Heavy Duty are an anonymous artist collective made up of three friends, all creatives, all operating in different parts of the world. Their guerilla art installations not only act as on-the-nose social commentary, but also create real and progressive change in our cities, too. Here I talk to a founding member about the initiative.

Interview by Oli Nicholson

All three of us were a little bit disenfranchised with the clients we were working on at the time, so we thought, let’s do something for good. It was at a time when Covid was peaking, and the Black Lives Matter movement was taking off in a really poignant way.

We started chatting, and through conversation mentioned statues being pulled down around the world.

Living in Perth, I realised there were some statues here that are really outdated as well, and was surprised they hadn't been targeted yet. After plotting and planning what we could do, we came to the conclusion that removing the statues wasn’t the answer, as they were more powerful erected rather than deconstructed.

We didn’t want to be too controversial, we just wanted to be honest and inform people that these founding fathers of the state were actually involved in mass genocide. Their disgraceful actions and links to the Pinjarra massacre had just been omitted. We came to the simple conclusion of, ‘let’s not omit it, let's record it and leave them standing in a public place, but use them as a powerful statement to educate and call for change.’

Heavy Duty replaced the plaques under Captain James Stirling and John Septimus Roe with new plates, detailing their participation in the attacks against Indigenous Australians, and calling for them to be removed from our streets and instead placed in a museum.

We wanted to lay down the new plaques as though they’d always been there. We didn’t want to damage the existing engravings. We don’t want to vandalise or tamper. We just wanted to install them in the fastest, least destructive way possible.

We decided that we could probably get more eyes on this and start more conversations online, so whilst we installed the physical plaques and hopefully captured the attention of people as they passed by, we also amplified it using our own PR methods.

Something interesting and a little different can spread quite quickly without the use of paid media.

It very quickly picked up a lot of national and international media, and got a lot of people talking and became quite hotly debated. Some of the media organisations reached out to the candidates running for mayor for comment. Some commented, some didn’t.

Basil Zempilas, the newly elected Mayor of Perth, made some infamous comments recently about homelessness in the city. Heavy Duty decided to get involved, installing a modular bench in the heart of Perth to act as both a shelter and powerful retorting statement.

As a group of creatives who are sometimes stifled in their professional lives, we want to take timely moments to create public statements and expression pieces that shine a light on issues that need attention. The bench idea came about very soon after the statues, as we’re always planning to continually seek out opportunities to make this a better place to live.

Our ultimate goal would be for our ideas to transcend borders, and be rolled out on a bigger scale. But if they’re not, we still think they're very effective in a localised world.

This might sound corny, but if you seek to be brave, other people will follow.

We’re not declaring anything radical, we’re probably expressing views that the majority of good people agree with, they just might not have the time or the motivation to enact them. Our work allows for other people to jump on board. And hopefully if enough people jump on board, then change happens and good things follow.