Blackmarket, from the PVI Collective, is probably not the first good night in King’s Cross to start in a car park. For this immersive, participatory artwork, Sydney’s brashest nightspot and its surrounds stand in for a post-GFC world, where a market collapse has rendered dollars useless and survivors must rely on their wits and what they can carry.
In a dank cranny of the car park I handed over the five items I would take into this maelstrom: a candle, a bottle of water and a fifth of whiskey - for trading, I swear - among them. This harsh new world being no place for niceties, the attendants were gruff and urgent, photographing and uploading my items to a specially issued phone.
Apart from playing eerie music, the phone is used to bark instructions and give directions to find other hustlers willing to make a trade. Hunger, shelter, even romance are provided for. But in this nightmarish world, I had to stick to essentials. I chose drugs and weapons.
The first led me to a hooded woman in black leaning near the fire door of a Darlinghurst alley. I approached furtively and held out my phone. We exchanged a coded handshake, and pressed our phones together, initiating the trade. She turned abruptly towards the fire door and motion for me to follow. Passers by shot glances. This was how I imagined drug deals went down as a kid.
What happened inside the public toilet to which the fire door led I won’t reveal: suffice to say it involved the Rolling Stones, powder, my nostrils and absolutely no illegal activity whatsoever.
Weapons were next, triggering over my headphones the forceful chants of a pack of footballing ultras. Instructions led me to another figure in dark robes, this one absorbed by a newspaper in a cobbled lane. Wordlessly, he laid the paper down and began to make folds, emerging with a “Millwall brick”, working class Britain’s contribution to origami.
I swung the improvised baton hard against a metal rail. I have a bias for online media, but the satisfying clunk it made was the best advertisement for the newspapers I’d heard in years.
Buried in each trade is a larger lesson about excess. Actually, much of what passes for necessary in the world is useless, given value by a market that is itself fragile and illusory. A little suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy the artwork, and it was less thought-provoking than I’d hoped. But the feeling of liberation was undeniable, and stayed with me.
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PVI Collective: Blackmarket presented by Performance Space and Art and About Sydney, Kings Cross, until 6 June
