Refuge

Project description

Heatwaves, wildfires and floods have become a lot more frequent in Australia, affecting infrastructure, biodiversity and human security. When climate emergencies arise, they force us to rethink the structures on which we have built our society. As Jen Rae, an artist involved in Refuge says: ‘disasters are a terrible time to learn new skills’, we must therefore prepare before the next one takes place.

At the heart of disaster management is the ability to deal with the unforeseen, which is something art can help us with. From crisis to trauma, art can help us understand and heal. This was the starting point for creating Refuge, an interdisciplinary project led by Arts House in Melbourne.

‘Artists are well positioned to navigate the complexity of wicked problems, and there was real understanding of this from emergency service organisations.’

Catherine Jones, General Manager of Arts House in the evaluation report from 2017

Together with emergency services and local communities, Refuge looked at the role of the arts in preparing for and recovering from climate-related disasters. Through an exploration of the relationship between art and reality, Refuge sought to develop a better social infrastructure for future crises. It helped the community to imagine how they could prepare, and it invited experts, artists and thinkers to share knowledge.

The project brought together people who normally don’t collaborate during a crisis. Elders, experts, emergency services and local community gathered to ask what role we each can play when the survival of the individual becomes a question of how we deal with it collectively. Throughout the project, there was a sense of it being led by artists, and of all decision making being taken collectively.

Watch a short documentary – Refuge 2021 – from Arts House video channel on Vimeo:

Activities

Each year Arts House produced a creative lab that brought together artists, emergency services, scientists and communities to explore a specific disaster scenario. Here is an annual overview of the activities:

• 2016 – Refuge imagined a local flood running through North Melbourne Town.
• 2017 – Refuge envisioned continuing days of heat.
• 2018 – Refuge examined a situation of a pandemic (quite ironically!).
• 2019 – Refuge expanded on displacement prompted by the climate crisis.
• 2020-2021 – Refuge explored what happens when these crises meet.

Every annual programme consisted of participatory workshops, installations and in the first two years, a 24-hour simulation of disaster scenarios, all aimed at engaging the local communities in being involved in future disaster management. The simulations used art installations and included emergency service presentations with citizens as participants. Through imagining different disasters they sought a collective response to catastrophe through a creative approach.

In the process of creating and preparing each scenario, Arts House held workshops bringing together artists and relevant stakeholders who exchanged ideas and designed the next emergency scenario in collaboration. Following each year of the project, they arranged an evaluation day, where everyone involved shared their learnings and future aims. This process helped to inform the following year.

An example of this was the workshop ‘In Case of…’. ‘In Case of…’ was led by performance maker Kate Sulan and created in collaboration with the Red Cross. The workshop involved the creation of a personal emotional preparedness kit; a grab-and-go bag for wellbeing, and builds on the Red Cross RediPlan workshops which prepare people for emergencies and disasters. ‘In Case Of…’ added a sense of creative and emotional dynamic to the RediPlan workshop and helped communities to be able to make decisions on their own when emergencies related to climate change, such as floods and heatwaves, arise.

Heatwave scenario 2017

In 2017 Arts House was transformed into an emergency relief centre in an imagined scenario of responding to a heatwave. The number of days when the temperature will be higher than 35 degrees in Melbourne is predicted to double by 2070. The scenario asked how the community can build resilience and respond in an inclusive way. During this year of Refuge – artists and emergency services came together to imagine and foresee possible futures through performances and installations. The experiences people could take part in included:

‘Contact’ by Asha Bee Abraham

This interactive installation focused on the most vulnerable to extreme situations, who often don’t make it to activities like this. It invited participants to make contact with the homeless, elderly who struggle the most during heatwaves and other marginalised communities.

‘Swelter’ by Dave Jones

A young group of collaborators created a room-sized model apartment block and subjected it to a halogen heatwave.

