A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Landscape, Westspace, Melbourne, curated by Ryszard Dabek, 2003

Video Projekt 6, Melbourne, curated by Brendan Lee, 2004

Video Projekt, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Perth, WA, curated by Brendan Lee, 2006

Australian Video Art, 5uper, Museumsquartier, Vienna, Austria, curated by Milenti Pandilovski, 2006

SD video (Mini-dv) 6:06

Territory narrativises scenes surrounding an antiwar rally in Pisa, Italy filmed in 2003. This was one of many such rallies directed against the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq I witnessed throughout Italy where I had been sharing an artist residency in Milan. Generally telling about these protests was their combined casualness and ritualised formality; a fitting solemnity merged with a very public sociality. This sensibility was common to many similar protests around the world at the time. Different here perhaps was the march’s diverse bannering, its incorporation of a multitude of flags readily identifying public groups with the causes to which they were primarily affiliated. These were unions, council bodies, community groups, communist and anarchist affiliates. The visible solidarity of these otherwise crucially differentiated parties, essentially ignored by global governments, was double-edged; on the one hand it proved that significantly different political and social movements could still unite over a cause significant enough. On the other hand it inadvertently demonstrated that in a post-democratic democracy, the voice of the people, unified in a way unseen to this extent for many years, was no obstacle to nationalist corporatist self-interest.