The former Australian embassy in the German Democratic Republic opened under the Whitlam government in 1975 and closed eleven years later in 1986. Diverse narratives converge here in a project that incorporates artworks, texts, a program of events and finally, an effort to resist the full gentrification of the property. Through these means, this abandoned piece of diplomatic infrastructure reveals the battle scars of colonialism, surveillance and gentrification.
Built in a Brutalist style from a modular plan by the architect Horst Bauer, the former embassy was part of a crop of 140 diplomatic buildings erected in the late sixties to mid-seventies by the GDR. With a red clay tennis court, generous balconies, extensive interior wood paneling and decorative mosaic walls, the distinctive features frame both the way the works are presented and the social dynamics of the exhibition.
There is a bureaucratic decadence to the architecture, all the more apparent when one hears the gasps of visiting GDR citizens who were denied such luxuries in their own homes. The conference room also lends itself to an appraisal of how diplomacy is conducted. The phrase ‘swamped by’—regularly used by Australian politicians to refer to those who are unwelcomed by the Australian government, and resurrected in the maiden speech of Pauline Hanson, is the starting point for Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore’s Text (2018). Leather-bound Hansard transcripts from parliament line a large conference table and are available for visitors to leaf through. It is unsettling to encounter speeches from multiple generations of politicians manufacturing fears of invasion and engulfment. ‘Swamped by’ appears in relation to ‘foreigners’, ‘Communists’, ‘Asians’ and also ‘the Aboriginal vote’. A single volume containing the 1967 majority vote to count