Runway x disorganising: Pari - Tian Zhang, Rebecca Gallo and Amy Toma
Amy Toma, Rebecca Gallo, Tian Zhang and disorganising
Published October 2022
The twelfth Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from the disorganising project, a joint program initiated by current All Conference members Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects.
Interviewed by Lana Nguyen, Amelia Wallin, Debris Facility Pty Ltd and Sebastian Henry-Jones
Thanks for joining us today, Pari.
We’d really love to hear how Pari came to be. What were the kinds of contexts that inspired its creation, and how would you describe your organisation?
Well, there was no independent contemporary gallery space in Parramatta, and also no artist-run spaces pretty much in the whole of Western Sydney. It was quite shocking actually, when I realised that, because Western Sydney is such a vast area and there are so many artists that come out of this geographic space. It’s also quite dominated by council-run galleries, which certainly have their place within the ecosystem, but there were no independent spaces between the inner west and the Blue Mountains at that point.
We’re motivated by wanting to have a grassroots, community-focused space in this area. And one of the key things was that we wanted to be able to pay artists. I guess we were always looking towards funding to be able to provide that support to artists, in order not to exclude people based on their being able to afford to exhibit. After a very long period of negotiating with council, we managed to rent, with a rental subsidy, a space that’s supported by council. So from the start, we were aiming quite big. And so we became an incorporated association to apply for that funding, in order to get a lease. So we were having to organise at quite a high level before we even started, because we wanted to be accessible and didn’t want to be reliant on artists to fund us.
The point of creating the space from the outset was to support particular types of artists that weren’t receiving enough support. We didn’t want to have finances be a barrier.
And then in terms of how we operate, we have always had a pretty big team of directors.
People have come and gone depending on how their individual careers have gone and their availability. I found that Pari’s a pretty accommodating space in terms of people’s growth. When people join Pari, in whatever capacity, there’s always room to be involved with more. We’re organised in a way that there’s no hierarchy. There’s always room for growth and improvement, bringing people up to different roles and fostering everyone’s individual interests and the skills they would like to work on.
The hierarchy thing’s funny right? Like I’m aware that’s something we definitely want to operate without, but then obviously there are levels of experience and knowledge of the organisation. We’re constantly working through these things.
It’s a tension that we’re really aware of. While there’s no official hierarchy, certainly some of us have been working in Pari for longer, but have also been working in the arts for longer. So we’re always conscious of that, and of sharing knowledge to make sure that it benefits everyone. And also acknowledging that people who are younger have a lot of knowledge and skills that we learn from as well.
And having to be an incorporated association means there are these official roles. You have to have a chair, you have to have a treasurer. So there are these internal contradictions that we’re constantly talking about and thinking through together. And one of the things that we’re still thinking through is to be able to pay ourselves to do what we do here, so that it’s sustainable. But we didn’t want to create one managing role because then it becomes this imbalance of who has knowledge and who has autonomy within the organisation.
It divides the people who contribute into paid staff and volunteers, and from my experiences at other not-for-profit organisations, that was something that always seemed quite bizarre. And especially at the ARI level, where directors do so much, to centralise all of the payment into one person or a couple of people just didn’t seem like how we wanted to work together.
And have you found a solution or are you still working through that conundrum?
We’re still in the pilot phase of a system that we call Honeypot.
It was previously known as ‘Pari Tasker’ [after Airtasker].
It’s like our own internal payment system where there’s the ‘honeypot’, which is a pot of money that is allocated to co-directors performing work, doing certain tasks or roles for Pari. At the moment we’re trialling the system where all co-directors are logging their hours, and we’re essentially reimbursing those hours at the same rate for everyone. So regardless of what the task is, everyone’s time is valued the same.
It means that if this week, I’m working heaps at another job or I have an install, someone else is doing Pari work and they’re getting paid. And then when I have time and someone else doesn’t, then I can do some work at Pari and make some income. It’s trying to create something that also works with that level of flexibility that we all seem to need juggling heaps of different projects and jobs. At the moment, Honeypot comes out of different funding pools that we’ve got. But we are also trying to find ways to generate income so that we can become more independent. That’s a big challenge as well.
Yeah, I think that’s interesting, the problem of creating your own structure and almost mimicking other models, but also, you do need to find your own means of being flexible and distributing that work too. It sounds like Honeypot is one way to address the administrative, bureaucratic labour that is such a huge part of what it is to be a cultural worker. Could you talk about institutionalisation? What’s your attitude with that or how is it useful to you in certain ways, if you are looking to be sustainable, or grow Pari as an entity?
We’ve had so many conversations trying to unpack how we actually do this without replicating how organisations do it elsewhere that wasn’t about just adopting those systems. We’ve tried to spend the time to think about how we would actually make sure that people’s labour is valued. It was a challenge because everything around us forces us into a particular model … funding bodies for example. Just the way that the arts ecology is structured forces us to work in a certain way.