‘Future Proof by Fair Shar’e by Jen Rae

In this workshop, food was seen as labour, knowledge, energy and technology. People were invited to take what they needed and to share it with others. Skills were shared on foraging and preserving as well as how to build collective knowledge in a crisis.

These installations (among many others) and events were created alongside workshops and information sessions from emergency preparedness activities run by Red Cross Australia, Victorian State Emergency Service (VICSES) and other emergency services and community partners.

Watch Refuge 2017: Heatwave

Sustainability issues

Community resilience

‘Refuge has created a cultural change. Communities have grown stronger and are more resilient as they plan for a crisis together. Through active participation in creativity and arts practice, we’ve found that local communities are more engaged to create stronger social cohesion, as well as enabling a deeper shared purpose while they consider solutions together.’

Sarah Rowbottam, Producer

With a more extreme climate, emergency services and policymakers in Melbourne recognised a need to prepare individuals and communities to be able to manage and respond to disasters. This is supported by research, which shows that community engagement can increase local resilience during disasters.

Refuge worked with some key questions to investigate how to prepare communities in the best way:

To what extent should we all be given the opportunity to aid ourselves in times of crisis and emergency, rather than relying solely on public services? And can we also be valuable to participants in processes of mass, collective recovery?

Traditionally, emergency services are seen as something delivered by experts to communities, but the people behind Refuge saw community members as active participants and identified a need for cross-cultural discussion in developing societal resilience to disasters. They brought together artists, elders, researchers and emergency services asking how we can be collectively responsible. In doing so, Refuge radically challenged the established top-down approach in disaster management and used creative methods to help neighbourhoods understand and prepare for the uncertain futures. Engaging through emotion, it sought to strengthen communities to cope with uncertainty through activity and participation.

At its core, Refuge invited the public to learn new skills and share local knowledge. According to the emergency services, the main issues in emergencies arise when people don’t take action on their own, but rather just wait for services to arrive. The lack of collective action. By bringing in the arts Refuge offered new forms of engagement and for finding ways to improve people’s individual and collective action during disasters. By engaging with different art practices Refuge explored how communities can prepare for climate change and issues of survival and recovery. Through the programme, creative practice offered imaginative insights into how to deal with different scenarios and potential solutions.

Following Refuge, the organisers experienced an increased public awareness of disasters. One of the reasons the project was successful in engaging a wider part of the population was the cultural and participatory elements such as theatrical performances and interactive digital work. This allowed for a broad age group and diverse backgrounds and demographics to attend, and allowed for the community to grow stronger and more resilient.

Improved disaster management through art collaboration

Another important outcome of Refuge has been the embedded relationship between artists and stakeholders involved in the programme. Over the years, creative activities were used to investigate social practices and traditions during disasters.

The LAB in 2017 brought together scientists, policy-makers and artists creating what Catherine Jones, General Manager of Arts House, in the feedback report called ‘a genuine space of interdisciplinarity’. This process of knowledge sharing is believed to have created stronger links between policy and the arts. The programme facilitated a rare chance for professionals within science, logistical services, government and creatives to interact. Artists were involved in the scenario planning and this provided valuable insight to what locals believe to be relevant for different disasters and services. The involvement also changed the artist’s own perspectives. Over time, artists became more resilient and adaptive in their approach to change.

‘My participation as a core artist in Refuge has fundamentally changed how I practice and define myself as an artist and how to speculate on alternative climate emergency futures. The gift of six years of ‘playing in the dark’ together in whole and in parts with other Refuge artists, partners and collaborators, reflects a depth of inquiry and commitment to collaborate differently, knowledge share and experiment outside of disciplinary boundaries and cultural comfort zones.’

Jen Rae in Unfinished Business

During Refuge, artists engaged with emergency services directly in their projects and presented at Emergency Service Conferences, which is believed to have led to a closer relationship between the public sector and the arts. One of the collaborations that emerged from Refuge is the partnership between emergency management Victorias representative Callum Fairnie and North Melbourne artist Lorna Hannan, who went on to map the environment, history and culture of North Melbourne.

