Sweet Separation Siteworks 2018

29 Sep 2018 : Bundanon Trust, Illaroo, NSW, Australia

Sweet Separation, durational performance/ installation. Performed/ created for Bundanon’s annual Siteworks one-day festival. This year the theme was ‘Micro’, so working with tiny sugar cubes was appropriate. In this iteration of the work a very pleasant outcome was that mid-afternoon children and some adults became involved in the building work, uninvited. After I left the site, into the night and early the next morning children were still there building the sugar walls !

In this work I constructed miniature walls around myself in a 2 metre x 2 metre square.

Turkey is a key country for migrants and refugees attempting to find a new life in Europe, frequently risking their lives to escape hardship and danger. In his ongoing research into the forces that generate diaspora, Alan Schacher employs Turkish sugar cubes to construct a vision of the bitter-sweet, tiny walls that divide artist from public. This is a folly of a separation wall, it can easily be spoken across, walked over, knocked down, or dissolved in tea or rain. Its very real inspiration exist in intentional barriers constructed between Israel and Palestine and the USA and Mexico. In Australia too, borders are forcibly policed. Walls for seclusion and segregation lead to alienation. All cause bitter pain and anguish to citizens and divided families. The ruins of the iconic walls of history in Berlin, China, Rome and Jericho stand as models for the global gated communities that continue to divide neighbours. (This work was first presented at Proximity Performance Art Event, Scratch Art Space, Sydney 2017)