Amie Anderson

Slowly being engulfed by cranes and car parks, Melbourne’s dockside ARI stops serving up art at the Food Court.

The Food Court has survived with a month-to-month rental agreement for the past three years, however at the end of June it will close its doors to the sound of building works that surround it.

‘We are one of the last spaces left – there were 14,’ said co-founder Amie Anderson.

One night last year at an opening at The Food Court in Melbourne Docklands I found myself in conversation with a stranger. He was standing alone dressed in a hooded yellow windcheater and wearing black stripy plastic boots... (Maria Miranda)

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the state of artist-run initiatives by writers around Australia, for Runway issue #30, Ecologies. 

Soap Exchange was shown at Seventh Gallery in Fitzroy in February this year. It was the perfect gallery to show the archive as it sits right next door to The Atherton Gardens Housing Complex, where half of the collection was collected from residents.

In the Past-Time live performance, Siying and I sat in silence, knitting and feeding wool for up to five hours a day - in a cycle without beginning or end. One person would knit, while the other was feeding the thread to the knitter, both lost in their own actions.

The work explored the meditative quality of repetitive behaviors, while appealing to people’s voyeuristic natures. Siying conceived the work while living in Darwin, where she was struck by the irony of a knitting craze in the humid and tropical Top End.