‘A beautiful kind of realisation for me was that cities are actually organic things; they're not culture on top of nature. They're supported by this huge root system of pipes and channels and aqueducts that source water into a centre that enables a hive to survive.’

Joseph Griffiths’ video installation titled Fountains for Moonee Ponds Creek documents his site-specific sculptural intervention in transforming a stormwater drain into a fountain. Underpinning the project is a long-term engagement with the relations embedded in the creek’s material and political infrastructures; Griffiths worked closely with the community group ‘Friends of Moonee Ponds Creek’, an iteration of the Victorian Environment Friends Network, and drew from his own family history. ‘My great grandfathers built the houses that caused the problems by building too close to it’ he reflects, referring to the flooding and erosion which led to the creek being lined with concrete between 1940 and 1980. The project is grounded in generational memory of the creek’s transformation, marked by a sadness and childhood nostalgia, but also, as Griffiths reflects, ‘amazement in the sheer, brutal, minimalist shapes that came out of it, which are very connected to things in the art world that are very highly praised.’ Griffiths was interested in how the fountain could be used to highlight the entanglement of political, cultural and environmental tensions within the Moonee Ponds Creek—an environment that serves as a recreation space, heavily engineered drainage system and public amenity. 

Griffiths was engaged with the community campaign that called for the creek's restoration,  resulting in a council project to remove 700 tonnes of concrete. ‘It is an amazing symbolic gesture that makes me extraordinarily happy in my bones on one level,’ he says. However, he is cognizant that any ecological benefits to the immediate riparian environment are greatly outweighed by the violence of urbanisation elsewhere.  These restorations, he says, are also underpinned by enduring colonial aesthetics and attitudes. ‘I think the way we approach the environment is governed by ideals of beauty and nature and things that go right back to those sorts of classical and colonial images,’ Griffiths says. ‘I was trying to bring those things into the work to create a space where some of this complexity can be teased out.’

In reimagining the concrete creek as a fountain, the work reflects the aesthetic endurance of the colonial project in imagining nature. Reflecting on the cultural importance of fountains, he cites the Trevi Fountain's large role in middle-class pop culture. ‘If you take time the decode the symbolism in the statuaries, [it communicates] the power and importance of water,’ he says, ‘It’s kind of grotesque, but it’s also an incredible investment in that message.’ While engaging this broader Western sensibility, the work is also aesthetically grounded in the West Brunswick catchment area. ‘The fountains that I knew growing up were this large sort of geyser-style fountains that were positioned in the artificial lake in Queens Park, which is a 19th century English style public garden in Moonee Ponds, on top of the hill above the creek . . . If somebody has been up to queens park for the day, and they're walking back over the freeway with their mum, and realise it's noisy, and they see that big jet coming out of the creek below, then it would be a pretty obvious connection.’ The video work also captures a sense of urgency that is specific to the sculpture's improvisational elements. ‘It was quite different to how a traditional fountain would be experienced within a much more peaceful atmosphere. This had a sort of violent kind or urgent quality to it, which I've tried to maintain in the video—this persistent and slightly irritating racket from the pump.’

The fountain represents a visual point of connection through which to engage with the city's hydrologic infrastructures as part of nature rather than dichotomous to it. ‘The work imagines the city as being a kind organism, or a set of tubes that are linked arteries that pump and filter and draw water through them. The sort of circulation going on often underground is often revealed in these stormwater channels.’ Captured through film, Griffith’s sculptural gesture engages with the contested relations of how the creek is shaped and reimagined by the colonial project but is also uniquely positioned to expose how urban hydrology makes up part of an organic body. ‘My motivation was about relating to that history of fountains, civic infrastructure, water and land art—using those references as ways for people to think longer about what this concrete creek is and what it means,’ Griffiths recounts. The fountain repositions the creek as an alternative town square, offering a new way of thinking about its role in the ecological and social landscape. ‘It is used as a bit of a meeting place where people walk their dogs, ride their bikes and do kind of come across each other, albeit a little bit tentatively because it is a sort of edgeland and people aren’t don’t always feel one hundred per cent comfortable there. It’s like you're not really supposed to be in this flood channel, but it’s this kind of incredible architecture and people use it . . . I wanted to use the fountain to punctuate that space as a way to get discourse happening.’

In installation format, the video work is accompanied by an official-looking PVC binder featuring an imagined facsimile of an unpublished survey by the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works and a series of interviews with community members. ‘Fewer people that are seeing it in a gallery are gonna have a direct connection to the place,’ says Griffiths, ‘and so there’s going to be a different and sort of more formal or slightly objective approach to the scenario, which I think provides a good context through which to focus on the visual and aesthetic archetypes and ideals of the project hopefully made clear between the book and the video’. While Fountains for Moonee Ponds Creek as a sculpture was grounded in place, the video installation format extends the intervention to wider geographic contexts. In thinking through urban hydrology and colonial aesthetics, the work traces the violence embedded in urbanisation more broadly. ‘Whether [gallery visitors are from] interstate or overseas, everyone has experienced some version of this global urban problem’.

(02) Dialogue

Interview excerpt,
Joseph L Griffiths on Fountains for Moonee Ponds Creek

On urban hydrologies as organic

Joseph L Griffiths (JLG):    I was interested in the fountain’s role as a meeting place and a water source before there was household plumbing. People would go to the fountain as they would have a well and take their water for the house. So they were meeting places but also markers of civic control where the government kind of could turn the tap off if they wanted to, right? So there is an implied social control through the provision of this very important resource. On top of this, there was a beautiful kind of realisation for me that cities are organic things; they're not culture on top of nature. They're supported by this huge root system of pipes and channels and aqueducts that source water into a centre that enables a hive to survive. In thinking through the city in this way, the fountain became a visual point of connection to that, at least in terms of our hydrology.

