Memefest: An Innovative Model for Socially Responsive Design & Research

Dr George Petelin, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Dr Oliver Vodeb, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Presented at FORMA 2015, VIII International Congress on Design in Havana

The majority of communication design as practiced in western democracies serves instrumental

interests of the market and is reproducing predatory neoliberal capitalism (van Toorn 1998, 2010). In
his paper, Sustainability as a project of history, Clive Dilnot states: Sustainability is that which most
cruelly exposes design. Nothing reveals more sharply both the necessity and inconsequentiality of
design: its (absolute) necessity as capacity, and its almost complete irrelevance as a value, or indeed
as a profession (Dilnot 2011). Design education mostly produces designers as service providers who
do not have the capabilities to seriously confront the urgent issues of radical uncertainty and
environmental degradation, which are defining conditions of todays societies.
In order to address this problematic state of design, Memefest (www.memefest.org), an
international collective and global network, is engaged in creating situations that have the potential
to engage people in transformative social relations through communication/design and art, largely
focusing on the problems of commercial colonisation of the public sphere (Habermas 1984,
Habermas et al. 1992, van Toorn 1998, Vodeb 2009). Memefest is fostering fundamental change of
communication/design in order to become relevant in these times of radical uncertainty and
environmental degradation. It approaches research as inter/extra-disciplinary and understands
theory and practice as interrelated.
Memefest holds an annual Festival of Socially Responsive Communication/Design and Art and a
special extra-disciplinary conference/workshop that result in radical visual communication
intervention projects focused around a contemporary issue. Started in 2002 in Slovenia, Memefest
conducted three events in Australia in 2012, 2013, and 2014. In 2012 the theme was Debt, in 2013
the theme was Food Democracy, and in 2014 the theme was Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our
Times.
The events were organised on the basis of three main principles: a) that interventions or visual
communications be based on rigorous research, b) that the research and production were carried
out collaboratively, c) that the outcomes are focused towards a sustainable society as well as a
critical reflection on the discipline of Design.

The conference-workshops were each roughly ten days. We began with two days of papers,
discussion, and research then formed groups in order to produce interventions, visual
communications, art works or events that addressed the theme.
The theme of Debt was topical in 2012 due to the fallout from the Global Economic Crisis and to the
Occupy Wall Street movement that commenced in September 2011. Through the lens of
communication/design and art, Debt was analysed as an instrument for social control, economic
warfare and neoliberal slavery (Graeber 2011, Lazzarato 2012). Our own approach was to identify
not only the causes and effects of the crisis but also political tactics related to the crisis and the
history and characteristics of an economy based on debt. After several theoretical papers and
discussions, we conducted a field trip to investigate socio-economic contrasts in Brisbane, Australia,
the city where the conference took place, and to gain visual material and ideas for radical
interventions or critical visual communication projects. The subsequent workshops resulted in a
variety of interventions ranging from posters to on-line animated graphics to performance events in
the city.
The present paper argues the importance of a new workshop-based extradisciplinary approach
(Holmes 2011, Vodeb 2012, 2015) to communication design for social change. It focuses on two
main levels: a) the workshop as a design research method/pedagogy/ intervention in which we
discuss how the main principles behind our approach were developed into an innovative workshop
research methodology/pedagogy, and b) our ground breaking collaboration with Australian
Aboriginal people in 2013 and 2014 on the Food Democracy and Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in
Our Times projects. We conclude by discussing the unique design intervention outcomes of the
workshops and contextualising them in the light of design innovation for social change.
The workshop
Workshopping is a recognised design research methodology as well as an established medium for
education. Memefests history is tightly connected with workshops. To a great degree it was inspired
by Project Propaganda, an intensive and experimental workshop-based summer school held in
Slovenias coast region in the years 1999-2001 initiated and led by than undergraduate student
Oliver Vodeb and Slovenian illustrator and visual communication design professor Zdravko Papic.
