AAANZ CONFERENCE

‘Unconscious Demonstrations of Freedom: Children’s Behaviour in Public Places’ can be viewed here.

Dr Sanné Mestrom and Nadia Odlum presented in the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand annual conference, as part of the panel ‘Coaxing chaos: spontaneous demonstrations in contemporary art.’

ABSTRACT

Public spaces in cities influence and shape how we inhabit and move through them. Michel Foucault characterises modernity through a distribution of power, agency and gazes. Public spaces as panoptic regimes of visibility and order can be understood as reinforcing power and domination through their linear spatial organisation, but they can also offer potential sites of resistance and subversion. My research addresses how young children relate to public spaces in cities. Through play, they inhabit and unconsciously subvert the powerful exertions of the public realm in ways that we, as adults, find difficult to anticipate. Quentin Stevens suggests that most movements children make are spontaneous demonstrations of freedom and imagination. Trying to understand how public spaces shape us, by analysing them through the eyes of a child, may give us the tools to ‘fight back’ against the power these spaces exert over us. Drawing on extensive observation of behaviours in public spaces, my research findings suggest that even the most innocuous doorway or gutter can be a site for play, resistance and power. Indeed, my own art practice (public sculpture) explores the way we can embed these unpredictable child-led demonstrations into ways of thinking about public space.