In 1925 the YMCA opened its headquarters on this site, on the banks of the Yarra River. In 1983, structural damage caused by the construction of the Roy Grounds designed Arts Centre and Concert Hall meant that the building needed to be demolished. The land was acquired by the State of Victoria as Crown Land and is reserved for arts purposes.
Since October 2013, Testing Grounds has provided Melbourne with an alternative arts space within the arts precinct. It has seen hundreds of artists show their work and has provided a space for experimental and emerging ideas to find a voice.
Testing Grounds has provided a backdrop for education and ideas-generation across a range of subjects — ideas around architecture, urban planning and community development have all been tried and tested on this strange triangle of land. It has allowed artists, students, producers and directors, painters and poets a space to take a chance, to extend their ideas and craft and make significant connections with new audiences. It has also provided the local Southbank community an open space to explore and enjoy, to walk a dog or let children play, or to just sit in a patch of sunlight for a minute and witness the beginning of a new art form.
In November 2016, Testing Grounds re-opened with upgraded infrastructure including 4 dedicated indoor spaces, and a large multipurpose outdoor area.
While the site’s long term future is still currently undetermined, Testing Grounds continues to occupy the site for the short term, providing an alternative place for creative activities, alongside more traditional venues in the precinct.
Testing Grounds is a temporary space for creative practices encompassing art, performance and design. From October 2019 - April 2020 a village of artists occupy the indoor spaces working on major creative projects.
The outdoor grounds are programmed through an open application process that supports interdisciplinary practice, experimentation and courage. Testing Grounds is a place where people at all levels can test, develop and share their work. We encourage both creative and education-related activities.
Articles and case studies
The start of an anomaly is a delicate thing. There are moments in a city’s life that are worth noticing. There are strange seedlings, unusual blooms, that last for a week or month or year and then slip back under the pavement. These are joyous and rare and to be celebrated. Sometimes in just the right conditions it will take root, it will cling to the edge of possible and last a little bit longer than you might think, and in fact it’s there the next time you pass by, to the point that it becomes part of the fabric of a place.
We started with questions: What would happen if we opened the gates? What would happen if we moved in? What would happed if we invited people to join us?
What would it be if artists and designers and dancers and poets had space and time and someone to help them run a cable or rig a light or hang a banner or stage a show?
So we started.
And we found a name. Testing Grounds. Somewhere to try things out. Somewhere to work together.
What followed were more questions: Can I move this? Can I turn that upside down?
Can I run a cable? Have you got a hammer? Can we stay the night? Can I dig a hole? Can I cast these cracks? Can we light a fire, paint that wall, bury a talisman?
One set of questions answered the other. What happened was people came. What happened was people made use of the space, and tried things out, and worked together. And we were building creative infrastructure, but it felt like so much more than that term held.
Edge of Wildness
Testing Grounds as both a place and a program begins at the edge of wildness; it promotes the improbable and finds delight in the less likely. There are ideas about a civil society that reflect on how the least of us are considered, how the edge is considered, how the outside can be given a roof.
Governing superstructure
The framework that helps, that holds and gives shelter, the infrastructure that is the framework for art for creative practice for brave attempts. Understanding that it is at the meeting point of two things that creation happens, art and viewer, wall and floor, me and you.
White Box, Clear Box, Black Box, Open box.
The program of filling a public space, of caretaking and curating, will be governed by the framework, by the art infrastructure, the building will stand back and allow the work to work.
A kit of parts provided, enabling multitudes of action of emergent meaning.
We built a space in the heart of Melbourne’s arts precinct for experimental art, creative development, performance, design education, and public gathering. What had been a vacant block for the better part of 30 years — publicly owned land that had been fenced up and largely forgotten about — has become a site for a unique experiment in programming, in community-making, and in infrastructure for creative practice.
