Just as nature can no longer be understood as a pristine and discrete realm apart from human activity, art’s autonomy is all the more untenable when faced with ecological catastrophe.**

The Avoca Project is an international art project in regional Victoria, Australia, centred on Watford House. Referred to locally as 'The Swiss House', this pre-fabricated gold-rush residence was imported as numbered planks from Scandinavia via Hamburg in 1852. The house is thus an immigrant that arrived by boat, its walls revealing stories of a former wealth and European glamour faded by the harshness of the climate and the decreasing services that are the result of globalization and climate extremes in rural Australia.

​

In late 2004, when Lyndal Jones began this project, the house had been declared ‘beyond repair’. 

​

Lyndal Jones is an artist who focuses on the politics of context, place and gender through very long-term projects. In this extended art-project she works with the house, the local community, national and international artists and scholars 

and climate change activists to address the place, the land, the house itself, together with the humans who inhabit it all, as a site of climate change and response. 

​

Her proposition – that, as the house and the grounds are transformed into a site that thrives despite a heating climate, so too will all those involved in it change thereby creating a new ecological order. To do this the line between lived-activity and formal art presentation has been completely blurred.

​

The Avoca Project has now taken place over 14 years (since 2005) and includes land works, exhibitions, performances, film showings, concerts and symposia, always with Watford House rather than simply at it. Artworks made here are often also shown off-site.
 

In 2008 The Avoca Project became a not-for-profit organisation to support the numbers of artists, large-scale community cultural activities and increasing number of partners involved. . 

Postscript: This organisation and The Avoca Project was wound up in 2019, 5 years after the usual 10-year project for which Jones is renowned. The house itself continues, however, under the name The Swiss House, as a continuing experiment in art-as-action.

 

**T J Demos, The Post Natural Condition, Artforum, April, 2012 p197