For La Trobe University’s Biannual Façade Commission, artist Roberta Joy Rich brings the dark corners of archival material into the light.
On the glass frontage of the La Trobe Art Institute in Bendigo, Rich has created Lying Inside, a work using sound, image and text to explore South African diaspora. During the development process, Rich spent time looking at cultural objects housed within the university’s ethnographic collection and speaking to the local migrant community. To communicate the effect of this experience, Rich produced an inverted photograph of La Trobe’s underground storage complex and its shelving, and overlaid images of cowry shells sourced from the collection onto the facade.
“The shells dance around a reproduction of a letter that Roberta and I found in the administrative documentation from when the Southern African materials were donated to La Trobe University,” explains curator Jacqui Shelton. “The letter is from 1993, and states the materials are essentially of no value, and have been kept in poor storage condition for years.” Designed to challenge and question institutional collecting practices, Shelton says Rich’s work serves as a catalyst for further dialogue about “access to knowledge, who holds knowledge and power, and how unearthing archival material can re-work these boundaries of power.”
In addition to the visuals, a sound component can be accessed via a QR code on site. Here viewers can listen to Rich speaking with a member of the Zulu diaspora as they handle and reconnect with ancestral materials, bringing them back to life by understanding their deeper meaning. As the artist says, the completed work is part of “a process that breathes oxygen and life into Southern African cultural materials that have been silenced for far too long.”
Roberta Joy Rich: Lying Inside
Biannual Façade Commission
La Trobe Art Institute
On now—19 January
This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 print issue of Art Guide Australia.
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