Approaching sustainability from within the colonial project, specific to Moonee Ponds Creek

JLG:    They've announced that they're going to spend millions of dollars removing a very small amount of the concrete from its northern limit around Strathmore. It is an amazing symbolic gesture that makes me kind of extraordinarily happy in my bones on one level. And it's a terrible waste of money on the other because it's unlikely to improve the ecological health of the creek overall, or the way that creek operates in flood events. It costs so much money to do that. It’s great for birdlife—the creeks do serve extremely important corridors for wildlife in general—but for the waterway, it could be too little, too late.

Minor improvements, especially to the riparian environment, I think are worth doing. You know the planting and the revegetation along the banks of these waterways are producing better habitats and more abundant habitats. However, continued urbanisation and housing development do so much more harm to the overall hydrology of the city. So there's a scale problem. I think the way we approach the environment is governed by ideals of beauty and nature and things that go right back to those sorts of classical and colonial images. I was trying to bring those things into the work to create a space where some of this complexity can be teased out.

I wanted the sculptural gesture through the film to position the creek as a fountain as a water source but also as a public space, drawing a direct link to popular aesthetic signifiers like Trevi Fountain in Rome. It’s a symbol of very, very wealthy middle-class pop culture—you go to Rome, you take photos and throw a coin in the Trevi, have a bad pizza—it’s kind of gross, right. But what does the Trevi Fountain actually tell you? If you take time to decode the symbolism in the statuaries, [it communicates] the power and importance of water; it's kind of grotesque, but it's also an incredible investment in that message.

I felt that the fountain could also speak to how, ultimately, the most important thing about the creek is the water in it. Water is endlessly fascinating to humans, and watching the water molecules divide and subdivide and be affected by light and wind is complex enough that we never tire of that. I think that’s why, even in a country where water scarcity and different policies have led to fountains often being kind of maligned things, kind of wasteful colonial decor, they’re still somehow compelling things. They represent how we’re attached to some old-fashioned values around how water is appreciated, which I thought was interesting to lean on—drawing artistic and symbolic archetypes from antiquity and familiar things that people can relate to quite immediately as a form.

My motivation was about relating to the history of fountains, civic infrastructure, water and land art—using those references as ways for people to think longer about what this concrete creek is and what it means.

On engaging community-based practice

JLG:    The stakes are different—you know it matters. Your sense of responsibility to yourself, your people, and your community is different, and that changes how much agency you feel you have. I think that helps to build humility because you're not just speaking for yourself and your ideas and what you think is important. You know you're actually speaking in relation to a group, and I think that this is a healthy balance for artists who can sometimes get a bit self-righteous, especially when it comes to politically motivated work. There isn’t anything wrong with people having strong political commitments. It's fantastic, but what is it that you can bring to that? Why do you feel entitled to speak on that?

When artists and documentary makers are jumping all over the place without a personal connection to most of what they're talking about, it’s a complex kind of thing, but I think it's a typical example of a Western mindset. Such an approach suggests some kind of objectivity is possible — I don’t think it is possible to adopt a journalistic or scientific position without imposing any values.

In teasing out the project’s different angles, from the Friends Group and other community members who I was involved with throughout the process, many of whom I knew growing up, this really delimited what I felt I could do there in terms of making any claims

Working between a site-specific cultural intervention and moving image installation

JLG:    The role of the fountain as a town square as a concept also became very important to the work. [Moonee Ponds Creek] is used as a bit of a meeting place where people walk their dogs, ride their bikes and do kind of come across each other, albeit a little bit tentatively because it is a sort of edgeland and people aren't don't always feel one hundred percent comfortable there. It's like you're not really supposed to be in this flood channel, but it's this kind of incredible architecture, and people use it . . . I wanted to use the fountain to punctuate that space as a way to get discourse happening. I wanted to allow people to hate it or love it, or talk about it. This, to me, was a more important thing that art could do rather than dictate a particular agenda.

For artistic gestures that operate in an urban environment, I think the opportunity is there to do something that isn’t ‘clear’—people don’t have to have the expectations that they might have coming to a gallery. However, I am also an artist and make things that end up in galleries most of the time. So the challenge is to give the gallery public some kind of experience of the important aspects of the project. The Moonee Ponds Creek film was structured around its context as an installation in a gallery. This was a big factor in the choices we made about how long the shots were, how it was edited and how it could be experienced so people could get enough of it in a short time. It is shot and framed and angled in various ways to situate the gesture within the existing infrastructure of the Moonee Ponds Creek, and the location where it’s colloquially known by the Friends Group and other locals as ‘malfunction junction’. It’s a place where the Bell street offramp, Pascoe Vale Overpass and the Broadmeadows train line all intersect at this bend in the creek. There are footbridges and lots of big concrete pylons, and the way these columns occupy space evokes a classicism in a certain strange way. It was important to pick a site where this could be captured in frames. It also had to show the intimate feeling of being within the creek, which is a little unusual about concrete waterways. The work imagines the city as being a kind organism or a set of tubes that are linked to arteries that pump and filter and draw water through them. This sort of circulation going on often underground is often revealed in these stormwater channels

I wanted to make these kinds of art-historical, archaeological and cultural connotations of the Creek visible. The video was framed with that in mind rather than acting as just a sort of raw documentation.