‘Refuge 2017 has allowed artists to further diffuse their imaginative strategies through the public sector and into the discourse of policy-making at a local and state level. For example, as noted above, Refuge is an “aligned action” of Resilient Melbourne and consequently both feeds into and benefits from the strategies of this government project (Resilient Melbourne, 2016, 54). It is expected that the policy influence and yield of Refuge will continue to build as the program progresses to 2020.’

Feedback report, p.17

Producer, Sarah Rowbottam, also says that emergency services that were actively participating in Refuge have since reviewed and adapted their approaches to crisis management situations and procedures:

‘A key takeaway has been the importance of preserving the knowledge and skills required to respond to challenges of climate crisis and finding ways to make information accessible through storytelling, participation and activities that invite people to actively take part.’

Sarah Rowbottam

Reaching new people is important in creating preparedness for disasters, and this was something the project did particularly well. There were several ways minority groups were engaged throughout Refuge.

In 2019 Refuge teamed up with North Melbourne Language and Learning, who assist Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) residents of North Melbourne with English classes. This led to several events such as ‘Words Nourish Neighbours’ – an evening of food and story sharing with community members from Colombia, Iran, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tibet and beyond who are now living in North Melbourne. The event centered around Red Cross Australia’s campaign ‘know your neighbour’.

In 2018 Refuge Pandemic year, artist Kate Sulan undertook a long-term residency at St Joseph’s Flexible Learning Centre, a local school in North Melbourne catering for young people who are disenfranchised and disengaged from education. According to Kate, ‘for the project, they mined their personal experiences of living in crisis and trauma to offer an alternative instruction manual for preparing for a disaster – one that focused on emotional and psychological preparedness’.

In 2021 Refuge, lead artist Latai Taumoepeau worked closely with State Emergency Services and Pacific people to create MASS MOVEMENT, a work in three parts which contemplates the reality of forced relocation of Pacific people from their submerging island nations. ‘Mass Movement: The Departure’ saw a large cohort of Pacific people follow the coordinates of saltwater, freshwater and civic water, to contemplate the humanitarian disaster of displacement. Watch a film about MASS MOVEMENT.

‘Refuge promotes new ways to ground equity, access, dignity and hope in our response to catastrophe through a creative approach. Refuge has been driven by principles collectively determined by an expanding group of participants over its six years: honouring First Nations knowledge, listening to the voices of those most impacted and vulnerable, and collaboration across sectors.’

Sarah Rowbottam

Over the years Refuge had a ripple effect in changing how disasters were managed politically. One of the best examples of this was with the most recent project in 2022, when Arts House worked with the City of Melbourne emergency department on the co-design, planning and delivery of Exercise Torrent.

‘Normally, these kinds of exercise scenarios are for emergency services to rehearse and don’t involve communities’, Sarah Rowbottam explains. However, the 2022 disaster simulation used an arts-based approach to develop a scenario of a recovery phase of a local flood in North Melbourne for emergency management professionals, service providers and community organisations. The exercise was co-facilitated by former Refuge artists and City of Melbourne’s Emergency Management Co-ordinator, Christine Drummond. It modelled a way for creativity and the arts to support community engagement strategies and collaboration in emergency scenario planning.

‘All aspects of the exercise considered community as first responders and found ways to involve them at different stages – the creation of a scenario video, pre-exercise workshops and participation in the exercise itself.’

Sarah Rowbottam

Listen to a podcast that documents the process: ‘Putting the pieces together: how the City of Melbourne is strengthening disaster preparedness through creativity’.

Lessons, tips and advice

‘When the emergency is extended deeper into our way of life, we are forced to turn to new habits and ways of relating to each other. If we can listen to the stories in this short book, and spawn multiple other scenarios, then there is a hope that a preparedness is developed, not just in the infrastructure but also in the imagination, before the next wave.’