The workshops were the first successful attempt in Slovenia to bring together disciplines of design
and social sciences in an interdisciplinary process and to research the potentials of such
collaboration in the light of social and environmental change. The aim of Project Propaganda was to
show the propagandistic nature of dominant communication design and advertising and develop an

alternative through a socially engaged and critical process, involving students, educators, and
professionals from different disciplines, which aimed at researching and creating real
communication design campaigns for social and environmental change. Project Propaganda
conducted two major campaigns, the first was Against torture for Amnesty International and the
second was Prohibition Blinds, the first national campaign to reveal the harmful effects of drug
prohibition as an instrument for social control.
As a mentored process, the projects outcomes were the work of students but the level of quality
made it clear that it is possible to create conditions that generate results comparable in professional
accomplishment to those of the mainstream industry.
Memefest started in 2002 with a festival-based friendly competition which has remained a strong
component of the workshop model. The object of this competition was to submit design projects
for mediation through Memefests internet site and to gain thoughtful critical feedback from
appointed mentors as well as responses from peers. A tactical media workshop series in Colombia at
Universidad Caldas (2003 and 2007) and a workshop mapping the difference between social
marketing and socially responsive communication in Nijmegen (2011) in the Netherlands
significantly contributed to the further development of the workshop model. The Nijmegen
workshop was particularly strong as it involved a large international interdisciplinary group of
participants who had ranked highest at the Memefest Friendly Competition. This workshop especially
confirmed the strength of the workshop concept built around a collaboration of different disciplines
and knowledge production as had been previously conceptualised by Project Propaganda.
As Oliver Vodeb moved to Griffith University Queensland College of Art as a full time academic,
Memefests workshop model started also to evolve theoretically. Holmes texts on extra-disciplinary
investigation as a new institutional critique and on the logic of the current social movements
(Holmes 2011) proved especially insightful as the driving principle of Memefests operation became
not only a contribution to social and environmental change through public communication design,
but also a contribution to the change of the dominant design discipline that had to be largely done
through institutional critique.
The workshop model itself became investigated more and more theoretically and practically over
the last three years. Memefest organised yearly events, which were part of the larger festival and
connected to the friendly competition. The events included a symposium, the workshop, and a
public intervention. The three parts were interconnected and designed to influence a particular
educational and research experience.

The events were organised on the basis of three main principles: a) that interventions or visual
communications be based on rigorous research, b) that the research and production were carried
out collaboratively, c) that the outcomes are focused towards a sustainable society as well as a
critical reflection on the discipline of Design with the aim to actively change it.
The philosophical principles developed by Memefest since 2002 are very well articulated through
Holmes concept of extra-disciplinarity which is based on bridging institutionalised disciplines with
marginal, critical and radical social movements.
[] the notion of reflexivity now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an
attempt to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to open up new possibilities
of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment. This back-and-forth movement, or
rather, this transformative spiral, is the operative principle of what I will be calling extradisciplinary investigations. (Holmes 2009, p.100)
Memefests approach to extra-disciplinarity focused on three disciplines: connecting design with
sociology and media and communication studies, in order to remedy designs lack of understanding
of its social role, its communication approaches, and principles of media, and develop a new position
with strong generative potentials. By 2004, Memefest started to involve art in its project of social
change as it launched the worlds first participatory art category within its friendly competition. In
the next years the interdisciplinary model grew even more as the festival generated participation
from the areas of philosophy, political science, economics, and other disciplines and Memefest
became open to any field that could be brought in productive relation to the themes that were
researched. Our involvement and interest in radical social movements with highly experimental and
expressive aesthetic practices were bringing us in touch with numerous extra-disciplinary potentials,
which Brian Holmes describes in the following terms:
The extra-disciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations on terrains as far
away from art as finance, biotech, geography or psychiatry, to bring forth on those terrains
the free play of the faculties and to carry out a lucid and precise critique. These are
deliberate and delirious experiments, unfolding by way of material forms, conceptual
protocols and situations of social exchange. Satire, hallucination and political activism go
hand in hand with careful study and technological sophistication. (Holmes, 2009)

These potentials had been explored, although in a less articulated way, since 2002, but the
workshops from 2011 started to integrate this position in a very strategic manner and connect them
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through a network-based collaboration with marginal countercultural movements, while at the same
time intervening in the institution of the universities design departments.