Testing Grounds (as the name would suggest) is fundamentally about testing out ideas. Spanning all creative disciplines from dance to sculpture to cabaret to architecture, the activity constantly happening on site is more often than not about pushing boundaries, taking calculated risks, and playing with ideas. It is an approach to programming that extends to the project itself: the design of the spaces; the insistence on a caretaker on-the-ground every day; the quest to say ‘yes’ to the myriad questions artists ask in their working… Testing Grounds as a project asks how to design infrastructure that nurtures creativity? What is infrastructure beyond architecture? How can it become public space? And how can a project support artists materially, creatively, and - if it isn’t reaching too far - emotionally?
Finding answers to those questions has driven the project from the start, and as it has evolved, the answers found have been made material in the (re)design and maintenance of site itself. [Those answers are also made interpersonal through the team on the ground working with artists to realise their creative vision and talking to the visiting public about the project.]
The Beginning
Testing Grounds started as a creative intervention in unused public space - opening up a fenced-in, run-down vacant block behind the iconic Arts Centre and National Gallery of Victoria for free use by creative practitioners. After running on a shoestring and goodwill for a few years, the project received funding through Creative Victoria to build temporary creative infrastructure - three box-come-atrium structures offering flexible indoor spaces and an outdoor raised steel grid supplying power, data, and useable anchor points across the two-thousand-square-meter site.
Design
The design of the structures on site - both fixed buildings and moveable pieces - is a response to maximising possible uses, aiming for maximum flexibility and utility without prescribing how spaces should be arranged or filled. It has evolved. The first step was as modest as pulling down the fence, opening the gates, and seeing what would happen in a big open space. These humble beginnings grew through some shipping containers of questionable provenance, repurposed wooden pallets, and whatever fit-out could be could be begged borrowed and salvaged. It grew into a series of gallery-come-atrium spaces with big barn doors opening out onto a central open space, gridded overhead with a steel canopy delivering power and data and useable anchor points and surfaces and structures across the site. A shell to be inhabited in innumerable, innovative, and unforeseen ways. The , but still carefully considered. while having as little limit or prescription as possible for how those surfaces and structures and spaces should be used.
Programming
The programming of the site reflects the same ethos - it is always free for artists to use, and gives emerging and experimental artists time, space, and material support to test out new ideas, push their practice in new directions, and take calculated risks. The programming is also always interdisciplinary - an artist-in-residence with a digital art practice might share the site with an experimental dance group and a large-scale sculptor, and we have watched this cross pollination of practices and ideas lead to new collaborations and previously-unimagined creative results.
Program Objectives
Cross programming; seeing what emerges when divergent groups come together on-site and work alongside and with each other.
Development of a flexible and robust creative program, which is not immutable and is free to respond to creativity.
A shortening of the time between when art is created and when art is presented.
Pooling of knowledge, information and resources for sharing.
Program Outcomes
Carefully considered creative projects that are combined with rigorous practice-led-research.
An online archive, documenting and collecting information about Melbourne’s creative community, with a focus on new, experimental and emerging models of creative practice.
A stronger relationship between creative practitioners, their arts precinct and audiences.
More civic agency to be creative.
More experimentation, more innovation and more discovery.
Starting from a place of “yes” we accept as many projects as we can. We program to find value in creative experience, as well as supporting artistic merit and creative excellence, and we value projects that bring a diversity of creative practice, cultures and people to the arts precinct.
Creative Communities
From the perspective of building creative communities, Testing Grounds is an action-research project - we are gathering data about what practitioners want the site for, what they want from the site, what works and what doesn’t work in the infrastructure and the programming - to feed back to the stakeholders who will decide the longer term future of the site. That’s also why we are temporary - a short term scoping exercise to help identify and think through what artists want and need from this kind of art space.
You can read more about the project on our website http://www.testing-grounds.com.au where we have extensive archive of (almost) every creative activity hosted on the site and more in-depth case studies of key projects.
Creative Infrastructure
We have come to think about infrastructure as an adaptable, reconfigurable, evolving kit of parts. An invitation to move, adapt, connect and reconfigure is explicit in the site, the program, the kit of parts, and the attitude with which we manage the project.
It’s fair to say that in recent times the kit has become more sophisticated. These were humble beginnings, not much more than some shipping containers and pallets placed temporarily.
