OVERVIEW

 

Presented by Denmark Arts, City of Albany and Emerging Curator Saira Spencer as part of the Regional Arts Triennial, Radical Futures: Fertile Ground is a group exhibition that will explore how Great Southern communities engage with bushfire and bushfire management in the near and distant future.

 

The brief challenges artists to imagine a world where we have gone through a cultural palimpsest: A process where a socially-divided group of people come together to replace old ways of understanding with new ones, but pre-existing ideas still influence how those new ideas take shape.

 

It responds to the Triennial’s core theme Radical Futures, as outlined by Lead Curator Sarah Roots. Roots’ brief can be viewed here: RAT3 Brief

 

In responding to Fertile Ground, artists are directed to critically examine the dominant narratives of bushfire resilience that position human beings outside of ecosystems.

 

Selected works are expected to engage with hopeful, positive imaginings of a future where the intersections of fire and community are experienced as productive and generative. In developing their work, artists are asked to consider the roles of collective responsibility, community-driven response and environmental stewardship in building true resilience.

 

How the themes in this brief are expressed through the work is up to the artist: It may be communicated through subject matter, use of materials, artwork development process or otherwise. Ambitious works encouraged.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists are particularly encouraged to contribute to the project.

Non-Indigenous artists are urged to consider how the Menang-Noongar people’s cultural connection to fire has shaped the land around us and how it impacts their relationship to fire.

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Radical Futures: Fertile Ground will be exhibited at Albany Town Hall 12 December 2025- 17 January 2026.

 

BRIEF

 

Each dry season Great Southern communities are put in their place by fire. Images of charred homes, towns, wildlife and landscape are weaponised to promise an apocalyptic future of smoke-choked airways and anxiety-filled dry seasons. We find ourselves at a point of crisis: one where we are grieving past losses, human and ecological, whilst attempting to anticipate and conceptualise this future devastation.

 

But… What if we no longer felt the need to mourn for a future that hasn't happened yet? What if the threat of fire wasn’t so threatening?

 

1n constructing this future, Fertile Ground challenges artists and creatives to reflect on the collective agency and collaborative capacity of your local community to imagine a world where our culture of care for all forms of life extends beyond times of crisis.

 

Artists are particularly encouraged to reflect upon how grief can shape perceptions of the future, to draw inspiration from the ways Great Southern communities cope with profound loss and consider how, in a (radical) future, these capacities could offer a foundation for addressing and shaping our emotional, psychological and spiritual rebuilding process before, during and after fire.

 

Ask yourself: How can we move forward from this point of discord toward a future where the necessary work is done, our country is still burning but so is our passion to protect this place we call home?

What existing and emergent ideas will help us get there?

 

“We must draw from the tangible miracles of everyday life” - Manifesto of Futurist Painters, 1910

 

BACKGROUND

 

In the past 20 years homes, lives and thousands of hectares of native vegetation within the Great Southern have been lost to fire, driven by extreme weather and a drying climate.

 

However: climate change aside, bushfires are one of the few ‘natural’ disasters that human action is often directly responsible for. In Australia, approximately 50% of fires in remote areas are caused by lightning but in areas populated or visited by people up to 85% of bushfires are the result of human activity or infrastructure. Yet, responsibility and culpability for their management, suppression and prevention is currently a burden shouldered by very few.

 

Prescribed burning is one of the key government strategies employed to mitigate the risk of fire that Great Southern residents assume by choosing to live amongst the region’s unique fire-loving, Gwondanan scrublands and forests. Burn regimes predominantly began as a Department of Forestry initiative to protect and maintain logging forests. They were expanded in WA following the 1961 fires south-west of Perth that destroyed 1.8 million hectares of bush, forest and farmland and displaced hundreds of residents.

 

Controlled burns are performed to reduce threat to built environments and to people, with efforts made to protect native environment & wildlife in the process. The motivation to maintain this practice has increased as more and more people move to or visit southern WA seeking out solace in nature, economic reprieve and community life.

 

Opponents of prescribed burns are calling for state and local governments to expand rapid detection and suppression strategies to reduce the need for burning. This includes investing in existing and emergent technologies such as autonomous drones, AI-supported fire detection 2 systems and satellites with thermal sensors as well as increasing resources and staffing for firefighting crews.

 

Concerns that WA’s fire ecology is being mis-managed have existed within scientific and environmental activist communities since the 70s. Many environmental advocates argue that both controlled burns and wildfires can be catastrophic for ecologically vulnerable areas. While many native flora and fauna species are fire-adapted, many ecosystems cannot survive frequent, intense fires regardless of how they first started.

 

Many parties have pointed toward Indigenous traditional burning practices as an alternative. Studies show that intense forest fires in particular became far more frequent in WA following European colonisation and the subsequent dramatic change to landscape and disruption of cultural burning practices. However, Menang-Noongar Elders interviewed in 2020 by academic Ursula Rodrigues were clear that, while fire management is a cultural obligation and that cultural burning should be the exclusive realm of Noongar people, the landscape has changed too significantly for them to take on the responsibility entirely.

One Elder stated:

“The biggest issue is that we’re fixing something, we don’t have the knowledge about fixing.”

Another added:

“We are trying to fix something here that is broken, so maybe their [fire practitioners’] science is about creating fire breaks first and then later on let the old Noongars strike the match and let it burn.”

 

Regardless of the solutions offered, discussions on prevention and resilience do little to address the reality that living through a firestorm is a physically dangerous and deeply traumatic, isolating experience. Firefighters are particularly vulnerable to developing debilitating physiological and mental health problems (such as PTSD) from exposure to catastrophic fire, with their symptoms worsening over time.

 

In a wildfire, emergency services often need to employ triage-like strategies to prevent en-masse devastation: Sometimes, one property may be lost in order to save 200. However, as a result many civilian survivors can feel abandoned by emergency services when the responsibility of defending their property falls squarely on their own shoulders. In addition, while grassroots community responses from neighbours, local groups/organisations and fellow townsfolk were crucial to emotionally survive the event, fire-affected individuals often experience a second form of abandonment when help fades as the sense of urgency subsides.

 

So…the burning question is… how will Great Southern communities navigate a fire-filled future?

 

“Like my dad used to say, ‘fire fixes everything’.”

- Noongar Elder, 2020

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For full brief, selection criteria and to apply, go to RAT3- Radical Futures: Fertile Ground | Denmark Arts Council

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