Rendezvous in Wrongtown

Rendezvous in Wrongtown is the perfect excuse to indulge in the wrong side of art on the wrong side of town.

For one day only, Saturday August 7, 2010, twenty five of Melbourne’s most provocative and creative space invaders will be moving into an empty house at a secret location and making it their own.
‘Wrongtown’, noun, adverb 1. A bad place where evil, wicked, sinful, immoral, iniquitous, reprehensible, and crooked things occur. 2. inaccurate, incorrect, false, untrue, mistaken.

1. “I’m going to get drunk and vomit on you – yeah! I’m going to wrongtown! And I’m gonna love it!”
2. “Dude, You are Wrongtown!”

(www.urbandictionary.com)

Most of us have seen some pretty disturbing and disgusting houses, or at least heard stories about them. Decrepit, decayed, stinky, squatted, haunted etc. But how many of us have actually experienced a truly wrong house? A house where, upon entering you are greeted by an eerie mixture of cleanliness, out-datedness, loneliness, apathy and an undeniable feeling of deceit.

This place is just plain unhomely.

(Das Unheimliche or literally translated as unhomely; the Freudian concept where something, either a place or idea can be in one instance familiar, yet foreign at the same time. Unshakably uncanny and uncomfortably strange).

When there is carpet in the bathroom you know that things aren’t quite right. If this house were a person they would be missing a chromosome, or perhaps had just enough plastic surgery to make their presence unnerving. It’s all a little bit false, unreal, WRONG.

Each of the artists and collectives involved has responded to this wrongness in a multitude of unique and strangely compelling ways. Kind of like disturbed house guests that have left a little something to permanently mark their stay.

One room, traditionally for bathing, becomes a warped, bright, strange place, it’s contents allude to an experiment gone wrong. One room emits loud sounds and houses peculiar characters playing strange instruments that jar and fog, like an odd nightmare from your childhood. In another room there are gaping holes revealing sections of what lies beneath; think of a rich banker’s bunker, post-apocalypse.
With every corner of the home open from the cellar to the garage, ready to explore, the Wrongtown experience will be one wintry Melbourne afternoon that you will never forget.

The one catch is, the location is secret. In order to visit Wrongtown, you will need to get off the number 8 tram (heading south from the city) at stop number 32. Look towards the nearby park and you will see a flower stall in ‘Rockley Gardens’. It is here that you must wait for directions to the house, at 2pm on Saturday the 7th of August, 2010. All late-comers can ask directions at the flower stand.

Artists involved: The Agents, Tom Civil, Hotham Street Ladies, Andy Hutson, Ash Keating, Bonnie Lane, Jonathan Leahy and Vexta, Matt Morrow, Simon Pericich, Kiron Robinson, Robbie Rowlands, Neale Stratford, Hiroyasu ‘TWOONE’ Tsuri, Urban Village Melbourne, Danae Valenza, Theresa Harrison (curator), Tai Snaith (curator), Vexta (curator)