Advertising Feature

When I first moved to a house with my kids in Heidelberg West, after separating from their dad, quite a few years ago, I spent a lot of time walking around the area- as I have always and still do spend a lot of time walking.  I quickly became aware that there was a lot of rubbish left laying around in Heidelberg West, on the roads, gutters and in parks and playgrounds. I don’t know if this was something about people in the area not bothering to bin things, or because we were close to Northland, and the rubbish reflected both what was available to people to consume and also the sorts of things people wanted to consume perhaps. I found it a bit despairing at first, but then I started getting into taking photos of the rubbish. This was before the iphone, and I had an early model phone camera which was one of the best ones around at the time. I became quite obsessed with walking around and photographing rubbish. It occurred to me that the discarded packaging I was seeing everywhere was a sort of ‘backdoor’ form of advertising. Whether conscious or not, big companies were advertising their products, in playgrounds, parks and on the footpath, through rubbish. 

 I started to show people my photos when they came to visit, and the kids looking over my shoulder would list the products as I flicked through the photos. If they had friends over there would be a chorus of kids listing the items as I showed their obliging parents my proudly growing photo collection of discarded wrappings. This is where I got the idea from to make a film of these images and record the kids labelling them. I asked my friend Jackie and her son Kai to join us. I put the images into a slide show (no one piece of rubbish was repeated, apart from the valium package) and then recorded the kid’s response to it. Initially I put a track of me playing the old version of Waltzing Matilda on banjo during the part where all the bottles are shown in the creek. I sent this to the Banyule Council, and I received a phone call. The woman from the council wanted to put a slogan on the film at the end saying ‘Don’t Litter’ or some such thing, to play to a festival for teenagers the local council was organising. But I didn’t like this idea. I explained to her that to me it is more about corporations and the hold they have over young minds, and their contribution to polluting the world and the possibility of ‘backdoor advertising’. Putting a ‘don’t litter’ slogan on the end seemed to trivialise it. She was disappointed I think, but in the end she helped me out by setting me up with a local recording studio called Jets, and we re-recorded the soundtrack. I ended up turning the film into an installation, at the C3 Gallery which John Butt was curating- the film played in a loop on an old TV atop a mound of leaf Litter. Jo Mott helped me set it up and get the angle of the TV just right. Arts critic Robert Nelson reviewed the exhibition in The Age, and he said “How tragic that pedagogy should come to this! Called Advertising Feature, this wicked installation by Sandra Fiona Long portrays children as chirpy for all the wrong reasons. They rejoice in their collective familiarity, which has nothing to do with skills-acquisition but simply reveals the penetration of brand-marketing.”

I just pulled this video out again for the first time in years and watched and laughed. I finally have put it on youtube. If you can’t be bothered watching the whole 5.20 minutes- the very end is quite cute and worth skipping to. Imagine this on a loop. The gallery sitters at C3 said they went a bit loopy too.

So here’s to 2015 being a year of transforming our pain and frustration into gold, into something which will be a blessing for everyone, into something which will reveal a little more about humanity to all of us. And the pen, brush, or editing suite will always be more powerful than the assault rifle.