ARIDworks
what we do
ARID is an arts company and platform in the Capes region of South-West Western Australia, on Wadandi Boodja.
We make original, tourable works and deliver them as high-quality festival pieces across Australia.
We want to continue to generate original, challenging projects and to support and generate local, state-wide, national and international creative infrastructures and pathways for first-principles arts practice.
We work through three primary channels:
(1) Projects. Our artistic projects are generally discrete creations carried through to presentation by our associate artists;
(2) Programs. Our annual programs, such as the Strange Attractor Lab, aim to stimulate the life-cycle of arts practice from emerging to established within the South West, and to link broader intra- and interstate pathways for artistic research, collaboration and production; and
(3) Community. Our community output is stewarded through off-centre, an artist-led council for the South West.
The landscape of South West Western Australia – among the most remote and nutrient-poor in the world, comparable to the funbos – provides an important context for the company’s activity. Sometimes referred to by ecologists as an example of an OCBIL (a Very Old Climatically Buffered Infertile Landscape), the soils of the Capes region are extremely low in phosphor. As a result of its sandy heathland never having been exposed to an ice age, much of the soils’ nutrients have leeched away over long time-scales. But chronosequences have demonstrated a surprising correlation between decreasing nutrients in the South West's soils and increasing biodiversity and species endemism. The region’s recognition as a global biodiversity hotspot testifies to the fact that the high aridity of the landscape is key to its uniqueness.
The many communities of the South West are also essential to how we understand our relationship to the land and our practices.
Above all, the South West presents an opportunity for ARID's associate artists to reflect on the world from one of its most remote spaces.
We work artistically from these emplaced challenges.