The Memefest workshop in the years 2012, 2013, 214 followed a 2-3 day intensive symposium
whose aim was to thoroughly investigate the given themes: Debt in 2012, Food Democracy in
2013 and Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our Times in 2014. The symposium was comprised of
presentations and following discussions by academics, students, alternative professionals, activists,
and members of the local community from different fields of knowledge production. Based in the
design departments at Griffith University in 2012 and 2013 and at Swinburne University of
Technology in 2014, the workshops were heavily design-oriented. Participation at both workshops
was by invitation only. Oliver Vodeb and George Petelin, both at that time academics at Griffith QCA,
curated the participants in 2012 and 2013 and Oliver Vodeb and Lisa Gye, as academics at
Swinburne, curated in 2014. Following the extra-disciplinary model we invited a very diverse group
of participants and connected the institutional participants with the countercultural and network
based participants. Three authors of the most provocative works submitted to the festival one in
each category: visual communication practice, critical writing and participatory art were invited.
The most engaged, most interested students from design, social sciences, art, and photography from
Griffith and Swinburne were invited each year along with relevant academics. Members of the local
communities of Brisbane and Melbourne who had demonstrated an interest in social reform were
also invited to participate.
For the 2012 Memefest dealing with Debt, the workshop worked on a more experimental and
speculative basis. Debt is a very abstract and complex issue and while we researched debt in
Brisbane we did not work with one particular social activist group, but approached the city of
Brisbane from a perspective of self-initiated intervention. The 2013 Food Democracy workshop
began collaborating directly with an Aboriginal activist group - The Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign
Embassy, and in 2014 the Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our Times workshop from its outset worked
together with The Indigenous Grandmothers Against Removal as well as with other Aboriginal
activists from various networks.
The symposium provided the research platform for the following workshop. Presentations covered
philosophical questions regarding the nature of Dialogue and political problems of dialogue with
particular attention to the need for intercultural dialogue with Indigenous people. The workshop
participants were then assigned to groups. The groups were created on the basis of the participants
diverse profiles. The aim was to create groups with a high level of balance in terms of strength,
experience and profile, which would be able to act like self-sufficient
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communication/design/intervention studios. It was crucial that the groups were designed according
the extra-disciplinary principle of connecting a wide range of disciplinary profiles, theory, and
practice as well as bridging academia with radical networks. The groups were predefined and put the
participants in the situation where they had to find ways to collaborate in a given situation with a
particular group of people.
Each group had two mentors who led the process working towards strict deadlines and within a
limited budged ranging from 500- 1000 AUD per group. These mentors were members of our
network who had collaborated with Memefest in the past.
Groups discussed the topic, decided on their own approach, and presented and discussed their work
on a daily basis in terms of concept, strategy, production, and implementation.
Creating a dynamic that resembles a socially responsive studio as a whole and within each group, the
workshops logic connected the free flow of the self-initiated and experimental approach usually
employed in activist-driven design art and communication projects with an educational ethos as well
as with the pragmatics of professional production.
The Memefest workshop aims for education and action without guarantee - real, meaningful, and
important risk-taking: for politics does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged
good but when you act, without guarantee, for the good of allthis is to take the risk of the
universal interest (Rose 1999: 62). Such risk-taking minor politics operate on the level of everyday
life, its situations and its potentials. They are part of extra-disciplinary investigation and are
experimental and imaginative in nature:
If one were trying to characterize the creativity of what one might term, after Deleuze and
Guattari, a minor or minority politics . . . one would examine the ways in which creativity
arises out of the situation of human beings engaged in particular relations of force and
meaning, and what is made of the possibilities of that location. These minor engagements
do not have the arrogance of programmatic politics perhaps even refuse their
designation as politics at all. They are cautious, modest, pragmatic, experimental,
stuttering, tentative. They are concerned with the here and now, not with some fantasized
future, with small concerns, petty details, the everyday and not the transcendental. They
frequently arise in cramped spaces within a set of relations that are intolerable, where
movement is impossible, where change is blocked and voice is strangulated. And, in
relation to these little territories of the everyday, they seek to engender a small reworking
of their own spaces of action. (Rose 1999: 279280)
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Memefest operates in this space and intervenes in existing educational situations within the formal
institution in order to create potentials for ethical and political engagement through public
communication as well as to create ruptures in the existing education and profession of design
within the institutional context of the university.
