The Culture Hub is a work-in-progress with the north Canberra Dinka (South Sudanese) diaspora community.

This intergenerational and intercultural project creates a ‘safe village’ environment for the Dinka to restore and maintain cultural practices. From here, members can share with and contribute to the larger Canberra community from a basis of their strengths as dancers, drummers, athletes and agriculturalists. The project creates opportunities for exchange between the Dinka, staff, students and families from the host school (Radford college), and a larger community of participant contributors and volunteers.

There will be opportunities for skills sharing, mutual languages acquisition, shared community events (including cooking, feasting, wrestling, dancing, ‘yarning’ and developing a community garden), and the potential for professional and social mentoring in a culturally-compatible environment. The emphasis is on sustaining long-term relationships. Food harvested and cooked from the community garden will be shared with the further underprivileged in Canberra. The project lays the ground for future intercultural exchanges with other Canberra organisations, families and  artists.

Created in partnership with the Dinka community, North Canberra diocese Anglican church, Radford College staff, students and families, Anglicare South-East (as the auspice body), and various cultural and community participants.

The Culture Hub: Major Gathering occurred on Nov 17, 2018, with over 400 participants from local and interstate communities in attendance.

Part II, 2019 will extend this ‘village’ to develop the  longer-term Arts-and-Health and intercultural scope of this project. The project will support art workshops, excursions, public performances and several exhibitions.  Up to 15 professional artists and organisations will facilitate activities including sewing, weaving, beading, collage, ‘shadow-play’, parkour, capoiera, circus skills, storytelling, and creative journaling. The process extends story-sharing through non-verbal means into the development of literacies in English, and the acquisition of job-ready skills.

The project is intended to be a pilot which can extend to working with many other groups in the wider community.

Partners include UnitingCare Kippax [UCK],  The University of Canberra, and the Anglican Diocese of Canberra.

Co-contributors and potential sponsors are welcome to be in touch to discuss their potential contribution to this project.

Zsuzsi Soboslay, with flautist extraordinaire Eliza Shephard, leads a new guided interpretation of the life of portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, NPG Spring Festival, Oct 28, 2018.

“We need a different kind of language and a different emotional register if we are going to touch people…. And that’s what you are creating…” [writer, academic and social commentator Jane Goodall]

Performer and educator Zsuzsi Soboslay, with flautist Eliza Shephard, create a work that activates gallery spaces in a performative dialogue with the lives of portrait subjects, each of whom have made a significant contribution to Australian cultural and intellectual life. The performance animates little-known facts and characteristics of portrait sitters. Subjects range from the cyclist Cadell Evans to feisty women from the 1950s [such as Nancy Bird Walton] and the Bogong Moth, whose annual flight plays out against the backdrop of desert landscapes highlighted in the contemporary galleries. A ‘dinner party’ in Gallery 4  stages a musical dialogue between important C19^th figures such as John Fairfax, Nellie Melba and the mining magnate Deborah Vernon Hackett. The music for this segment was specially commissioned by Australian composer John Shephard, for this room. The performance is a rare experience of interactive interpretation that was part of the National Portrait Gallery Spring Festival, drawing visitors into the gallery spaces and encouraging a more intimate engagement with the lives and eras of portrait sitters.

The 20-minute performance enthralls and delights people of all ages, from babies to seniors, and provides a multi-sensory and multi-dimensional experience, encouraging visitors to sense through the story-lives of portrait subjects on many levels.

Eliza Shephard plays personalized leitmotifs to match portraits and other compositions highlighting the relationship between portrait, viewer, and their moment in history.

Comments and reviews:

‘Your work makes me re-think my relationship and approach to my own research… A fine example of how you how you bring people together and provide space for their stories and voices” [historian Mary Hutchison]

“Your performance…adds richness to my experience…  I feel quite immersed in other layers of meaning..invisible fibers of sound and movement.. a broader scope of interpretation” [dancer, choreographer and community cultural development artist, Jane Ingall]

^{The event forms part of a series of gallery activations that Zsuzsi has created in collaboration with visual artists in recent years.  Other significant activations in 2018 include:  Locus [ANCA], and Ventilate [part of  Contour 556]– both with artist Sally Adair and musician Richard Johnson—on our inter-relationship with nature, geology and history; and Subnivien: the world beneath the skin, with Annee Miron and Clive Bourne, on the life of the endangered Ginninderry Frog, first performed at Craft ACT and then as part of an installation  in the 2018 finals of the Tom Bass Sculpture Prize in Sydney.  Each work involves in-depth subject research and amplifies the relationship between thought and sensory processing. Each creates a unique,  intimate and immediate relationship between artwork and viewer, amplifies sensory communication, and  translates research into a direct embodied and aesthetic experience.}

Photography and video edits: Jane Duong