Bordertown: LILY HIBBERD
Bordertown is a study in conflict, social partition and border construction in Australia. This sound installation relates the story of two women who live in Bordertown, a community sited at the frontier of two Australian states. One woman has been dispatched as migrant labour to an internment camp on the outskirts of Bordertown; the other is an angry and disenfranchised young woman from the poorest part of town. Both are witness to escalating antagonism and the social exclusion of women and other minorities in the town. For those living in Bordertown, existence consists of daily confrontations with an impassable frontier, a wall being constructed along the border. It is a place renowned for its political and geographic conflicts as a town that straddles two states. As global politics and militarisation trickle down into everyday life they are evident in personal relations, and Australia’s brutal history pierces the present in language and architectural structures that defend and divide. While conflict and aggressive human engagement are inevitable, the divisions are fuelled by political elites as this maintains the structure of the dominant culture. Yet borders are not substantiated in mountains, rivers or walls but the people they separate. As the women in the story of Bordertown resist their subjugation, situations of direct conflict with authority arise. Through a series of assertions their vulnerability is transformed into solidarity through aggressive expressions of courage and resistance.
Exhibition: 8 February – 1 March 2008
ARTSPACE 43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia
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