Kambah

A digital mapping project with the Kambah community 2020 –

An exhibition in early 2023

Testing participatory archiving – the case of Kambah bogan suburb

Archivists have been working on Involving communities in selecting archives for a couple of decades, wanting to move away from being gatekeepers for collections. However, delivering on aspirations to actually build collections with communities has been elusive. There are great community archives in Australia, the Australian Queer Archives is a good example as is the ARI Remix project from Brisbane but for public collections, the goal of building and managing collections with communities is still recognised as a key challenge. 

I am working with my community to learn what is important to them and to build a digital map of what I call atmospheres. This map forms a collection that has a potential to gather our knowledge, images and stories that the community values and to find ways to keep them for the long-term. 

There are other innovations in this project – it uses unusual categories to prompt residents to reflect in new ways on what’s important t them, amospheres of my suburb: places to meander, places to imagine, places to go wild, for example. The digital map generates what I’ve been thinking of as a ‘performance of place’ – this is locative media for the mobile phone. Entries can be hidden, or revealed only at an approximate distances or made completely visible and browsable on a desktop as well as the mobile. While the potential of locative media for heritage collections  is well understood, the practice is still immature, I’m digging into that. You can check out the digital map although it is still in its infancy.

A gallery visitor encounters a series of pinhole camera photographic prints, connected to the map. My suburb is famous on the internet as one of the biggest bogan suburbs in Australia. What is bogan and what does that look like? By using old media, things are slowed down, it takes time to make to take and make the image and errors show up. The pinhole transposes things, upside down and back to front, causing the viewer to look more closely to recognise the image in the first place. And that’s the point, to get people to look more closely at the very familiar, appreciating it anew. 

Here’s the digital scrapbook https://kambahpeoplesmap.tumblr.com/

And here’s the digital map https://cgeomap.eu/urambi/

Louise Curham: KAMBAH