Artworks by Sophie Penkethman-Young are buried as part of Heap, at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Artworks by Sophie Penkethman-Young are buried as part of Heap, at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian Art Dozens of ‘dangerous’ artworks are buried under dirt in Sydney, and Heap visitors will be asked to dig deep Festival of Dangerous Ideas exhibition/installation in the cavernous foyer of Carriageworks will feature 80 works by eight Australian artists
Prefer the Guardian on Google I ’m watching a Hitachi earthmover bury a suitcase in a mound of dirt inside Carriageworks when my mind peels off on a surreal tangent: does the machine have job satisfaction? I happen to know that another machine on this job has an MOU with its human operator outlining fair work conditions, and I’m wondering if this excavator got the memo.
In fact, the Hitachi just buried the memo: 25 tiles bearing the text of a labour agreement between artist Sophie Penkethman-Young and the 3D printer she used to make them. This weekend, members of the public will dig them up as part of Heap : an unusual mix of exhibition, installation and “archaeological dig” featuring 80 artworks by eight Australian artists, commissioned by the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (Fodi). Taking place in Carriageworks’ cavernous foyer, it’s the centrepiece of a program of panels, performances and screenings inspired by this year’s theme: revelation.
View image in fullscreen Eighty artworks by eight artists are buried underneath tonnes of dirt inside Carriageworks. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian During the installation process, I see a bronze mushroom, a canister of kangaroo apple and a spider costume buried under 120 tonnes of earth. Already interred: a human figure cast in hardened dirt, and a funerary urn. Each represents a “dangerous idea” – something “that has potential to change the world if taken seriously”, says festival director Danielle Harvey. Audiences are invited to “really get their hands dirty” in excavating these ideas, “as a prompt to think a bit deeply” about thorny issues such as climate change and colonisation.
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Heap draws on a “very obvious metaphor,” Harvey concedes, but a powerful one. “We’re a country built on mining and excavating, so what we find in the dirt and the lens that we [put on it] – whether it’s interesting or dangerous, and how we value it – is super interesting in an Australian context.”
View image in fullscreen Workers installing the final few objects buried as a part of Heap, at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian Unlike the mining industry, diggers will be required to relinquish any treasure they unearth, with the artworks progressively added to a nearby display.
“We need to find new ways to get people to pay attention to these issues,” Harvey says. “Art feels like a really important way to progress and expand some of these conversations.”
Penkethman-Young’s cheeky provocation cloaks a radical idea: what if we didn’t treat machines as an endless source of production? The artist limited use of her 3D printer to a standard work week of 38 hours, capping output at one tile per day. It would have been quicker and easier to run the printer 24-7, but Penkethman-Young is pushing back on this mindset. Her artwork is an invitation “to think about…