‘Primary Producers’ was a site-specific installation that intersected the
Performance Space as a post-industrial zone, questioning the socio-economic logic implicit to these types of spaces.

During the colonial industrial development of Sydney, Aboriginal middens that surrounded the costal hem of Sydney Harbour were exploited for their high lime content. The shells were incinerated in kilns and the residual lime was used in the mortar and whitewash of colonial Sydney. The middens were seen as “waste dumps” of shells and held no cultural / social significance to the early developers.

On Saturday the 24th of February 2007 the inaugural event at the Performance Spaces new venue in Redfern involved a “shucking off”: inviting an audience to shuck and eat oysters. In what initially appeared to be a kind of large-scale game, 30 red tartan blankets were laid in a strict grid configuration, each blanket seemed like a discreet unit, with gloves, oyster shuckers and two buckets attached to each.

One of the blankets, a bright blue tartan demarked a space for the oyster shell midden to be created. There were three stations for participants to collect oysters, dump shells and get a refill of beer. This created a lot of movement overall, although on a micro level, small pockets of people congregated on the blankets exchanging ideas on how to shuck, perhaps having a tug of war with their implements (as shuckers were threaded through eyelets on the blanket and to each other).

The event was only the first part of Primary Producers. The empty oyster shells were gathered up into a midden then dried and fired to activate the lime content within the shells to create a concrete block. The process referenced the original Aboriginal middens that dotted the coast of Australia. These middens were pilfered by the Europeans to create the mortar used within colonial architecture.