This intervention in the university context we think is important because university design education
primarily mirrors market interests and creates design as a service-providing culture that produces
professionals and experts instead of (practical) intellectuals.
Antonio Gramsci advocated for a type of intellectual that would not primarily operate in the
institutions and apparatuses that are considered to be the legitimate producers of knowledge in
society, such as universities, media etc. (Gramsci 1965). He advocated what he called an organic
practice of intellectuals. In his opinion, intellectuals should come from working classes and
knowledge should be created through action.
This process should be organic and strongly embedded in class struggles of the proletariat. The
organic intellectual would have to give a lot of attention to how to articulate the struggle while using
a wide range of possible strategies. Gramsci advocated that such an intellectual should be seen as a
different type of researcher, one who is maybe even more valid because of their action and political
integrity (Gramsci 1965).
Memefest adopts Gramscis stance towards inclusiveness of non-academic intellectuals, but rejects
the necessity of a continuing distinction between organic intellectuals and those in a profession.
Todays precarious situation for creative workers produces parallels between communication
designers of today and Gramscis proletariat. To a large degree, communication designers work in
precarious conditions which, in many parts of the world, involve oppression equivalent to that
suffered by the proletariat in Gramscis day. But, even more than that, universities in the western
world are also increasingly run on precarious labour through contract work and sessional labour.
Thus there are increasing grounds for solidarity between institutionalised intellectuals and organic
intellectuals.
In order to work towards contextual and relational learning informed by critical theory, pedagogy,
and practice, our workshop method proceeds according to the following steps:
a) research in a particular topic building on insight gained by means of the friendly
competition. This can be done independently or in class, in the case of students who
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work on the friendly competition as part of their education in the official curriculum, and
then at the Memefest symposium.
b) research to understand what is the relation between design, the design profession, the
designer and a particular theme.
c) Development of a personal understanding and position to the problem through dialogue
d) collaborative development of communication design solutions addressing specific
problems outlined by Memefest
e) contextualization of the work through implementation/ intervention in the public
sphere.
This method allows us to a) research a topic outside of the commercial paradigm within which
design usually operates, questioning the role of design in society, its purpose, and its effects b) relate
design and the profession to issues to which it normally does not get related although it is playing a
crucial role in their manifestations, and discuss how design as a profession gets constructed c)
involve participants personally, encouraging them to step out of the client service providing position
and think about their own values in relation to design d) develop socially responsive communication
approaches e) connect designers with socially engaged non-institutionalised networks and other
disciplines.
The culture of work within the workshop is highly egalitarian as the values of the process are aligned
with critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltodano, Torres 2008; Giroux, 2011; Freire, 1970), especially
regarding distributed knowledge, collaboration, sustainability, friendship, solidarity, respect,
dialogue, and personal and social responsibility. This work ethic has widened and developed over
the years, particularly through our collaboration with Aboriginal networks in 2013 and 2014 as the
following section of our paper will elaborate.
Indigenous collaboration
This next segment of our paper addresses how Memefests extra-disciplinary collaborative research
and design workshops enabled us to begin a process of intercultural dialogue with Australian
indigenous people that resulted in the production of visual communications that were both
politically meaningful and socially beneficial.
At the first Memefest conducted in Australia, on the theme of Debt, the issue arose of the debt of
the colonising culture to Australias Indigenous people. It was resolved that at the next Memefest,
Indigenous issues would be given priority.

Consequently, in 2013, the theme of Food Democracy (Geyrhalter, 2005; Shiva, 1999) not only
explored various issues related to food on a global scale, but also focused on immediate local
instances of these issues related to an Indigenous organisation in our own vicinity, the Brisbane
Aboriginal Sovereignty Embassy (BASE).
BASE is an activist organisation composed mainly of Indigenous Australians campaigning against
their dispossession by colonial powers. And, as BASE also operates a food delivery service to
underprivileged families, we decided to approach them to help us explore issues surrounding the
distribution of food.