Nikos Papastergiadis, researcher on Refuge

• • Having a producer to keep an eye on the entire programme, budget and decisions was critical in succeeding with Refuge as a project.
  • Long-term collaboration is important to make systemic changes. Over the years Arts House experienced that it became more common for artists to be involved as creativity in disaster preparedness became more accepted by emergency services.
  • Approaching all phases of a project with fresh eyes is useful, and the project leaders found that it was best to treat each situation and scenario as specific, rather than using the same template for each year.
  • Evaluation was critical. Through annual evaluations delivered by the University of Melbourne, they could adjust and reinvent the programme each year to respond to participants’ and stakeholders’ expectations. From the 2017 evaluation, they found that more was needed to reach minority groups:

‘There was a realisation that some of the community didn’t participate this year. Some of those who are more vulnerable were missing, some of the people in the high-rise buildings – new migrants, for example – and these are the people who might benefit from [Refuge] the most.’

Evaluation report 2017

Partners and stakeholders

Refuge was supported by public sector institutions, local communities and cultural organisations with a shared aim of creating new models of crisis management. Each year partners would change depending on the chosen disaster scenario.

Arts House

Arts House is a central cultural venue and programme for the City of Melbourne. It creates spaces for artists and communities to gather through art and performance, and projects like Refuge. Arts House managed the overall project including funding, stakeholder, partnership management, artists involvement and emergency services. It also produced and delivered events. As a council venue, it was able to connect with a wide range of sectors from health, security and climate change, and as an arts venue it naturally engaged with artists as well. The Arts House creative producer Sarah Rowbottam kept an eye on the entire program, budget and decisions.

Emergency services

Emergency ervices provided knowledge on disaster management and helped to shape and run each disaster scenario. Three services were particularly involved in the project:

• Emergency Management Victoria, which works to increase the capacity of communities to respond and recover from emergencies, and co-ordinates management between government, agencies and communities.
• State Emergency Services, which consists of volunteers who provide assistance in situations of flood search and rescue, making a difference in their own communities.
• Australian Red Cross, a volunteer-based organisation working to reduce human suffering and strengthen disaster resilience of communities .

The University of Melbourne

The University of Melbourne is focused on social, economic and environmental issues and often works with communities to do so. For the duration of the six-year Refuge programme, the research unit at the University of Melbourne undertook annual evaluations. Evidence was gathered through observation during events, interviews of stakeholders and surveys for participants.

Artists

Arts House engaged over 50 artists who developed projects over the six-year span of Refuge. These projects invited community and emergency services to actively co-create and participate in artworks, experiments, workshops, emergency drills and conversations. Some of the artists involved were visual artists such as Keg de Souza, and artist and researcher Jen Rae or interdisciplinary artists with a focus on interactive elements such as Harry Lee Shang Lun, among many others.

Funding

The annual cost of Refuge varied from around £37,000 in 2016 through to approximately £105,000 in 2021. This does not include production management delivered by Arts House and research contributions from University of Melbourne. The in-kind contributions could be valued at approximately AUD$47,000 in 2021.

Refuge was funded through the Arts House core programming budget and City of Melbourne resources. Over the years, Refuge artists sought additional funding for their projects. This came from a range of sources such as: Emergency Management Victoria, the Australian Government in partnership with the States and Territories under the National Partnership Agreement for National Disaster Resilience; the Victorian Government through the Natural Disaster Resilience Grants Scheme (NDRGS); the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts and funding and advisory body; Creative Learning Partnerships – a Victorian government initiative.

Relevant links

• All project videos
• Reflection from participants at a two-day creative lab
• Refuge evaluation 2019: Displacement (PDF 2.58MB)
• Refuge 2017 evaluation: Heatwave (PDF 1.06MB)
• Reflection on Refuge by Nikos Papastergiadis