creative disorders and hope
Wellington is New Zealand’s capital city, and politics dominates the local talk. While Auckland has three times the population (and the largest Polynesian population of any city, anywhere), it exerts less weight on New Zealand’s cultural policy discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism. However, Wellington is also home to a range of radical groups and counter-discourses agitating to overthrow the system.
It is within this latter community that the gathering ‘Whiteness/Whitemess: Creative Disorders and Hope’ emerged. Organised by visual artist Jack Trolove and theatre practitioner Madeline McNamara (co-founder of Magdalena Aotearoa, a local chapter of the international network of women in contemporary theatre), this ‘creative and critical gathering’ provided a forum for white artists, writers, treaty workers and educators to ask: ‘how through our creative work, can we “see” ourselves and our positionalities in order not to be “neutral” or “passive participants” in conversations around identity and power?’ Held in a suburban school hall, conference fees were optional (‘if you’re flush just now’); and the catering featured organic soup and lentil bake—a self-consciously long way from art gallery glitz, stale academic bureaucracy or the flash insouciance of Auckland’s dynamic urban-commercial inter-ethnic mix.
The critiques of academic whiteness studies are legion: for all its critical approach it provides a haven for useless expressions of white guilt; encourages navel-gazing; and puts white people back in the centre, subtly displacing the attempts of people-of-colour to set the political agenda. Some of the academic presentations were true to form—mired in ‘reflexivity’, oblivious to the impact the work was having on the audience and in the world. On the other hand, a number of the artists seemed to offer an equally ‘critical’ yet far more powerful affective intervention