something that has both limited what is possible and expanded their art practice, challenging them to invent more creative strategies to circumvent permissions and rules without actually breaking the law or putting their audiences in danger. Steve explains there are two types of interventions applied: the ones they clearly get a permit
Kelli: In Iceland they had a proper revolution and nobody even seemed to notice. I mean the banks were put on trial, it was amazing, and then on the grassroots level the economy, the black market, flourished as people adapted and innovated. Steve: This was a significant trigger for the work because we went ‘wow this black market economy is real’ and
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for and then the other which is conducted as an experiment and usually results in a one-off event rather than a ten night season.
and wondering whether you walk home after experiencing the show, and maybe there is a tiny fraction of a tiny glimmer of questioning these things for yourself, may be all the work does—but that could be enough.
Kelli agrees: This is where pvi have needed to become very savvy because we do need to come back to those spaces again and again, and this is also where the audio has become really key, because you can really heighten the situation if you are immersed in the audio. You may be wandering around a perfectly innocuous safe area of Sydney, but you can make the audience feel very very different about its relative safety.
Numbers and figures on spreadsheets may not be all that sexy but they can be terrifying— like the $27 billion in tax that wasn’t paid last financial year by the top 55 companies in Australia because of their ability to navigate complicated tax loopholes. Or other devastating figures like the $300 million that has been slashed from women’s shelters compared to the $240 million that was allocated to fund a chaplains program for schools. And most recently, the announcement by Arts Minster George Brandis to shift $105 million from the Australia Council to a new national program aimed at fostering “excellence in the arts” at the Minister’s discretion.
The situations created through the performance set up the audience to make decisions that test their value systems and require them to give some things up in exchange for others. It tests the audiences’ generosity to their fellow human and their ability to continue operating in the marketplace. As a large-scale social experiment blackmarket is consistent with the suite of pvi’s work, now approaching its 17th year creating bold new contemporary works. Steve and Kelli continue to be inspired and motivated by the impossible acts of resistance that make transformation possible through art; including the smallest gestures.
How we decide on the distribution of funds and what we decide is of value may be dry material coming from the mouthpiece of governments, but in the hands of pvi it becomes a rich site for playful experimentation. And perhaps the experiment may just yield some new ideas and possibilities for a postcatastrophe world where knowing the true value of something can be expressed without costing the earth.
Kelli: Can economic policy and economic modelling work without the concept of growth? Just posing these questions
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your hustler needs to relieve their pent up sexual libido, and you are going to help them. make eye contact with your hustler, now wink at them and smile. you are going to be objectified.
blackmarket stats
Number of trades: 1371 Most popular service: Courage, Stimulants, Weaponry, Porn Average survival rating: 26%
pvi collective’s blackmarket credits sydney blackmarketeers aaron manhatton, harriet gillies, kate jane, julie vulcan, loren kronemyer, julian woods, liesel zink, dale collier, scarlett o claire and leah shelton devised by pvi collective – kelli mccluskey & steve bull with steve berrick, chris williams and loren kronemyer produced by kate neylon sound pieces by jason sweeney voice overs by kate neylon and roly skender economic consultancy by michael chappell designed by chris nixon induction video by sam price pvi special ops finn o’branagain development and programming by steve berrick technical consultancy by chris mccormick special thanks to the city of sydney, alaska projects, jeff [special guest] khan, tanja farman, tulleah pearce, jimmy holley, aaron clarke, john byrne, sanja simic, nathan gilham and all at performance space. michele fairbairn & lukus robbins [adhocracy festival local artists creative team] and our binstallation experts including terry rankmore, ryonen butcher and robert. 24
performance space staff Performance Space is a cultural agency that facilitates new artistic projects and connects them with audiences across many different sites and venues: from theatres and galleries to non-traditional spaces and sitespecific projects. The company champions work that takes creative risks, experiments with art forms and creates transformative and captivating new experiences for audiences. Performance Space is a resident company at Carriageworks, Sydney’s home for contemporary arts. Artistic Director Jeff Khan
Associate Producer Skye Kunstelj
Executive Director Terese Casu
Marketing & Communications Manager Sanja Simic
Producer Tanja Farman
Development & Membership Manager Karla Tatterson
Production Manager John Byrne Technical Manager Aaron Clarke
Administration & Ticketing Coordinator Ashleigh Garwood
Associate Curator Tulleah Pearce
Finance Officer Rhanda Mansour
blackmarket supporters ALASKA 25
pvi collectiv e
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www.performancespace.com.au