The Longford Project Lab is an ongoing project between Liz Day, Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas exploring global and local connectedness - diaspora and reconciliation between people of Aboriginal and European descent. The Longford Project Lab is curated by Nicholas Tsoutis and Brianna Munting.

The Longford Project Lab follows on from a  residency during January 2014 in Longford Tasmania during which time connections to the community will be established. The residency will be ground work for the lab at Articulate.

The Longford Group is investigating the intersection of family and cultural histories through residencies developing skills through collaboration, community immersion and critical dialogues between the Longford community, Indigenous peoples, artists, writers & curators.The residencies interrogate the ideological, personal and geographical relationships between people, landscape, history and home and the tensions surrounding the group's personal connection to Longford, Tasmania. The residencies will be an interrogation of genealogical, colonial and post colonial histories of settlement and displacement, and community stories.

The residencies provide the opportunity for new collaborative practices to emerge expanding on the Group's previous work, Alchemy 2012. This residency will explore Longford as a point of departure for mapping our colonial and post colonial connections. It will engage with community to discover relations and interconnections of the local and global diaspora and Indigenous peoples. It will document the stories of those who came into Longford, or were always there, and then radiated out. 

By engaging with the participants’ family histories and the Longford residents' memories and their family histories, the research will identify the relationship of these family stories to the larger political and cultural histories of Tasmania and Australia, developing a philosophy of history and an the ethics of responsibility for the present made possible by the past.This opportunity emphasises the importance of meaningful exchange through immersion, negotiation and partnerships in and with cultures and across disciplines.

*image (left)
Geneaological names lines emanating from Longford, Tasmania
© Liz Day, Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough & Noelene Lucas