2019Cosmopolitan

Organised by Rafaela Pandolfini with Jana Hawkins-Andersen

Over seven days and four nights of live events, the Cosmopolitan exhibition program brought together artists, writers and collectives from Australia, Aotearoa, China, the USA and France, speaking to 'the social' in relationship to world-making, centres and peripheries. Taking place at The Drill Hall in Darling Point, Sydney a former site of Navy use and administration for much of the twentieth century, and overlooking Sydney's famous harbour, Cosmopolitan includes artists who, together, address our changing relationship to the divisions and interconnections between contentious notions of the local and the global. Subcultural aesthetics and expressions of community pushed up against the logic of globalisation.

Cosmopolitanism is a concept that has a number of usages/deployments. Etymologically it is derived from the Ancient Greek: κοσμοπολίτης, or kosmopolitês, formed from "κόσμος", kosmos, i.e. "world", "universe", or "cosmos", and πολίτης, "politês", i.e. "citizen" or "[one] of a city".  At the centre of cosmopolitanism is the notion that all individuals, regardless of socio-political affiliation, are members of a universal and singular community. As such, we are challenged to detach from more localised, parochial, discrete and exclusive forms of socio-political organisation - nation state, ethnicity, religion etc - in exchange for wide, all-encompassing modes of global-being. We are to echoe with 4th century BCE cynic Diogenes, “I am a citizen of the world”
Lukiah Bodley, The Cosmopolitan, 2019

THE GREEN ROOM
Spencer Lai (AU)

hippies enter through the side door to the bazaar

a curated show with
Alethea Everard
Ander Rennick
George Egerton-Waburton
Hana Earles
Jessie Kiely
Joe Speier
Nik Lee
Samraing Chea
Sorawit Songstaya

George Egerton-Warburton appeared courtesy of Sutton Gallery Melbourne
Samraing Chea appeared courtesy of Arts Project Australia

Even though I have never been here before, the bay and this area reminds me of boring obscenities, fantasies you hear on television, in movies: I never experienced like handjobs under piers I never gave, pairs of underwear and greasy groceries I never stole.

That evening, I dream about being an adolescent teenage girl. More accurately: I dream about the embodiment of a young person during their formative years.

In the dream I make friends, listen to music. I rebel against my parents, who are conveniently represented in my dream as two shadowy, undefined figures. I lie in bed and kick and cry and scream into my pillow. No one understands me, and if only there were other people like me out there, we could be friends.

We could share similar interests in another city. We share each other's clothes and exchange information to one another. And if there is no one else left in this world: so be it. I smile to my friend in the dream and I am sure we will continue this friendship over many years. This scenario could take place in the 1950s through to contemporary times. The clothes, music and environment changes only slightly, incrementally different each year -- such is the passage of time.

The large doors swing outwards, as hippies are asked to use the side door to enter the bazaar.

Spencer Lai

https://suite7a.bigcartel.com/product/cosmopolitan-publication

Inspiration for Cosmopolitan Ainslie Templeton

- there I was at a bbq at the ambassador’s house
- omg I was at the ambassador’s house too..
- I know you were at the ambassador’s house bitch I saw you there
theory
maps as the forgotten metaphor
you know I’m
so jaded about this
reading
de Sousa Santos on laws as maps
carving out a space for interpretation via:
scale of parts
abstraction of symbols
projection of features

an event that happens now
with multiple competing jurisdictions

the misreading of social territories

(in London where I am now)

what is a meridian?
pin points

you know, my acupuncturist Alistair
has a voice like a split oak

embraces me, rolls me, twists me
covers me in needles

a squeeze on my uncovered forearm:
“I’m just going to let you bake for a bit”
he leaves,
my conducted basement FLOODS

the equator tipping
I don’t know how he knows,
but he knows

bearded fish surface in the corner of the image
a truly accurate map would be a giant one
one that covers the very territories it claims to represent

hell with all its rings and rings of Italians et al

change temp colour
contour, maybe valence

S becomes J
obelisk becomes pinprick
buffalo heaving through the creek

Latour: common cosmopolitical concern of climate change

all these plane crashes
the terrible flooding

jaded
misreading social territories
listening to fkn BBC radio
interview an academic

while Alistair has a wank in the toilets or something
(I wish)

thematics

multiculturalism being the probsi policy of Australian cities
cosmopolitanism being the denial policy of London
haven’t there been other words for these relations?

cosmo questions:
how do you feel on a long plane?

where’s home?
what connections transnationally? like mirrored selves, joining hands
over a cosmopolitan

Carrie in Dubai bitch

all the gorgeous and diverse hookers in Dubai;
oil barons’ nephews; colonial schoolteachers; fashionovas husband hunting;
baklas at DK sending money home; ski instructors; vampiric estate agents;
passport-confiscated workers; Michael Schumacher; tragic lifestyle Brits;
maids; spies; thrill seekers over from Saudi; etc.

gossip as process
disappeared journalists
baseless “Australian” subject position
Burj-al-Arab selfie
peach brunch

BBC News transition graphic to:

Documenta’s headquarters get firebombed in Exarchia lol
you’re asked to do this show
interview even triplecanopy won’t publish

BBC News transition graphic to:
white feminist curator desperate to salvage cunts
as a framework for womanhood
instead turns to nipples as a strong connective symbol
of femininity

“nipples are. democratic!
they have the largest iconic reach as dichotomized targets
steeped in affect
my cosmopolitan nipples”

munch munch
I’m a teen mutant eating Korma in my 2nd floor nightmare flat

“like you don’t even have to be on hormones?
no augmentation necessary? always round?”

5318008
skates across the bottom of the screen

we get back to fertility headliners
gestational feeding

sensation of cashew milk moving down your throat
into your stomach

but it’s a creepy
injection of FSH
before egg harvesting

wet dream wakeup sweat
yearning but not yet hungry
just thirsty

therapy
task: write something not about your body
response: an essay on 13 looks you got today

the chill people I want to tap the glass
make sure they’re working

silence, shadow

future
blink to some portal
the eyelid comes down like whoosh
a second time whoosh

and you see it
provincial ways of being
creative beautiful people
drinking, smoking

task: write on the affect of this--
old Manila friend’s Onlyfans you linked up and watched eachother weirdly
--not a diary-

found a client’s art site, it’s pixelated spreads of what could be your open arse
--and I’ll give you $100,000 you might be able to blow in Spain.

I really miss my friends
and get a thrill to see someone like myself on Instagram

birds and snakes which live in the city
the cynical ghost shell info wisping from the train station
it’s confession time

commission for a perfect interior
a closet full of carapace corsets
a saxophone in the ebbing wind
two men walk on and hi-five, not so poetic

task: 3 yrs later you return to the Imperial capital to starve out a residency and
marry up
this round life just thematics?

I’ve been to paradise but
there’s still this random pulling over on the main road
and frenetically gesturing for me to get in…

trains, planes, ships
(I like the way you move your hips)

mummy getting upgraded
mummy’s special holiday
mummy’s piggy bank

doesn’t know when she’ll drink real champagne again
through the tears

task: 16yr old Danni in Bulgaria with a Guess model heiress, 4 guys and a
magnum of Moet
the items just pouring
through the doors of the incubator
housing Alistair’s acu/IVF studio

he comes back
tells me he’s taken a short round trip to his farm in Tasmania in the interval

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