As part of the South Project Gathering happening in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in October 2009, the Agents of Proximity are developing a new project exploring travel, tourism, leisure and the relationships of power and exchange which these things generate. This site is intended to act as an online project diary and - with one of us in Yogyakarta and the other back in Melbourne - a way of talking to each other, and to anyone else who wants to be part of the exchange.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The project so far...
Our collaboration began in late 2006, emerging out of a year of chats over coffee, and cigarettes smoked together out of the kitchen window in the share-house where we both lived. One of us had a background in photography and fine art, the other in academia and activism. Both of us had moved to Melbourne from other cities, and were in that messy, slightly bewildering process of trying to put down roots. It was this, perhaps, that first stimulated our ramblings about place and change and urban neighborhoods. Then we started talking about travel, and then about participatory arts practice, and then about the inadequacy of disciplinary boundaries. And somehow, out of all of that, we ended up in a Brunswick coin laundry dressed as 1950s air hostesses…
“Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974
Agents of Proximity is a collaboration which began in 2006 between Melbourne-based artists Amy Spiers and Victoria Stead. We use text, photography, performance and public intervention to try and make art that is socially engaged, curious and critical. We like collaborative practices, collusions and participation. We are interested in the relationships between people, and between people and places. We don’t like disciplinary boundaries or taking ourselves too seriously.
You can find out more about the project we ran in Melbourne from 2006-2008, at www.agentsofproximity.org
Our collaboration began in late 2006, emerging out of a year of chats over coffee, and cigarettes smoked together out of the kitchen window in the share-house where we both lived. One of us had a background in photography and fine art, the other in academia and activism. Both of us had moved to 
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