Hawke Research Institute
This in an exhibition with a difference that challenges those who put it together and those who view it. It did not begin in the usual way with an idea and the collection of objects. It is a collection of images and text that arose from a research project undertaken by University of South Australia researchers in partnership with the Migration Museum, the Social Inclusion Unit (Dept of the Premier and Cabinet) and the Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Training. It was supported by the Australian Research Council through its Linkage Grants program. Collaborative research projects such as this seek to connect researchers to those developing policies and programs and the wider public by making known their results so that a larger group might benefit.
It is in this spirit that Hope: the utopian imagination of young people on the margins is offered. The essay in this catalogue explores the wider intellectual context and meaning of this project. Here we set out the more immediate challenges faced by researchers and curators alike as we developed this new approach. Complicating the task was the the researchers’ decision to work with young people generally considered to be on the margins of social life in South Australia. They are not the young people gracing the pages of the press as academic prize winners or sporting heroes. Some might appear in police reports, others in statistics deploring the fact that not enough young people complete their secondary schooling, still others in concerned accounts of teenage pregnancy or drug use.
While some depict them as on the social and economic margins, they are fully central to their own lives and milieus. They were also full participants in the research, taking photographs, imagining futures and speaking with us about their hopes. In this sense they fit the brief of the Migration Museum. In presenting the stories of migration and settlement, the Migration Museum grapples with the business of presenting the complexities of Australia’s cultural diversity, developed through the arrival of frequent waves of immigrants and refugees. Whilst cultural diversity might describe the larger narrative, the individual stories focus on the cultural origins and identity of individuals and communities. At the Museum there is an acceptance that cultural diversity and identity is both complex and many layered. The Hope exhibition offers a focus on age and class in presenting the views of young people whose opinions are rarely sought and usually do not find their way into museum displays.
When curators put an exhibition together it is often through objects that personal stories are told. They frequently return to the people interviewed. The story may change as people see their words and images represented. Hope however, came as a completed research project. While the Museum had a presence on the reference committee for the project, it relied on the University’s research team to gather the material that would become the exhibition. The team brought this information to the Museum in the form of academic reports, quotes from the young people, photographs, drawings, and transcripts of interviews the young people took part in.
The young people who took part in the research project were frequently transient, and often difficult to contact to check text or presentation. This might have led to an exhibition that was filtered through a heavy academic lens as well as a curatorial one. Through the strength of the content produced by the young people themselves, and the commitment of the research team to ensuring the young people’s voices are heard, the exhibition, we believe, has stayed true to its intent – to enable young people from the margins to present their own perspective on an imagining of their future.
A research project involving young people whose behaviours confront the mainstream, indeed at times challenge legal boundaries, necessarily evokes a duty of care on our part and as such we have guaranteed anonymity or masked a participant’s identity wherever possible. We have consulted widely on these matters, with legal advisors, with South Australia Police and with representatives of the Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia. We hope that viewers of this exhibition will leave feeling challenged and with an understanding of the different and often difficult lives of some young people. We also seek to evoke hope in viewers, an understanding that while some young people seek pleasure in transgressive activities, they also desire futures common to us all: a secure job, loving and friendly relationships, the sense of home and family, a sense of play – and fun.
Alison Mackinnon, Viv Szekeres, Catherine Manning and Simon Robb.
