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By Vikki Riley Darwin, April 25: Mervin Jarman - community art activist and interactive multimedia designer from Jamaica has rounded off his Australian tour in the Northern Territory, visiting urban indigenous communities in Darwin and giving a keynote address to media students at Charles Darwin University, the first time he has visited an academic institution. He also gave a presentation at Darwin Community Arts in Malak, where indigenous, migrant and refugee artists meet together regularly. Jarman is known internationally for creating The Container Project, a media lab housed in a shipping container in rural Jamaica, where street youth – who he calls the “bad boys” demographic – come and learn IT skills and create their own art, music and video who then go on to be the teachers to a new group of youth. The project is also mobile whereby plastic wheeliebins have been converted into portable media labs fitted with laptops, radio and TV transmitters and ‘jam mixers’ for music making. Jarman has so far worked with indigenous communities in Canada and North America and also street youth in Eastern Europe with incredible results; not only has youth crime and violence statistics plummeted in regions where his media projects have been established but many who take up the courses have gone on to become media professionals. “Give and earn in order to learn” is one of Jarman’s rasta inspired catchcries for success and he is convinced that mainstream society would be enriched if only people would tap into “street university” knowledge. In Darwin he visited the Bagot indigenous community and then out to the suburb of Holtz, home to a graveyard of shipping containers and also Ironbark, a not-for-profit indigenous employment organization devoted to skilling up the local community. Given that the Australian federal government's free laptops for schools program is already up and running in Arnhem Land at primary school level with machines donated by the powerful Murdoch Foundation, Jarman's project may well prove to become popular among the large itinerant population in the Northern Territory as well as those indigenous youth who have been in detention for minor crimes and thus so far have avoided the confinement of a cirriculum which bears little resemblance to the life skills they desire. The Southeast Asian Times |
