What is an artist supposed to do with all this?

Tina Stefanou, Back Breeding (still), 2023, performance, film stills, wool, on Amangu Country, eight voices and field recordings, John Deere 1986 Tractor, 11:00 mins.

Here are brief segments pulled from fieldnotes that emerged from the beginning of the first two weeks of my fieldwork in the rural town of Carnamah, on Amangu Country in Western Australia. Picture this: the edge of the Wheatbelt, landscapes strewn with monocrops, salt lakes, and those infinite ribbons of flat road stretching into oblivion. I travelled to and from Carnamah from August 2022 to October 2023, under the auspices of a residency program with SPACED and the North Midlands Project.

What has this led to? Artworks, workshops, ephemeral events, writings, friendships, and nascent research initiatives. All leading to and from Agripoet(h)ics, a yet-to-be-published fieldnote series.

The path ahead was shrouded in the unknown, lost in the thick geopolitical grain of a late-stage agribusiness quiet, a small town of four-hundred people. A place where gentrification comes to die for better or for worse, but economies of exchange such as volunteerism can be found in the gaps, like rare wildflowers.

humming

Lots of agri-agro oddities happening, like the local tip. Couches, tracksuits, old telephones, rusted metals, and TVs, you could trace the history of technology, an archaeological site screaming the stupidity of asbestos. It’s too expensive for the council to send the recycling to Perth | Boorloo, so it builds up in local landfill creating mini mountains, sculpting the land into a Mad Max scene.

I’m thinking of a trash orchestra, I’m thinking of all our forgotten things pilling up somewhere.

Back in town, a local writing group, Scribes of the North Midlands, get together at The Exchange (community centre). I attend their meetups, and they share the stories they have been collecting from local community members, farmers, nurses, and army veterans. The group is a smear of generations, and the spectral legacies of the White Australia policy haunt the walls.

We sit around a large wooden coffee table and share some personal writing, with a notebook (no laptops), a pen, and cups of English Breakfast. Reading out loud, the voices and accents around the table vary from retired Anglo-Celtic expats to harder Australiana rural tones. I code-switch out of the too-articulated vowels of the city and relax into the back-body of my migrant purring. All my fight-or-flight academic ventriloquy drops off and my writing-reading turns to deregulated mush, and all I can share is my childhood, my dog, and death.

Back at the tip, I consider that the peculiarities of waste management exist in the city too; it’s just out here with the bareness of the land, the lack of trees or buildings, the ancient saline pools in the distance, a foreboding drought, and the proximity to the town, the tip screams louder.

Operatic carnage that no one seems too bothered by.

Maybe this is because townsfolk regularly visit the tip to see if there’s something they need. One man tells me he found a mechanical part for his truck right next to a series of family portraits, beside some mouldy avocados.

The writing shared at Scribes is an extension of casually thinking-out-loud; it’s very honest, a type of write-speak, where the grain of one’s situatedness is present in story-experience. One member, in his sixties, playfully puts on a cap sideways and performs some slam poetry. His boomy voice bounces off the wheat, into the silos, and back into our bodies enjoying the sensation and earnestness of his rhyming. We cheer.

Positioned between large land holdings, the strangeness of weather, and the tip are humble story dwellers. The grain of the town is the voices that fill it, even if numbers are dwindling—the groups of unpaid volunteers who give their time to one another, creating spaces for building relations and passing the slow time of the ungentrified.

I notice there is no singing group; perhaps starting one is a way to be here, humming with nervous systems that agribusiness renders mute.

Will anybody come?