In adherence to our foundational principles, we invited the members of BASE to share their
knowledge and problems with us and offered to form a partnership of equal collaboration that
would result not only in politically critical outcomes but also in outcomes beneficial to their food
program. Our egalitarian mode of operation proved sufficiently congruent with the protocols of
respect and consultation on which Aboriginal society is based (Petelin, 2009) to establish mutual
trust. Thus, as well as achieving immediate outcomes, we formed a lasting relationship with BASE
and learned a great deal from them about alternative principles of social organisation.
This cooperation uncovered a complex of issues that trouble Indigenous people in Australia and the
communication breakdowns that exacerbate these problems. So, first we will briefly outline these
problems and then comment on how the principles that framed our communication approach
aligned with the communication style traditional to Australian Aboriginal people. Finally we will
describe what kinds of design and visual communications resulted from our collaboration.
After 40,000 years of continuous occupation of the Australian continent (Flood, 2004), its Indigenous
people, referred to also as Aboriginal, were invaded in 1788 by the British without any negotiation or
formation of a treaty. This was deemed by the British to be legitimate because Australia was
considered Terra Nullius not populated by anyone capable of free and independent ownership of
land(Frost, 1981). The connection of Aboriginal people to land remains to this day a source of
misunderstanding that perpetuates their mistreatment by government. The form of nomadic
existence that characterised Aboriginal people, and to an extent still does, is not aimless wandering
but a cycle of pilgrimage and subsistence within geographic perimeters prescribed by Indigenous
tradition and law (Memmott, 2007). Their land was the source of all their knowledge, their religion,
and their identity (Berndt, 1974) in a more profound way than that of any European.
This misunderstanding of the nature and depth of Australian Indigenous culture led to various
government efforts to civilise them or to assimilate them to European culture. Amongst these
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strategies was the herding together of people from disparate tribal and language groups, away from
the location that was to them the source of all meaning, into Christian missions that later became
known as reserves. Another strategy, instituted first in 1937, was the removal of children of mixed
race from their parents for placement with white foster parents or in orphanages (Read, 2008).
These practices have now been the source of much anguish for adults referred to by historians as
The Stolen Generations who try to recover their birth family connections and their lost cultural
heritage.
The members of the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy symbolically protest the denial of their
culture by meeting each week around a traditional campfire in an inner city park in defiance of city
fire ordinances and regular attempts by Police to break up their meeting. BASE also stages public
meetings and protests in response to government policies - activities that have resulted in a media
image of their always being in conflict with authorities. However, inclusive, non-confrontational and
benevolent aspects of BASE, such as their food program, escape media notice.
Memefests collaboration with BASE began around their campfire. This circular arrangement, unlike
the hierarchical lectern or podium style of European discourse, implies that all participants have an
equal right to speak and deserve equal respect for their area of expertise. It does not mean that all
opinions are equal. In precolonial Indigenous society every individual was defined by their unique
combination of totemic relations to aspects of their natural environment (Berndt & Berndt, 1988).
Thus each person had a unique area of authority complementary to those of the other members of
their community (Strehlow, 1962). Two principles tend to govern all Indigenous social relations:
what they refer to as respect and protocol. Respect in Aboriginal parlance means that every
individual is included equally in society whatever their plight or circumstances. This means that
everyone is considered to have some unique knowledge and authority that is relevant to the whole
group. Protocol means that one must not overstep their own realm of authority without permission
from someone who has that authority. In practical terms, this means that you should always consult
others and know whom to consult. In particular it requires that you ask for permission to step on
another communitys territory and do so through an intermediary. Translating that to contemporary
circumstances, the members of BASE listen to and discuss with anyone who approaches them
appropriately to join their circle. The campfire circle, however, belongs to broader network of
constituents so decisions on matters can be deferred to elders, referred to as aunties or uncles, or
to a member of their society considered to have knowledge or ultimate authority related to that
particular issue. Unlike European democracy, there is a tendency for decisions to be made not by a

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majority at the actual meeting but through community consensus concerning whose authority is
legitimate in this instance.
Memefests adherence to equal and collaborative participation and its recognition of different
realms of technical, creative, and intellectual expertise proved remarkably compatible with this
Indigenous style of communication. Aboriginal people are constantly approached by European
experts who blunder in without permission to research them and tell them how to lead their lives.
