Hi, I'm Helen Vivian, I'm curator of Mildura Palimpsest No. 8 and we've just had the symposium
this morning which is an art science symposium and one of those unusual events when artists
and scientists talk to each other, a feature of Palimpsest.
This is Mildura Palimpsest No. 8, it's been going for 12 years. Palimpsest is a regional
art, visual art, Biennale. It's an event where we bring artists from all over Australia
and internationally to this region and they make work about the region in response to
the cultural and natural environment. It's site specific work and that's what makes
it quite unique and different because the artists are engaging with the place, they're
not bringing work that they've made somewhere else to here, they're making it right here
and about here.
We've been doing this since the very beginning of Palimpsest, developing a dialogue between
artists and scientists we think is very important. People tend to divide knowledge and understanding
into boxes and you have the political box, the economic box, the scientific box, the
religious box and the artists vision is a kind of separate box and we believe right
from the start that it's incredibly important to break that down and to look at the natural
and cultural environment in a much broader sense which is what artists tend to do naturally
anyway. When we first did our first art science collaboration, we discovered that actually
artists and scientists have a lot more in common than we had anticipated because scientists
also take a problem and try and find the truth of it. They're always asking questions and
always looking at the world that they're in, the natural world or the universe and trying
to come up with answers to very deep and probing questions. So we found that there was just
a fantastic symbiosis and that the opportunities for this conversation don't happen very often
so we decided to go ahead and make it a regular feature of Palmpsest.
They're usually considered polar opposites, aren't they, artists and scientists? I think
that there are huge differences. Science has authority, a kind of authority that perhaps
art doesn't have and doesn't seek to have and that's probably quite an important difference
but they are both very educated populations, artists and scientists highly educated and
they're interrogating their environment all the time. So there are many connections but
I think the key thing is to get people talking outside of these boxes that if you have silos
of information that are never exchanged then things just don't progress and develop our
understanding of the world. When you have fabulous intellectuals like Paul Carter who
can go right across history and time and geography and culture and bring things together then
you get this spark of inspiration that I think is just fantastic and that's what we try to
do here is bring people together into this region to really look at and investigate this
region and respond to this region and make sure that the conversation is not just between
artists but make sure that that conversation is as big as we can make it and includes cross
disciplinary and cross cultural because this is a very important cultural site, Milgera.
It's been the site of an immense amount of immigration. There's a very important and
large Italian community here but there's lots of recent immigrants from many, many nations
but it is of course one of the most important indigenous sites as well like Mungo obviously
which people know about but there's also been a number of really very famous atrocities
in this region too so the indigenous history of this area and the living indigenous culture
of this area is really important as well.
