Indefinite
Indefinite is a performance art piece that encourages the audience to reflect on their privilege by abstracting absurd aspects of Australia’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as hoarding toilet paper.
Although our piece has undergone significant transformation, we want to acknowledge how essential our research into Australian hotel and offshore detention centres has been to the development of our work. There is a difference between being couped up and being locked up, and that is exemplified by Australia’s response to the pandemic in comparison to the truly isolated realities of asylum seekers. This year, COVID-19 has stripped us of our suburban luxuries, but the Australian Government has stripped refugees of their basic human rights for years.
This article from the Guardian, written by Mardin Arvin, a refugee currently being in held in Melbourne’s Mantra Hotel, encapsulates the immense privilege of Australians whose isolation has an end date. It brings much-needed perspective to our current circumstances and we encourage you to read it to learn more about indefinite detention. It can accessed through this link:
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To find out more about Australia’s immigration detention policies and the inhuman treatment of asylum seekers, you can follow this link to refugee welfare and advocacy group, RISE; an organisation ran entirely by ex-detainees, asylum seekers and refugees: https://www.riserefugee.org/.
For local information, you can go to Refugee Solidarity Meanjin’s website: https://www.freethekp120.com.au/. They are focused on freeing the 120 men that are being held in a Kangaroo Point hotel. To help combat these issues, you can follow their social media to be notified of upcoming actions.
Finally, to donate to their cause, you can follow this link: https://chuffed.org/project/support-the-247-kangaroo-point-blockade.
