Extra-interior

Abstract

This article responds to the challenges facing creative practitioners whose work engages with aspects of ‘public’ provoked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The temporary physical closures of established creative infrastructures such as galleries, museums and festivals have disrupted the traditional dynamics of production and reception. This presents both challenges and opportunities for artists and designers to develop new forms of creative engagement with public audiences and spaces. The confinement of people to a 5-kilometre radius during extended lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 prompted a reflection on the opportunities of the ‘local’ as a particular context for creative practice. This restriction imposed a perimeter that brought people’s day- to-day lives into an enclosed loop and produced what could be thought of as a form of interior. In this period, ordinary domestic and local spaces — for example the home office or studio gained manifold functions for many creative practitioners, including as a space for self- initiated public presentations of their work. In several cases, windows, balconies, and doorways became thresholds for interaction with passers-by. This self-broadcasting situation provided an opportunity for practitioners to play an active role in cultivating new relations and forms of publicity from a localised setting. In this article, these shifts in practice are investigated through a critical reflection on a series of spatial interventions within a street-facing window of a studio space in Brunswick, Melbourne, an inner-city suburb where residential streets mix with spaces of industrial and creative production. The liminal space of the window became a way to speculate on the concept of thresholds between diverse conditions, including public and private, art and the everyday, urban and local, and interior and exterior. These investigations engaged with a ‘makeshift’ mode of practice, leading to the production of extra-ordinary interior conditions.