 Kia ora. I'm John Link, this is Carrie Ann Lee. I'm Dajihau, tena katoa. I'm Carrie Ann. Yeah, we're just going to talk about this project that we've both been involved in since its inception around the early 2000s. It's a community collaborative archive project that started out as a physical archiving collection process and in the last few years has migrated into an online format. We're going to start with who we are, sort of as contemporary practitioners, then zoom back to the past and then bounce into the future and how the project is shaping up currently. So, just as a starting point in 2011, the sort of collective ephemera and collections of up-the-punks spanning 35 years of punk culture in Wellington was sort of migrated online as a wiki. We're pretty much the luddites of this conference, I think, so I won't bother trying to explain to you what a wiki is. Yeah, there's sort of ironies with sort of how we came to be as far as the project, the punks and where we came from. How John and I know each other. We ended up going to school together. We went to design school in the late 90s in Wellington at the School of Design, Massey. And I think it was a really interesting point for us to capture that in our respective practices and almost like the sort of philosophical backbone for the project. I think in some ways the sort of premillennial kind of angst, that sort of transition between analogue hand-rended materials and media into digital. Cross-platforming between the two is interesting. I think myself, I'm an artist designer. I think I make an educator practitioner. And I work digitally. This is one of the pieces of work print from a recent art show that I had at White Space Contemporary in Auckland. So I sort of do a lot of work sort of between the realms, but around issues. And these are some lightbox tables that were commissioned through Tepapa. So the works that I do make zines. And trying to involve as many people into the process as possible. So there's a research project I did called Homemade, which draw upon social histories around the Cantonese, Chinese settlers in Wellington. And how difficult that sort of almost underground history was. It was sort of something that was close to me in my own sort of research, but very difficult to find in terms of archival research materials. So having to have one-on-ones and a lot of oral history research methodology coming in to try and upheave and bring these stories up. Yeah. And I think maybe you want to talk about that whole punks sort of connection. I think the social narratives and things that we're interested in our contemporary work is very much something that up the punks and what we're exploring as undergrads years ago is all about. And that connectivity, being able to contribute to, I guess, a sort of cultural community within it as well as sort of long view wise, sort of in and outside of it knowing the sort of language and the, I guess, the audience, I think, being part of this. So sort of, John put together the slides so there's a whole lot of funny old posters. Like these ones that are the old punk-fest poster that was cut and paste, but I think they all sort of stem from a similar kind of place, I think. The aspirations for the people that are contributing to this culture, whether they play in bands or make fanzines or do artwork or design. Yeah, it comes from a place that is in and of its own a community of interests. Yeah, and I think a point that we're interested in in terms of where up the punks potentially fits in with the NDF forum is the adoption, I suppose, within punk of a DIY culture. And that is a sort of a mainstay of how things get done and how that fits in with obviously open source and new technology opportunities that allow people within various local communities to construct and control their own narrative and means of presenting themselves. And there are people that can feel like they have a handle on it. I think dealing with issues of identity and identity construction, a lot of the terminologies and references, say, for instance, punk, it is a defined genre by all accounts, but as much we want to try and sort of puncture and break through boundaries of genre and into actually talking with people and presenting the people who are there. And that's sort of off of that and beyond. And yeah, some of the early forays into that, we had moments where zene making as a practice is the idea of becoming the media. And where you, in the respect of my old zene, helped most no man's burning, sort of a different era ago, was about taking that on board pre-internet, creating sort of stories and engaging with different media and content. Sort of a self-generated mobile thing. Yeah, I mean, zenes were these things that were around before our blocks. This is from 1998. Oh my gosh. This is a few years older. You had a reason for your wave with these in, though. Yeah, I can't remember what it was. It was because of that. And in conversation, telephone conversation with John last night, I reminded him about this particular spread where we'd be sort of trading information. So I would be organising these shows along with Markistically once a full time at this hall, all ages. The idea that we had a lot of friends who played in bands and we wanted to get