PVI Collective in Perth has announced a bold new residency at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), aimed at empowering members of the general public to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the future of humanity, and Kelli McCluskey wants you to get involved.
The project, 'Tiny Revolutions', is a public residency-based project inviting people to attend think-tank sessions and respond to submissions from the general public with regards to what people fear at the moment.
“In its essence, it's looking at 15 of the most overwhelming issues that are affecting humanity today and into the future and trying to find or create bite-sized responses to them, it's kind of aiming to take away that feeling of powerlessness and anxiety around all of these issues,” residency devisor, Kelli McCluskey says.
The idea was first hatched a number of years ago, yet there was no clear understanding of how the collective could go about it, until they found a list of 15 global challenges facing humanity.
“'Tiny Revolutions' was an idea we had maybe five or six years ago but we couldn't figure out what it was and I think in finding The Millennium Project and seeing how we could have this anchor-point to these kind of overwhelmingly massive global scale clusterf...s that seem to be heading our way, we felt that we'd found our anchor-point, so we were able to move forward with it.”
The residency is asking for submissions regarding people's biggest anxieties within the context of the list, which consists of a vast array of looming catastrophes facing humanity.
“I guess you could take a guess at the top one which is the climate crisis, but there's other things as well that are super interesting like population and wealth inequality, organised crime, rapid tech advancement. They're kind of massive, so what we've done is we've teamed up with The Millennium Project and dug a bit deeper with them so that we have this knowledge pool that we can draw from.”
Of these huge issues, entrants are asked to submit a small example of what they're afraid of, and how they want the PVI Collective to react to it through a peaceful disruption of day-to-day life.
“So you could say 'my issue is something about rapid tech advancement and biometrics on surveillance cameras', you have a bit of a rant about that but then you can say 'I choose a blockade or a sabotage' as your tactic.”
From there, the collective will take a three-week residency in PICA, where submissions will first be workshopped in a think-tank, before being acted upon.
“So that submission comes through to the think-tank in those first two weeks and we give each submission 30 minutes, so we have this game that we play that opens out the conversation and it basically guides any participant through coming up with a tiny revolution in response to that submission.”
“And then in the final week, the 'do' week, we actually have this whole long schedule where, to the very best of our ability, we try to undertake every tiny revolution on behalf of that person.”
