Artist-run spaces, places, projects and initiatives have long been sites of both precarity and impact for the shared professional development of artists; groups, collectives and informal associations, artists together working for artists, for growing audience engagement and for public activation of knowledge about the diversity of contemporary art practices. Here using a polyvocal approach and the re-iterating of ephemera, digital storytelling and resources we share something of Australia’s participatory heritage in the artist-run field since the countercultural 1970s as a small way of tempering, altering, transforming, critiquing and nuancing the official or dominant narratives that have long told the stories of contemporary art, community participation and social histories.

In the popular imagination 1980’s Queensland is often touted as the “Police State” years, a decade of menace during the final leg of an oppressive twenty-year right wing regime. Queensland under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Government was known locally, nationally and internationally for many things, most particularly for its inappropriate police powers and extensive police brutalities, for citizen disappearances, for deaths in custody, for state-sanctioned disavowal of dissent,  disavowal of community consultation and collaboration, for its hubris surrounding truthful media reportage and public accountability, for its gross disregard of civil liberties and human rights, for wrongful imprisonment, for its vehement disregard for refugees, disregard for racial diversity, for transgender politics, for homosexuality, for feminism, for migration, for refugees and perhaps most pernicious of all, for its anti-integration and apartheid policies, its desecration of the social and ecological frameworks that formed the cornerstone of an ancient living aboriginal heritage at the heart of Queensland’s ancient, rich, diverse arts and culture history.

It is during this era that artist-run spaces proliferated as never before, and this living archive we are participating in now is beginning to slowly gather together and share, testimonies, artist interviews, ephemera and resources to map and remix the 1980-Now artist-run scene and to begin to understand something of it’s impact on diversifying the arts ecology we know today.

Website copyright information.

This website contains information, data, documents, pages, photographs, audio, video and images (‘the material’) prepared by the ARI Remix Project which is a collaborative memory and living archives project of Queensland /Australia 1980-NOW artist-run heritage and culture for the purposes of documenting the vibrant, diverse, neglected and under-valued and un-valued DIY collaborations of the region.

• The material is protected by copyright under the Copyright Act (Cth) 1968 [‘the Act’], and is owned by the copyright owners.

• The Material is digitally reproduced and shared from private collections of colleagues, peers, friends, collaborators, individuals and families.

• All Material included is intended for personal use only.

• Please note that the images on this living archives website are not included at their full resolution. For permission to publish or reproduce and for higher resolution files, please contact the project co-ordinator: info[at]remix.org.au

• All due care and consideration is taken with credits and acknowledgements of the Material however, as the Material archives develops, there may be some Material which do not have related data or contextual information or where the rights holder cannot be identified and therefore, possibly an orphan work exists.

• ARI Remix Project minimises orphan works by conducting diligent, good faith searches to ascertain the identity of the copyright owner. If you are the rightful copyright holder of an item and you feel that its use on this website constitutes an infringement of your copyright, please contact the project co-ordinator – info[at]remix.org.au to discuss how to best represent your work.

Kindly include your contact details, provenance details, contextual information, appropriate credits, url links, tags and acknowledgements or if you prefer kindly request for its removal from the archive. Thanks for your interest, enthusiasm and shared passion for helping us redress the blind spot of artist-run heritage in the local global arts and culture canon, thanks for reading, thanks for your care, your attention and for participating, thanks for sharing in the spirit of open-source social and cultural change and digital community engagement and strengthening.