Brief Synopsis of the graphic novel – rough notes
The Long Weekend is a conceptual piece set in Alice Springs. It explores how cultures interact with each other, unknowingly doing terrible things to one another. It is a psychological and poetic analysis of what is at the heart of Australian cultures and the Aussie psyche and while it has a narrative but tends to read like a series of thoughts.
Friday
Craig is struggling to write an essay on the Jungian idea of the Cultural Complexes. He comes to the realisation that to explore the concept he can watch what happens in and around Alice Springs over the long weekend when many people from the many cultures ofCentral Australiacome to town for the footy. He relates some of the stories that he observes and uses them as a form of meditation to digest the concept.
Friday concludes with a telling of the myth of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld (ancient Sumerian story).
Saturday
Craig wakes up early, before daybreak, realises that he should be analysing his own culture and the overlap with others, not try to understand Indigenous culture. He continues his meditation, this time with some objects on his desk to focus his mind – some stone tools, a map of the Middle-East and a book detailing colonial conquest in theCongo. By examining the map he thinks about how places are linked to stories and these myths then form us. Through the book he thinks about colonisation and its destruction of these links by the use of guns, a tool of domination and destruction. By looking at the stones he thinks about how tools and actions form our brains. The lonely exercise is interrupted by a trip to the Alice Springs Hospital to visit a teenage Aboriginal girl who is experiencing a drug-induced psychosis.
In the evening of Saturday Craig speaks with a man in the police watch-house who has killed his mother-in-law and confronts us all with the terrible questions that such events bring up.
Sunday
The lightest of the three days: Craig goes with a Jewish friend of his, Amos, and some Aboriginal friends hunting and returns home. On the trip he and Amos discuss matters about what is happening with many cultures, colonised peoples such as the Aboriginal cultures. The Long Weekend concludes with Amos suggesting that we use our imagination to save ourselves.
Tags: Alice Springs, Australian, comics, Santospirito, The Long Weekend
In January 2011 this piece was exhibited at Araluen Arts Precinct as part of a group exhibition called Watching This Place. The exhibition was put on by Watch This Space (how confusing) artist run initiative. Dan Murphy, artist extraordinaire, also had dog sculptures around this piece when it was exhibited. This is the piece hanging on Craig’s front fence.
Joshua Santospirito Art 