people together. And somehow John ends up turning up to our shows with his camera right at the front, not saying a word to anybody and taking these amazing pictures. And so it was these kind of clusters of our own sort of media networks that were sort of joining forces somehow and to sort of being part of this moment. And it was purely to serve the point of existing at that time. It's interesting. In terms of an antidote to some other sort of things that were happening. Yeah, which we'll come to in a moment. I think that's Marcus there, actually. Which sort of brings me to, like Kerry said, I'm the kind of silent photographer, soul catcher person who turns up and takes photos of people. This is more, again, contemporary work with people from the local punk community. And the other punk's process is very much a sort of a rolling archive. So it's very much concerned with capturing things that are happening in the contemporary punk scene and drawing relations between that and the archival material. And of course, the contemporary does become the archival. And then this is heading way back into 1999 again. And the sort of community that was around at the time, a lot of this stuff just doesn't happen in Wellington any more due to changes in gentrification of Wellington central places like Tissa Hall. I no longer available for sort of youth all ages run venues that Kerry was very and Marcus were very much involved in. And things like punk fest have been shifted down to the South Island Christchurch into sort of red zone places because you just can't find any halls in Wellington central. All that will allow a three day punk festival to happen for some reason. And yeah, like the house party scene and this kind of organic community stuff that was all happening before we all had Twitter and Facebook and all that other crap. Yeah, and it had a very much a DIY punk activist and political sort of voice through music and the culture that was around us. So these are ban the carnies protesting at the top of Cuba Mall and the against the bypass protests. And that's part of the whole thing. I guess punk is a sort of stylistic form makes itself very visible to draw attention to various various events and issues and sort of how that happens. And some of those core philosophy shift when people get older in the scene, I think. Yeah. And so, yeah, bringing it all back to Te Papa again, I guess one of the main catalysts for constructing this archive in the first place was a kind of a sense of this year zero emptiness within the punk scene during the late 90s. And that no one really knew what had happened in Wellington before and there's no published material on a punk scene. So it appeared as if everything had just sort of appeared out of nowhere and there was no kind of connection or history to a local kind of lineage in that. And this exhibition featured in 2001 called Punk Culture, which annoyed so many people that we felt we could do a better job. Yeah, it was, I guess on behest of I was doing some reviews and writing a bit for a local publication called The Package, which you might have remembered or contributed to. And so I ended up getting invited to this opening of the exhibition that was the British Council sponsored historic survey of punk culture in the sort of broadest sense. The review that I wrote was rather damning and in some ways, kind of critiquing it from within the culture, we got led up and ushered by these sort of very sort of beautiful models with a styrofoam mohawks and fake affected British accents. And everything was behind glass and we just felt really sort of Mickey Mouse and kind of strange and detached. And we I had a chat with you about it and I think that's how we started picking our interests about. OK, so what have we actually got? Who's here and what are the stories that are here? Yeah, so I think, yeah, as a photographer, you know, it's sort of beholden to find an avenue to have those that material sort of put out there in the public realm. And obviously this was before Facebook and everything. So we basically put together an exhibition will start a collecting material. Yeah, so when we issued out the call out, it just started rolling from there. It's massive flood of information and people wanting their 15 minutes. Yeah, I guess the starting point also just going to throw a bit of a wormhole here was this album cover, a 12 inch final cover from released in 1984. And this is something that I'd seen in record bins as I was growing up and as a teenager was kind of like, yeah, from New Orleans was sort of, yeah, wow, I didn't believe that punks tried to burn down the beehive. That's amazing. But, you know, as I said, you didn't really have any sort of access to a Wikipedia or whatever to sort of verify this. Yeah. So, yeah, basically, we started hunting around and basically, you know, shoulder tapping anybody we thought could give us some leads. And so we found out that this gig was this record was recorded at a one day punk festival in Wellington called Golden Showers in 1983 in Newtown Community Center. And it was quite an infamous gig at the time. And obviously had some statements about Moldon and living in the Moldon era involved in it. This was some material that turned up after the initial 2002 exhibition. But