YEAR: 2004
ROLE: Member/Visual Director
FORMAT: Political Party Launch/Conceptual Artwork
WITH: Team DES (Tony Fry and Ann-Marie Willis) & Jim Gall (Gall and Medek Architects)

WHAT: Party 25 involved the conception and public launch of a radically new form of political party during that year’s Australian general election. The entire project was also intentioned as a conceptual artwork. Party 25 avoided conventional party-political approaches and was neither a protest group nor an advocacy organisation, but rather a new form of political association that confronted what we understood as the debilitating limits and impotence of contemporary parliamentary democracies in transitioning our societies towards ecological sustainability.

Party 25 was based on responding to one fundamental question which all of its policies served - “how does humanity get to the 25th century?” By basing itself on a dramatically long-term approach uncommon within conventional politics it raised the proposition that humanity does not have an assured future. Party25 therefore shaped its agendas around the idea that any future now lies in human hands and so how humanity treats the ecologies on which it depends innately determines the quality of the inseparable relationship between its being, and the being of the biophysical world.

The project was conceived through a number of discussion papers, workshops and creative works and was launched publicly at the Judith Wright Centre Brisbane accompanied by a full length showing of evocative imagery, text and sound, a series of speeches and the launch of a succinct web presence.

Through the website and this party launch a community of interested participants and creative practitioners was sought who then would form the basis of a nascent community of change.

SHOWING HISTORY:
1: Public Launch Event, 29 September, 2004, Arterial Group Offices, Judith Wright Centre, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. Curated by Team DES.

Party 25 Manifesto Website