Reading room

We discussed what would be in the small room of Alliance Française with Françoise, the head of exhibitions there, and came up with the idea of really setting it up as a 'reading room'. We wouldn't only provide copies of the stories, but also books about multicultural migrations and multicultural gay issues, as well as leaflets and brochures from Midsumma and other associated events. So visitors could spend time in the room, reading, getting ideas, maybe starting a chat. Fortunately, I have inherited a big pile of books on this subject from Palmina before she left for China.

Why stories?

I’ve been asked now a couple of times – where did the idea for the exhibition come from? Why the stories and pictures? Well, here it is, in a nutshell: I went through the interdependent visa thing myself – in France, early 2008. We downloaded the paperwork, and saw that one of the elements to be provided is a ‘statutory declaration’ where both partners have to tell about their relationships and its history. Trying not to copy each other as much as possible.
As an ex-linguist and still writer, I found that intriguing: how interesting that story-telling should be the basis for the right to migrate. It felt very… antique – memories of when I studied ancient Greek rhetorics, and had to talk about narration as part of the judicial discourse. Anyway, that’s where the idea came from.
And then reinforcements: when we arrived in Melbourne, Philip found a job at the Immigration Museum, and started talking about the ‘share your story’ database; visitors are invited to tell their migration stories (to the computers in the discovery centre) for publication on the Museum Victoria website, or something. Again, migration stories. There must be something about Australians and migration, mmmm, what is it, I wonder?

Everything is going to print

I gave final approval today, after receiving proofs yesterday. Now it’s all going to print. It feels oddly quaint, in this super-digital and online age, to still worry about printing issues. I mean, imagine a text you can’t edit after publishing! Sounds retro, doesn’t it. When will they invent self-correcting prints??

Small room

I was delighted when the Alliance Française accepted to host Love Journeys, but I didn’t put any further thought into what the space actually was, or what we would make of it. I knew there was a big ‘ball-room’ with a chimney and period features, and I was happy with it. As it turns out, there’s actually two exhibition rooms in Eildon manner: the big ball room, and a smaller one on the side.
Patrice, the director, asked if we planned anything for that small room – he’d like us to use it. I thought about it, and first had the idea that we could make long vertical panels, like Chinese painting rolls, exploring themes like storytelling, money, border control, or community. I even drafted a model and discussed imagery with Joy. But, as it turned out, it would be a lot of extra work, extra budget, and so we decided against it. I’ll be putting up some of the discussion themes on this blog later.
Phil had another, simpler ideas: there’s a lot of text in this exhibition – each version of the story is about 900 words. It may not be comfortable for the viewers to read all of that standing up, with people around. So why not provide a print out of the texts, and install chairs or a couch in the small room, for the visitors to sit down and read at leisure? I pitched the idea to Patrice, who was happy with it. It’s got a bit of a Sophie Calle touch, which I like, and fits with the Alliance Française.
Now, our next step is to locate the table and couch. Ideas anyone?

A mad week-end

After the first interview in Geelong two weeks ago, this was our mad week-end. Two days, three interviews: Ana and Gopika in Elsternwick at 10h30, David and Alex in the city at 3h00, and, on Sunday, Jerome and Brett in Camberwell at 1h. Joy and I were exhausted after that week-end. I pondered – how come? It’s, after all, way less than we did on certain films. But, upon reflection, going into the homes of people you haven’t met, move their furniture and set up a breakfast for them, ask them personal questions, at length, and make them look natural on a photograph, is not a normal thing to do.
Well, at least we’ve got good results; and now, even if everything goes wrong, even if Anne-Sophie and Keren were to cancel, we’ve got enough material to do this exhibition!

Precious help

Halfway through the project, very precious help came in the person of Keanyen Chin, that Philip recommended to me. He worked in Museum design in Singapore and Malaysia, and will coordinate the material set up of the whole thing. One element I hadn’t really thought about – but once the photograph is printed, it doesn’t hang itself on the wall. Now I can delegate that to someone, yeah!
And with people come ideas: we are going to make articulated wooden panels, like late medieval church altars, framing together stories and photographs. The upper band will have the originally planned two versions of the story with a photo in the middle; in the lower band, the names of the couple, an object that symbolises their relationship, and a photo of their front door. That should look interesting.

Catalogue

We had to provide a photograph for the Midsumma catalogue, but we were not in time to line up a couple. So Philip, my partner, and I volunteered to be the face of the Love Journeys.
The good thing about deadlines is that they force you to make final decisions. Joy came to the house and asked me, what would the photo look like? Where would we sit? I bounced it back at her – where would the light be best – and she pointed at one of the walls, the one where our dinner table is. But it still wasn’t a concept.
Then, in the afternoon I started thinking – what about a breakfast photo? That would be topical: don’t they say, about gay men, that we lie down in twos and wake up alone? And isn’t the exhibition about Gay and Lesbian couples? What’s more symbolic of domestic life than having breakfast together. Then for the multicultural side of things, we could have each partner bring to the table food from their countries of origin. Phil and I would be baguette and vegemite, for instance, that sounded good. And since Australia’s the land of plenty, we would add in a couple of croissants, jams, fruit, margarine, just to fill up the space.
And here’s the result!

Couples found

We now have five couples to interview, four women, six men, coming from all over the world – Argentina, France, England, Israel and the US. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any Asian migrants to take part, but we did manage a relative gender balance, and a nice coverage of other origins.
Thank you for your calls and emails, and we are looking forward to starting the interviews now.

Love Journeys is looking for couples

If you're a Gay or a Lesbian couple living in Melbourne, and one of you migrated to Australia, if you would like to share your stories, and be part of our exhibition, please, contact us at: journeys@agmc.org.au.

Format

The exhibition will tell five stories.

It will present five photographs of gay or lesbian couples comprising at least one migrant, in their intimate surroundings.

Each photograph will be surrounded by two texts.
One will be the story of the migration journey as told by the couple. That text will try to capture the voices of the migrants, with all of their exotic colour and emotions.
The other text, written in colder, dot-point style language, will follow the administrative process that accompanied the first story. It will also tell how this process itself was developed in the country, and about the legal battles or challenges that made such a story possible.

Overview

Australia is a country of migrants. People come here for a wide range of reasons. One of those is sexual orientation.

Compared to most countries in the world, Australia is very liberal and accepting of Gay and Lesbian sexual orientation. Sexual orientation can be a motive for migrating to Australia, and is acknowledged as such by the Australian administration in two ways:
- Migrants from countries where homosexuality is punished by death penalty can claim refugee status in Australia
- Gay or Lesbian people in a relationship with an Australian citizen (or resident?) can move to Australia on grounds of that relationship.
There are also cases of individuals who choose to migrate to Australia because of their sexual orientation, but go through different channels, such as skilled migration, studies, etc.

Migration is a long journey that starts overseas and finishes here, with some degree of acceptance and integration in Australian society. As they engage on this journey, migrants develop a story, that they tell themselves and other people, of how they decided to leave and why, and what happened to them along the way. But for that journey to be possible, they also need to engage with the Australian authorities and a – sometimes heavy and harsh – legal and administrative system that will hopefully allow them to remain in Australia. In this exhibition, we want to show the contrast between personal narratives of journeys to Australia, and the bureaucratic process that underlies and accompanies it. Our purpose is to cast light on the complex interaction between administrative frameworks and human lives. We also want to reflect in our exhibition the social, gender, ethnic and generational variety of gay and lesbian migrants to Australia.