this is what the sort of environment looked like in the Newtown Community Center in 1983. There was also a lot of stuff that was happening around the same time, sort of other people getting really excited about, I guess, New Zealand underground post-punk music history through Flying Nun and what was happening outside of Wellington. And it was really insightful to find this stuff that was happening amongst people when you. Yeah. And then, you know, we'd find out that the band that played at or was instrumental in recording that album was this band called Riot 111, who released this amazing seven inch and 1981 as an anti spring bok tour protest sort of thing. And, you know, all of this stuff is things that we just couldn't believe there wasn't no record of, really. And so, you'd find these clippings and things from various people who had hoarded material, amateur archivists and record nerds. Lots of scrapbooks. We had lots of Cubs of Teens scrapbooks. Yeah. Yeah. And then it was just sort of drawing the dots and making the links. And so the guitarist from this band, Nick Swan, was also in a band called The Wall Sockets, who were the first band, really, to put on gigs in Tissel Hall from 78, 79 era in Wellington. Yeah, it was amazing, because we were putting on all these shows and realised it was part of a larger lineage. And, yeah, a sort of community local history as well that was undocumented, largely. And you'd find out really weird factoids like The Wall Sockets. Guitarist is another than Francis Walsh, winner of a Grammy Award for Screenwriting Lord of the Rings. Yeah, everyone's got their dirty, dark punk rock past. She denies all knowledge now, apparently. Yeah, in this room. Yeah, and, you know, sort of connecting with local people around town that you would have seen before and then didn't realise where these massive sort of punk fanboys, post-punk fanboys, from back in the day and had all this untapped material just waiting to be plundered. So this is Dave MacLennan. And in more unbelievable stories, here he is, hanging out in his Mount Victoria flat with Robert Smith of the Cure before they went down to Cloud Key School and jammed out in the practice room below the PE sheds or something. Again, yeah, this was kind of mind-blowing. And then, yeah, we just started the whole process of, again, collecting this material, duplicating a lot of it. Do you know anything about Simon? Oh, just Simon Cottle, who did anti-system social disease. I mean, this was sort of in the 90s where, I guess, it sort of comes in waves. I mean, the idea of punk is just like saying in terms like European or Asian, it's just like this large pan brush, whereas there's different spectrums, different eras, different ideologies, personal philosophies, activism, I guess, styles, performances, yeah, that sort of diversity and flashpoints in peoples, in the timeline of the largest story about the punks. Yeah, I mean, expanding upon that, I think, right from the start, we had this idea of a very broad brush stroke of punk. We weren't trying to define a musical style or anything, and we're pretty much more concerned about how each generation sort of interprets the idea of punk, so this kind of DIY ethos and ideology. And this, I suppose, anti-authoritarian side of things and all the other sort of bits and pieces that go along. Yeah, and often the visual is quite confrontational and direct, and in amongst you, you get past the style and the skin, and there's, yeah, these ridiculous stories and connections in the city. Sort of where these people are now is quite amazing, too. So this is up on Hawker Street, just up the road from here on Mount Vic, in the Torres Punk flat in the 90s, that obviously would probably be on the means of most people to rent. Yeah, and people sort of ask about our focus in Wellington. So why Wellington Punk? Well, because we're from here, we grew up in the scene, also because, I guess, in proximity to what the Wellington Punk scene is, as far as responding to being in a capital city. And, yeah, that sort of political consciousness, I guess, growing up in the 90s, was really crucial as far as, yeah, what was going on there. As well as the silliness. Oh, yeah, I guess this is what it's all about, really. You know, like the project's very much concerned about recording the sort of underlying narrative of the band that sort of lasts for six months, records one demo CD, and has a hand-drawn piece of album art that needs to be preserved. And, yeah. And so, in saying that, we're sort of trying to uncover narratives that are sort of hidden beneath the more dominant stories that sort of get rolled out all the time about the need and sound and the Auckland punk scene and things like this, and exploring this kind of stuff in a very micro level. Stuff that people who were even in this band sort of wish that they could forget about it. And so, up the punks 2002, an exhibition came together. Yeah, in contrast to the punk culture museum exhibition, it was a site-based response within our local site, this little hall, where we'd been kind of actively doing stuff for a while. And, yeah, it was a nice kind of capture of that time. It was never going to be definitive, and we found out how sort of boundless the research aspect was after