And obviously we’re choosing to operate within the system. We have made the conscious choice that we would apply for arts funding and be answerable to those bodies because it was worth it for us, being in a relationship with council and having to deal with all the bullshit surrounding that. Because we couldn’t afford commercial rent even with funding. So now that we’ve made all these decisions in order to exist, how do we exist within all of these structures in a way that feels radical? I don’t think that there’s room within those structures to be super radical personally, but how can we do things in a way that feels different to what we’ve seen that we know doesn’t work, and that aligns with our values?
How do you balance interdependence and autonomy with your program, while boosting other people’s?
It’s a difficult one. We definitely like partnerships, and relationships with other communities and organisations are really important to us. We tend to come back to what we have to do first. We have limited energy and time, and it’s nice when other organisations reach out, but we still have to do what we do and support the artists we’re already working with.
It’s also being conscious of not holding on to information, of being able to share that with other people and not holding onto connections either. Being able to share those.
West Space, Bus and Liquid all started as ARIs and have moved more into an institutional, professionalised space. And even with something like ‘Disorganising’ there’s so many contradictions. How do you disorganise within a six-month program that has to be acquitted within five months? There are so many trade-offs that exist within the funding system.
Yeah there are definitely trade-offs. I think it can be pushed though. I think that there’s creative ways to do that. And you apply for extensions and variations because shit takes longer. You just say, ‘this just can’t be done in this time’, and they go, ‘okay’.
And interestingly, Pari was fortunate enough to get multi-year funding from Create NSW. And in our first meeting with Create NSW, they actually said, ‘Look, we don’t want to change you. What you’re doing is so different to every other organisation that we’re funding.’ They’re incredibly supportive. They want us to keep working the way that we do because they find it really exciting.
Yeah, we want to have the resources to support artists properly, to support ourselves and each other properly, but to really resist falling into an existing institutional model. And that’s the internal contradiction that we’re trying to hold.
We’re code-switching!
You tell bureaucratic bodies what they need to know, and continue to do things our way. And I guess it remains to be seen how that goes. But reflecting on Pari, what’s been really great is the very robust conversations that we have and particularly who the directors are, because, you know, there’s a couple of us who have worked in a lot of institutions while some none at all.
What’s actually been really great for me, in unlearning a lot of things that I’ve absorbed from working at institutions, is the questions that come from the co-directors who have never worked in them before, who have never really entered or been indoctrinated by the art world in that way. Especially younger voices, asking ‘why are we doing this in this way?’
And you realise that so many things like that are assumed knowledge for you and not actually fundamental. They’re not universal, they don’t have to be that way.
And I don’t think we’ve mentioned this but we don’t vote. So everything that we do, we decide in meetings and we decide together. So big or small, we talk through everything. We don’t do something unless everyone’s on board.
We can have heated discussions in our little Monday night meetings, but regardless, at the end of the day, everyone’s just trying to improve the space and make it more sustainable.
Amazing. Thanks so much for chatting to us.
Amazing. Thank you so much for your generous responses. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Biographies
Amy Toma is a graphic designer living and working on unceded Darug land. She is also a co-director of Pari, an artist-run space in Parramatta where people and communities come together to talk, think, learn and do. Her ever-evolving practice is focused on building community and finding ways to inspire and delight. Her other hobbies include making collaborative playlists and buying books she will never read.
Rebecca Gallo is an artist, writer and organiser based in Sydney. A former artist in residence at Parramatta Artists’ Studios, founding co-director of Pari and member of the artist duo Make or Break, Gallo divides their time between a range of creative and collaborative projects. As both a solo artist and with Make or Break, Gallo has exhibited in artist-run, institutional and commercial spaces, including at the Yokohama Museum of Art (2020), Artspace (2019), Campbelltown Arts Centre (2019) and Firstdraft (2015). Festivals include Cementa, Next Wave and Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School and a Master of Art from UNSW Art & Design. Walking, collecting junk and having slow conversations are possibly the most important parts of their life and work.
Based on Dharug Country in western Sydney, Tian Zhang is a curator, facilitator, writer and collaborative artist working at the intersections of art, cultural practice and social change. Her practice is underscored by conversation, criticality, solidarity and joy. Most recently, Tian was a co-facilitator of Gudskul’s collective studies program at documenta fifteen — living, cooking, eating, cleaning and conversing inside the Fridericianum museum for 50 days. Her text ‘A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts’ was published online by Sydney Review of Books, with subsequent print editions through documenta fifteen’s Lumbung Press and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Canada. Tian is a founding co-director of Pari and part of the Artistic Directorate of Next Wave. She is currently a board member of Utp.
disorganising is a project between West Space, Liquid Architecture and Bus Projects; an open and expanding conversation that looks to experiment with divergent ways of organising and creating. It is a practice of coming together and collectively building an arts ecology that sustains us and our communities.