Update: 2nd of September 2013

We did it! For two surreal days on 3-4 August, during the Underbelly Arts Festival, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was removed from our work's vantage point on Cockatoo Island. You can view pictures and read about the work on our blog. If you're in Melbourne, you can see documentation of Nothing to See Here (as well other new work of ours) at The Substation in Newport, as part of the show Vantage Point. The show runs until the 6th of October. Details here.

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We are Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, two artists who have been working together on public and socially-engaged projects for about a year. We are very happy that we’ve been accepted to present a new work at the Underbelly Arts Lab and Festival 2013. This will be held at Cockatoo Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour, over two weeks at the end of July.

Thank you to all our supporters! Now that we've reached our main target, the additional money we raise will be used to commission essays by Australian writers to accompany the work. We're hoping to get to $2000. We would be very grateful for any donations (however small) so that we can put together probing, experimental pieces of writing on the topics of absence, denial and displacement in Australian culture.

We've been selected to take part in a matched crowd funding campaign where every dollar raised up to our target will be matched by the Keir Foundation. This means for every dollar you give, you're effectively giving us two! Check out the other projects that are part of this matched initiative here.

What we want to do

We want to give visitors to Cockatoo Island the experience of looking out at Sydney Harbour and discovering that key parts of this iconic Australian skyline, including the Harbour Bridge, have vanished. To do this, we will create a viewing platform placed at a site on the Island from which the Harbour can be seen. Looking out, viewers will expect to see Sydney Harbour’s familiar features. Instead, they will find that Sydney's landmarks have disappeared.

The work will be titled Nothing to See Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour Bridge).

The familiar view of Sydney Harbour is often taken to symbolise Australia as a whole, so the act of taking away its characteristic features suggests a challenge to Australian identity. Taking away pieces of modern Australia’s cultural identity is intended to provoke reflection about the many events of removal and displacement, such as those inflicted upon Indigenous Australia or asylum seekers, that are often absent from Australia’s official version of its own history.



Our work is inspired by the research into monuments that we began in Berlin—particularly the artist Horst Hoheisel’s infamous, unsuccessful proposal for the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Hoheisel believed that the best way to memorialise the attempted destruction of a people was to destroy an iconic German monument. He proposed blowing up the Brandenburg Gate (the symbol of Berlin), grinding its stone into dust, and sprinkling the remains over its former site. “How better to remember a destroyed people”, he asked, “than by a destroyed monument?” Like Hoheisel, we want to make people think about our country’s history and identity by presenting an image of absence.

We will spend the two week Underbelly Lab exploring ways of making the image of a vanished landmark plausible and compelling. This will involve grappling with technical questions, constructing an immersive setting for the work, as well as obtaining feedback from the public about whether experiencing Sydney without its landmarks produces the effects we are after.

Cockatoo Island provides an unrivalled view of Sydney Harbour, and the Underbelly Lab offers us an unparalleled opportunity for us to develop an ambitious, site-specific artwork that responds to this iconic location. We intend this piece to be the beginning of a longer project that engages with the Australian public about collective identity and the way the nation deals with its past. We look forward to developing this bold new venture in the supportive environment of the Underbelly Lab.



How much it will cost

Presenting this work will cost $2500. This will cover the work’s production and construction costs, the artists’ flights to Sydney, accommodation, per diems for the artists and payment for any additional personnel. Any money that we raise above this would be put towards an accompanying publication for the project with commissioned essays by Australian writers.

Every dollar you pledge will be doubled

Through crowd funding, we are hoping to raise $1250. Excitingly, the Keir Foundation has promised to match the funding raised through Pozible, dollar for dollar, bringing us to a total of $2500. For example if you give $25, you'll actually be giving us $50 (and we'll be twice as thankful for your donation!). The project will only receive funding if we reach our $1250 Pozible target. The Keir Foundation’s matched funding is a first for arts philanthropy in Australia and we are thrilled to be a part of this initiative.

About us

In our collaboration we are interested in creating site-specific artworks that provoke questions about the present social order—particularly about the gaps and silences in public discourse, the things that are not or cannot be acknowledged by official culture. We aim to do this using aesthetics and strategies that are disruptive, antagonistic and estranging. Catherine brings to the collaboration a philosophical and critical rigour while Amy draws on her six years of devising participatory artworks.



Our first collaborative work, Ibrahim the Algorithm, was part of the show The Mathematics of Small Numbers, held at Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne in 2012. We have recently returned from an Australia Council-funded residency in Berlin, where we spent four months at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik researching how public art and monuments are used to construct collective histories and national identities. In Berlin we presented a temporary anti-monument, the Site Dedicated to the Active Effacement and Complete Disregard of History. You can read about our Berlin research on our project blog, The Futures of the Past.

About Underbelly Arts

Underbelly Arts exists to uncover Australia’s next great artists.

Since 2007 the Underbelly Arts Lab has provided opportunities for more than 600 artists to develop and create in a unique and supported environment where, over two weeks, audiences are invited to watch art unfold and take part in the process.

In 2013 Underbelly Arts is once again taking over Cockatoo Island and giving artists the chance to create and respond in one of Australia’s magnificent settings. These works will then be showcased as part of the Underbelly Arts Festival, a two-day art party that celebrates process, new ideas and the best emerging and experimental artists across Australia.

The Underbelly Arts Festival will take place on August 3 and 4.

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