Close observation and engagement with the public and artists on site since 2013 has informed the 2016 upgrade to the infrastructure of Testing Grounds.
Infrastructure as a responsive, adaptable and incomplete assemblage of objects is at the core of our interest in architecture and design. This is an experiment. We are fielding questions, continuously. We are facilitating adaptation continuously.
The written piece will be personal. It will be supplemented with images and drawings to show the infrastructure of Testing Grounds and the ways in which it has been used over the years.
We advocate for the anecdotal, the analogue, the embedded. We acknowledge that this is risky stuff as it can’t be easily summarised with facts and figures. But, we talk honestly and in detail about our understandings of this place; we discuss at length the things we have observed and learnt; and we demonstrate on a daily basis how this informs the project.
For us, we think about Infrastructure as an adaptable, reconfigurable, evolving kit of parts – The suggestive power and enormous potential of an eyebolt, a clamp, a hanging rail, a welded tab, an exterior powerpoint, an exterior fluoro tube, cable tray, Internet across the site, movable walls and screens, projectors, magnets.
An invitation to move, adapt, connect and reconfigure is explicit in the objects and the attitude with which we oversee their use.
It’s fair to say that in recent times the kit has become more sophisticated. These were Humble beginnings. It was Nothing more than some shipping containers and pallets propped temporarily. What animated these objects and allowed them to be used could best be described as a delicate dance through the building code. What followed was a fast-paced response of the infrastructure, and a temporary occupation of 1 City Road, Southbank.
As a project, we are interested in the idea of feedback, and how use - actual, on-the-ground, what-are-people-doing-with-things use - informs what we do with the space, how we change it and frame it and upgrade it. Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s project The Fun Palace has been hugely influential on our practice and the way we think about the combined force of architecture and event.
Public infrastructure must adapt to changing circumstances. Our design practice and our projects must adapt to changing circumstances.
Between the Testing Grounds team, we have lived on the site for over four years. Our embedded experience from its beginning as a bare-bones ad-hoc assemblage of bits and pieces that loosely supported creative projects directly influenced the design of the current infrastructure. All the questions fielded from artists and the public about what they could do, what the site was, and what the project meant over the first two-and-a-bit years of Testing Grounds became key feedback for the design. We had been saturated in public consultation, which inevitably soaked into the design. And that design became feedback to the questions themselves.
It is a project where questions about both the minutiae and the broad scope of the place were taken seriously in designing a built form to house creative practice.
All things that enable things to happen loosely and in an adaptable and expandable manner.
The facilitators and the build structures both aim not limit use.
To instead sit in the background, to be modest and supporting – through change, adaptability and with this comes an attitude, as much as possible of always saying yes.
For us, at Testing Grounds, it is not really a building, it is a kit of parts. The kit has built up over time due to the various requirements and desires of each project that takes place on site – an FM transmitter, a projector, a screen, particular tools, a pile of bluestone, a workshop, a wall, a shower, a table....
And we become the facilitators of this. We are care-takers.
robust, usable workable shed like structure...A roof + a network of services (power, light, water, sound, AV) as a base level of infrastructure, under which lots of extremely diverse things would then be able to happen.
We are still engaged deeply with feedback. Feedback is endless and ongoing and folds into our decisions on a daily basis. And when we re-opened just over 12 months ago, it was our position, that the building had just begun.
We also know the project has a limit, and we are excited about how it might end. “If its successful, it has the seeds of its destruction built in right at the start…”
To instead sit in the background, to be modest and supporting – through change, adaptability and with this comes an attitude, as much as possible of always saying yes.
Feedback
We want to talk about analogue, the anecdotal and the qualitative.
Feedback was endless and ongoing and folds into our decisions on a daily basis.
We want to suggest that through being saturated in feedback about a place for a long time, decisions in relation to this become intuitive.
This is risky business, you can’t evaluate it with data alone. But we can talk honestly about our attitudes and understandings of a place. We can discuss at length the things we have leant and the processes of managing and operating a site and a program.