The last two years have exposed many of the assumptions and vulnerabilities of cultural programming and infrastructure, primarily our access to physical space – in which to create, view and engage with art and each other. They also revealed artists and audiences excluded and obfuscated by these spaces, whose access to art is often limited – by background, lived experience, or distance – to online engagement. 

Out of this context, Firstdraft presents Conductive Site, an online program of artworks by six diverse, interdisciplinary artists – Hanna Cormick, Riana Head-Toussaint, Shareeka Helaluddin, Lost all Sorts Collective, Jamila Main, and Daniel Savage – curated by interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist Riana Head-Toussaint. This collective of artists is unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection –  as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space. Unfurling here on the Firstdraft website, Conductive Site aims to create movement, conversation and change through radical re-considerations of so-called public space.

Conductive Site

Conductive Site was originally conceived as a live event aimed at exposing the inherent assumptions, conditions and power structures that can cling to the walls of an art space – that hang in its air, crackle in its electricity, and nestle in its culture. It was to be a program of live interventions that would act as a conductive “site”; drawing focus to create movement, conversation and change through radical re-considerations of so-called public space. 

In response to the realities of our ever-shifting, COVID-affected landscape, the program underwent many revisions. Now, many months later, it has evolved into a purely digital form. Leaning deeper into ‘Crip Time’, a concept borne of the disabled community which pushes against normative, arbitrary notions of time and prioritises listening to the rhythms of our bodies,  Conductive Site will now unfurl across a number of months, with artworks remaining online to visit and revisit as your time and energy allows.

This collective of artists is unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection –  as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space. The intersections of experiences across our varied personal and formal backgrounds are rich and numerous, and I am excited to see these crystallise further as each work emerges.

As artists, we are all making work on the lands of First Nations peoples. We are privileged to inhabit these spaces. Sovereignty of these lands was never ceded.

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

– Riana Head-Toussaint

explore Conductive Site