having had eight solid months of conversation and documentation into this this beast. Yeah, and sort of talking about, you know, the community interaction and embodying, we're encouraging a lot of participation from people within the punk scene from the past and the contemporary scene. So this tied in as well with Wellington Punk Fest eight year on Labor weekend. So the musical performance is going on at Tissel Hall. I don't know, maybe up at the car club back then. And the way in which the exhibition was structured was very much, you know, pre-internet for us at, you know, the like nebulous sort of blobs of visual material thrown up on walls with text, minimal text sort of things into linking places and times and ideas and themes rather than trying to draw sort of a chronological history of the Wellington Punk scene as an elderly Dave MacLennan. So basically after that happened in 2002, we were left with a whole lot of scanned material and printed material, some of which were most of it archived in the National Library. And then basically for various reasons, the project I moved out of town for a few years, Kerry sort of is transient gypsy. Yeah, the project kind of went into hiatus for a long, you know, a number of years in the mid-2000s. And people all the way people kept giving us, still contacted us, kept giving us material and the project was still alive in some form. However, yeah, dormant. So at some point, I don't know why. Yeah, I decided to do something with all of the material that we had at the time and start putting it online. And the online wiki sort of thing led to more obviously like connection with social media sort of stuff, all the way in which an audience could be brought in to the material that didn't exist before and these were the which new material could be acquired. Yeah, so we got passed out millennial angst and we found out we had to live in the 21st century. And, yeah, online was the way to go. Yeah, so up the punks 2012 pretty much had its birth with material going online and then this new outpouring of material coming in. And the way in which the archives sort of operates is as, you know, I suppose archives do, I'm not sure I'm a photographer, not an archivist, but they, you know, it's a source of raw material to be reworked in different formats and different locations and stuff. And this is just a series of posters for the 2012 exhibition that were around the streets of Wellington. So charting stuff over in the Wellington Punks scene over 35 years. You're constantly re-looking at the material like it just as soon as you think you framed and captured something, it just gets overwritten and challenged again. I think that's just the constant nature of that building that sort of palimpsest of stories over stories over stories and then you kind of reinvent it and scrap it up, rip it up and tear it, you know, rip it up and start again. Kind of mindset. Yeah, I mean, it's very much the collage kind of mash-up culture that, you know, Carrie Ann Lee's own visual artwork that you saw earlier is very much about. And a lot of the thinking I suppose in terms of how culture operates now as this kind of constant remixing of past and present so this is a 2012 exhibition. And for this one, we did actually go chronological, but we installed panels all around the walls of this hall that could basically allow people to put photos up on the years. So people were contributing by throwing material up and writing directly onto the walls. So it became a kind of a walk-in online thread forum in which conversations could be had as you would by, you know, commenting on a section of Facebook or whatever. Yeah, and it's like a gentle progression from the first iteration. You know, this time there was blue tack and pens and safety pins. And if things were wrong and people could comment or move photos around to different areas. And then this material then feeds back and to from a physical kind of representation of a comments threadboard or whatever into the online forum. And people were able to drop off their own photos as well. There was like a scanners and stuff set up there to process material and have it added over the course of a week. So by the end of the week, more material was up on the walls and at the beginning. Yeah, it was really lovely, a collaborative, sort of interactive mural sort of space where people were encouraged to contribute and be part of it. And yeah, it was really, really, really enjoyable. Yeah, so some of the material was led to some quiet vigorous discussions about people and things. It was even multimedia. And again, back to events that were attached around this and connecting the sort of visual representation of stuff to the kind of music and culture. Again, this community engagement. There's a poster that Kerry designed that... Oh, yeah, pushed through. Yeah, just sort of an update of the old new wave spectacular. And yeah, that sort of combination of the new bands or current bands at the time. You should just race into your last bit. Sorry. Oh, John went to Beijing and he brought up the punks up there and just, yeah, some really interesting engagements. He hosted a gig in a mall. And yeah, the idea that it's going to keep going. It's gone, yeah. So, from local to global. Thank you.