In our case, we simply asked how we can collaborate with them and would they be willing to work
with us to create visual communications that would address, or help to redress, problems related to
food. The lack of colonialist arrogance in our approach is probably what won us the trust and
continued cooperation of Indigenous people for the next Memefest in 2014. This was assisted by the
fact that two intermediaries, members of BASE who had met Oliver Vodeb during the Occupy
Brisbane campaign, had been approached and were able to vouch for his sincerity.
The design solutions that came out of the 2013 interaction fell into two types: those that
highlighted, critiqued, or satirised social injustices and those that assisted the creation of a
microtopia by helping to improve BASEs food service and the communication of its ideals to the
wider community.
For example, as well as other more general critiques related to food democracy, one group made a
YouTube parody of the Basics Card, a demeaning government method of controlling how and where
Indigenous people spend their income (Basically Fucked - YouTube, n.d.). Memefest also designed
a web site to promote a positive image of BASE in contrast to media sensationalism. Indigenous
BASE members were photographed in counter-stereotypical professional circumstances, posters
were made to publicise BASE and its food program, and a food event giving away kangaroo meat
hamburgers at the nearby supermarket was staged to promote dialogue and help to engage the
good will and assistance of a local non-Indigenous community in proximity of the park where the
sacred campfire ceremony was conducted each week.
A sinister fact however emerged in the course of this project and that was that BASEs food
distribution program had deeper political reasons to be important. The abduction of children from
Aboriginal families by government authorities, commonly believed to be a thing of the past, was
revealed to be an ongoing practice. These abductions were no longer explicitly based on race, but
could be made on the basis of any judgement by a social worker that the family was dysfunctional or
that a child was not adequately cared for. One of the chief criteria according to which such a
judgement could be made was the amount of food in the family refrigerator. Aboriginal parents,

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typically belonging to a low socioeconomic group, were then faced with legal processes of which
they had little understanding and with which they had little financial ability to deal.
The following Memefest, themed Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our times (Hunt & Vodeb 2014),
held in 2014 at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, allowed us to explore issues of
communication through dealing directly with a crucial failure of intercultural communication in
Australia that results in systematic abduction of children from Indigenous families by the
government a process referred to as The Stolen Generations (Read 2008). This time, our relation
with BASE and the Indigenous network allowed us to collaborate with a group called Grandmothers
Against Removals Indigenous women who try to raise awareness of this issue and conduct a legal
campaign against government abductions. The creative outcomes of this project focused on
exposing the mass-mediated misinformation through which these abductions are rationalised and
on designing ways to restore authentic, especially dialogic communication on an inter-personal
human (Levinas 1969, Buber 2004, Habermas 1984, Vodeb 2008) as well as on a mass public level.
Thus we focused from the beginning of the workshop on dialogue with Indigenous people. On the
first day, we began by asking all the participants (approx. 200) to form a circle, in Aboriginal fashion,
to introduce themselves to the whole group, and, at the symposium, Indigenous people spoke about
their issues alongside academic papers and accounts of professional design practice. The main issue
that emerged, this time explicitly, was the removal of children. Two representatives of an Indigenous
group called Grandmothers Against Removals particularly talked about the prevalence of this heartwrenching process and the systematic way in which these children were separated not only from
their parents but also from their community and culture. Children could apparently be removed on
any pretext that indicated deviation from conventional European-style middle-class upbringing.
Cultural differences were often interpreted as neglect (Keen, 1991) and malicious reports by
neighbours were often enough to precipitate government action.
The theme of Dialogue drew our theoretical attention to differences between authentic dialogue
and what passes for dialogue: pseudo-dialogue. The two goals that mainly characterised projects
dealing with the removal of children were thus, first, to expose inaccuracies and insincerities in
government pseudo-dialogue about indigenous issues and, second, to create opportunities for
genuine intercultural dialogue on this intensely human issue.
One dramatic way that mass intervention in Aboriginal communities was justified by the Australian
government to the general public was to claim the prevalence of sexual abuse in these communities.
