Urban curating : the "interspaces" of art collaboration in Western Sydney

This article examines the modes of emergence of "the local" in particular collaborative art projects in suburban Sydney (Australia) as outflows of singular interfaces between artists, institutions, audiences, and administrators. We begin analytically with the circulations that variously draw on and craft notions of locality and community in two projects staged in western Sydney, both involving nonlocal artists collaborating with business entities and arts institutions. In each case, specific circulations worked to produce a differently spatialized interplay of artists' processes, aesthetic objects, events, performances and dialogues. The article develops a working conception of "interspatiality" that draws on actor network and assemblage concepts to elicit how creative labor entangles people, places, communities, and ways of working and thinking.