Jus Diddit: A Community Archive Unfurling is stubborn because DIY must be stubborn. It exists on precarious budgets and feeble resources, despite the wilful blindness of major institutions. And DIY is made manifest at Pari, an ARI situated on the outskirts of Sydney, in relation to but independent of inner-city Sydney’s purported cultural prominence.
Taking Western Sydney as its starting point, Jus Diddit asks: what does it take to create vibrant communities and resonant subcultures, and where do you start? For the local ravers, punks, and queers celebrated and archived in Jus Diddit, the answer is simple: they just did it. Curators Levent Can Kaya and Carmen Mercedes Gago Schieb speak in the language of the scenes because they inhabit these scenes.
And there’s a lot of talking in Jus Diddit. Gago Scheib and Kaya conducted and filmed several interviews with central figures of local punk, hardcore, rave, and drag scenes, which they put on display for us to listen to alongside ephemera from these scenes. By nature, DIY punk shows, raves, and queer and drag artists have had to exist on the margins and evade regulation or visibility for their safety. Because of the curators’ unique positionality and compulsions for these scenes, the interviews reveal an agile and sensitive insight into these subcultures.
Laura Luciana is an artist and writer working on Dharawal and Gadigal land. She is currently undertaking Art Theory Honours at UNSW A&D and is thinking about talking, creative labour, and jerking off.