The 2007 Northern Territory Intervention (Australian Government, 2007) which allowed the

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Australian government to send in the military and to conduct health checks in remote communities
(and later declassify Aboriginal land in favour of mining interests), was based on a report called
Little Children are Sacred (Northern Territory, Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal
Children from Sexual Abuse, Wild, & Anderson, 2007). Although there was serious questioning of the
accuracy of the report, of the way the mass intervention was handled, and of its outcomes (Amnesty
International, n.d.), the public impression remained that Aboriginal people abuse their children.
Memefests research into the governments own statistics however found that Aboriginal children
were in fact less likely to suffer either sexual or physical abuse than non-Aboriginal children and that
the chief threat to the welfare of Aboriginal children was socio-economic disadvantage (Australian
Institute of Health and Welfare, 2014). This enabled the creation of visual communication devices
such as posters and stickers that would simply present this fact together with the location of its
government confirmation. These designs were then deployed around the city of Melbourne and
surreptitiously found their way onto shop windows, and in places such as bars, railway stations, and
university lecture theatres.
One group designed a cheap photocopier-reproducible foldout containing succinct instructions on
how to deal with child abduction by a social worker that could be distributed by Aboriginal people at
protest meetings and demonstrations. Another notable project challenged the groups own
Eurocentric mindset by engaging people in a game involving role play themed around colonisation
and disempowerment.
Although most Australians have an opinion about Aboriginal people, who comprise only
approximately 2.4% of the Australian population (1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2008, n.d.), many
have never met an Aboriginal person, and few have ever had a sincere intimate conversation with
one. To counter this alienation, the notion that dialogue is more than mere communication and is
not to be confused with negotiation (Buber, 2004; Levinas, 2000) was pursued through video. An
intense close-up recording of a dialogue with one of the Grandmothers Against Removals conveyed
her direct human appeal in a way generally possible only through face-to-face contact.
Conclusion
In conclusion, these are the reflections we made about the development of Memefests workshop
approach. The principles that guided Memefest from its beginning have become more emphasised,
clearly defined, and articulated.
The principles of collaboration and respect for complementary knowledges and skills have become
even more entrenched in our philosophy as a result of our interaction with Aboriginal people. The
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importance of research and intellectual leadership in our design workshops remains undiminished.
Design allows theory to be put into action and actions to be critiqued and theorised. The experiential
dimension of Memefest workshops ensures that the intellect also responds to affect and not merely
to instrumental logic. While, as mentioned earlier, we see each intervention as minor politics that
may contribute only a little to changing the world, we recognise the profound pedagogical effect this
experience has on participants and on the cumulative effect it may have on professional practice.
It has therefore become clearer than ever before that one of our tasks has to be to project a
meaningful alternative onto our profession and its institutions, and that to do this, Memefest has to
interact with various realms of intellectual endeavour while also maintaining its independence from
them. By being self-organising and network-based, Memefest is able to mediate intellectual
leadership from both academic networks and alternative cultures of knowledge production, without
being subject to the limitations of either realm. This means that its projects are able to respond to
grass-roots social movements and problems in a way not currently possible within institutions and
thus provide a model for their improvement.
------------------------------------------Dr Oliver Vodeb is founder of Memefest and principal editor and curator of the Memefest Festival of
Socially Responsive Communication/Design and Art (www.memefest.org). He is an academic at
Swinburne University of Technology, Communication Design Department where he is focusing on
communication design for social futures and critical studies of advertising. His books include Socially
Responsive Communication and InDEBTed to Intervene, Critical Lessons in Debt, Communication, Art
and Theoretical Practice. He is currently working on a book on food democracy and a number of
interventions in support to the Australian Aboriginal struggle against colonisation.
Dr George Petelin is a critical theorist and digital photographic artist who publishes on Practice-led
Research as well as on the politics of Visual Practice. He has worked as an art critic for Australias
national newspaper The Australian and is a past president of the Australian branch of AICA, the
Association des Critiques dArt. For ten years he coordinated postgraduate studies at The
Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane Australia where he also helped found the
first Bachelor of Visual Art degree in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art (BoVACAIA) designed
for Aboriginal students on Indigenous principles arrived at after six years of discussion with the
Aboriginal community.

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