Collective Unlearning
THE ART OF ADAPTATION: CULTURE CHANGES EVERYWHERE
Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation
Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Sydney
10 April – 7 June 2026
[Co-authored with Jennifer Hamilton. Published in Artist Profile, September 2026]
Walking into The Art of Adaptation: Culture Changes Everywhere at Manly Art Gallery & Museum (MAG&M), visitors are invited to pick up a stone from a small pile. They are smooth and cold on this mid-autumn day, offered by Dabee Wiradjuri artist and cultural leader Peter Swain as temporary companions—part of Mira-Mura Galing Bila. Singing up the rain for the river (2026), to be pressed in the palm and infused with intentions while wandering through the gallery. The stones have travelled all the way from the source of the Capertee River in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales (NSW), where they will eventually be returned, to help us feel, quite literally, how different places are bound together in “shared flows, responsibilities and consequences.”
Swain belongs to Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), the subject (and co-creator) of this touring exhibition curated by MAG&M’s Ben Rak and Katherine Roberts as part of its Collective for Environmental Art & Design program (CEAD). KSCA is an expansive collective experiment, formed around a shared commitment to art as any activity that brings about cultural change. Its operations extend across places, communities and forms of hybrid practice (enfolding art, design, farming, science, Indigenous cultural revival and advocacy, education, living, loving, politics and more); across regional, rural and urban settings; and across different relational configurations, scales and timeframes. These dynamic groupings involve artists—thirteen of whom are named in the exhibition credits—but also people from many other fields working to find new ways of being and doing things together, testing out imagined alternate futures via joyful, messy, inspired realities on the ground.
Born in 2016 in the post-industrial regional NSW town of Kandos, KSCA has more typically activated a country paddock or community hall than an art institution. Marking its tenth year now, the exhibition at Manly Art Gallery & Museum functions as an expanded retrospective for a city-based audience, with individual projects selected by KSCA members, shown alongside information panels, films and interactive objects. Talks and workshops were offered during “A Day with Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation,” the gallery’s second CEAD public forum. Guided by the concept of cultural adaptation, particularly with regard to climate crisis, projects carried out by the school over the past decade track the diverse dimensions of this process.
Works like Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein’s The Turdis, 2024, a hot-pink human-manure composting toilet installation, approach transformation on both a practical and existential level. As functional, mobile infrastructure (with past outings at a music festival and botanic gardens plant sale), it clearly models a future adaptation practice. But framed within a wider creative research project, “Pootopia,” the artists are taking the “yuck factor” around human excrement as a genuine long-term challenge. Where disgust is conventionally resolved by the logic of industrial sanitation, this work looks for another way. Here The Turdis is expanded into a Museum of Humanure: visitors can obtain “shitcoin” tokens in exchange for their deposits, flick through a curated library and take home a roll of Turdis-brand recycled toilet paper or even a Pootopia tea towel. Humour is used as an entry into problems we would rather avoid or dismiss as not ours; The Turdis is relentlessly funny at every turn, like a material poo joke with a serious core, curiously warming us to the idea of composting poo.
Time travel as methodology, delivered with a heft of cheeky optimism, is a neat bundle that anyone familiar with KSCA’s origins will recognise. The school first “bootstrapped” itself into the world with a cameo appearance in Ian Milliss’ iconic speculative poster Welcome to Kandos, 2013. Then a prestigious innovation wing of the fictional Kandos University, KSCA made up part of the envisioned cultural landscape of Kandos as a fully realised “transition town” utopia. Milliss’ poster was displayed around town during the inaugural Cementa13 arts festival—itself a play on the local decommissioned cement works and the art world’s most esteemed international event, dOCUMENTA, held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Ahead of the festival’s second edition, Cementa17, KSCA was taken up as a real proposition, becoming, like Doctor Who’s famous telephone box, “dimensionally transcendental.”
Pinned to one wall of the exhibition is KSCA‘s manifesto, A Declaration of Interdependence, in which the energising effect of sharing ideas is noted alongside a need to “maintain and nurture the group dynamic and archive.” This attention to the mechanics of collective practice and its own internal memory may be one reason the group continues to come together in what founding member Laura Fisher calls a “curiosity-led” commitment, inspiring and informing each other. KSCA Network Map, 2026, a collaborative chalkboard mapping exercise created live on-site, makes visible many relational interconnections that have fed into and out of the group over time, traced over creek and river tributaries from Wiradjuri Country via Dyarubbin Hawkesbury to this gallery on Sydney’s northern beaches. Through slow, land-based residencies and relationships, what the group does, and how they do it, has been consistently shaped by situated knowledge, a willingness to sit, listen, learn and unlearn.
KSCA’s adoption of the format of a school is instructive in unexpected ways. As Fisher explains, rather than assuming the didactic position of some climate change focused community art, “we are the ones learning, we are attending the school.” Learning by doing, as “rough and ready non-experts,” allows KSCA to ask novel questions and see where they lead. When the artist’s role is to support a community in responding to its own shifting conditions, being able to have meaningful dialogue becomes more important than finding definitive answers.
The large-scale textile work Grazing Blankets, 2024, realised by artist-farmer Erika Watson but emerging from immersive collaborative experience, is a technology facilitating the cultivation of those skills. As social sculpture, it consists of several vintage woollen blankets sewn together in a tarp-backed doughnut form, on which folks can rest stomach-to-the-earth and contemplate country through its open “grazing” hole. Inviting both intimacy and listening, the work encourages difficult conversations about how we use and understand land, “what we take and what we leave behind.”
Like other KSCA projects, Grazing Blankets has traversed locations, gently accreting as a kind of magic climate adaptation carpet. The school is intentional about creating opportunities for exchange and cross-pollination beyond the immediate parameters of a given project, enabling those further away to contribute or take part. Two newspapers, Futurelands2, 2017, and The Groundswell Marquee/An Artist, a Farmer & a Scientist Walk into a Bar—The newspaper, 2021, published to spread proceedings of dialogue-rich KSCA events, are exhibited on the gallery walls. Airborne like spores, stray copies come to land on kitchen tables or bus stop benches, bringing ideas and learnings from distant climes. Fisher describes the newspaper’s appeal for the school as “homely and nostalgic” as well as pragmatic—lots of voices can be accommodated in one space, without asking too much of the reader. As rural newspapers evaporate, KSCA offers in their place an alternative mode of knowledge exchange, which also does much more. So too in this exhibition, those quiet little river stones held by visitors now carry a field of possibilities for how we might live otherwise outside the gallery walls.
Photos by Tessa Zettel