ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

TASWEGIANmateriality acknowledges that Lutruwita’s sovereignty was never ceded and we pay respect to the Palawa and Pakana people as the traditional and original owners, and continuing custodians of this land upon which we gather. We acknowledge Elders – past, present and all of Lutruwita’s Aboriginal people.

A SPECULATIVE 21st C ENTITY

WIP

nudgelbahWALLESSNESS 

Arhicteually, WALLESSNESS dematerializes barriers by design and it substitutes heaviness with lightfulness in structural modules made by hand and the use of HEATactivated carbon fibre strands that come together with fluorescent and retro-reflectivity. The concept of a 'nudgelbah' came about in the course of research at Southern Cross University in Lismore NSW as a consequence of the interrogation of the cognitive ownerships attached to 'places' and their 'placedness' – and the dematerialisation of 'ownership'. 

It was envisaged that there was a need for a new/different entity to promote and facilitate the multifaceted and layered cognitive ownerships and interests invested in places and entities beyond the 'Westernised cum colonised'  institutionalised understandings of 'place and entity' and the paradigm of 'freehold ownership'. 

Ownerships are contestable and they're ever likely to be  contested. Places do not 'belong' to people, people belong to places - HOMEplaces. 

The concept of shared and layered ownerships and interests in places is understood in some CULTURALrealities. However, it is not well understood in Eurocentric Western mindsets where places (my/our place) are typically seen as 'property and an fiscal investment' and where places/entities need to be 'ownable' by individuals, groups and/or collectively, or in some Colonial-cum-Empire sense where ownership is held 'by the crown' – a kind of quaise 'owner-in-common' albeit power centric. 

It is also the case anthropologically within say FIRSTnation cultural mindsets and CULTURALrealities 'place', beliefs, rituals etc. are 'owned in common' and collectively as CULTURALproperty in a CULTURALlandscape. That's so, albeit with a myriad of cognitive and somewhat idiosyncratic cultural sensibilities and sensitivities attached to the notions of 'ownership' and belonging. 

Interestingly, in the "hippie era" the countercultural movement that spanned the mid-1960s to early 1970s looked for new ways of being in the world. The movement originating in the United States, and FIRSTnation cultural mindsets were often invoked and appropriated. The movement was driven by young people who rejected mainstream societal norms like materialism, conventional authority, and especially War. The movement championed "peace, love," and sometimes radical alternatives to the status quo.

Initially nudgelbah was envisaged in a way that required a  'legally stucture institute' to be formed. That entity might be established to undertake the task of facilitating a change in the contestable understandings attached to 'ownership'. However, quite quickly that vision proved to be too contentious as the status quo seemed so, so inhibiting. Nonetheless, the nudgelbahIDEA was seen as some kind of threat to the status quo. 

So, it turned out that the Nudgelbah Institute transmogrified into just 'NUDgelBAH' – a word randomly constructed from a set of syllables drawn from 'the ether' by chance. A word that is a noun, yet quite deliberately not a Proper Noun. A word that is to do with 'being and doing'. A word that is somewhat poetic. A word that is something of a cultural construct. It is an idea.

Thus, a 'NUDgelBAH' is a kind of WALLLESSnetwork, a network of networks if you like, a rhyzomatic entity where 'placedness' is not rooted in the concept of a geographically defined place/space – a 'place' not defined by or confined by law or geography or 'owned and ownable' by any person or group of people. A 'nudgelbah' was envisaged as an entity that is terrestrial and at the same time somewhat etherial. It is an idea to do with the search for meaning and meaningfulness.

In sense the word 'NUDgelBAH' is intended invoke and embrace 21st C sensibilities to do with rhizomatics rather than being hierarchically oriented. First make the word and then give it meaning.

'Walllessness' is not just about removing physical barriers, imagined or physical; rather, it's about a profound reimagining of the spaces in between and/or outside. Fundamentally, spaces do not exist merely within or between boundaries yet they function as opportunities for new connectivities and new unions – albeit that the concept contests the very foundations of the status quo. 

Ronald Regan during his tenure as President of the USA he said that the status quo was quite simply "Latin for the mess we are in". This was the era of Reaganomics and Thatcherism when world politics fundamentally reshaped global power balance points and set the stage for modern globalization. In turn, the era of unchallenged Western hegemony has closed, replaced by a multipolar system driven by geopolitical competition - another kind of "mess", Plus being another version of the unsustainable mess that the world, the planet, is now in.

Therefore, symbolically the gestation of the 'NUDgelBAHconcept' began as life always does – it begins with a coming together. Somehow, there is a kind of magic in NEWbeginnings in that they are pregnant with potential – and they are truly the most powerful of the things we know and do. 
                                                                While a NUDgelBAH is not bound up in a 'belief system', somehow and somewhere, its is 'belief' there in the background and there is the Buddha saying “No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.” Then there is Buddha telling us that there are just three things that cannot be hidden ... the sun, the moon and the truth ... and somehow all this lingers subliminally in the NUDgelBAHsensibility.

The famous German-Swiss artist Paul Klee said that "a line is a dot that went for a walk". In a way, nudgelbah is an idea out on a trip into the unknown attempting to construct meaning as it goes.

LINKS & REFERENCES





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MAKINGunlimited (Mu) purpose is to facilitate cultural production, research, expansive critical discourses and publication outcomes relevant to the development of more inclusive  understandings of making, materiality and imaginings to do with current ‘cultural realities’ – and in many voices both harmonious and discordant. ... In summary : Make Making Matter


  • COOLABAH Vol 11 2013 – Placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production ... CLICK HERE
  • COOLABAHplacedness – IMAGES – Online images in support of papers & essays in Vol 11 ... CLICK HERE 
  • Community of Ownership & Interest: Landscapes ... CLICK HERE
  • MUSEUMS: Stakes Shares & Ownerships ... CLICK HERE
  • COGITATIVE OWNERSHIP: Boyd, W.E. 2012. ‘A frame to hang clouds on’: Cognitive ownership, landscape and heritage management. Pp. 172-198 in Skeates, R., McDavid, C. & Carmen, J, (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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