'Dare to Dream' project combats lack of queer spaces in Sydney's west

In the bustling heart of Parramatta, an art installation featuring personal shrines offers a sanctuary for Sydney's Western queer and gender diverse community, addressing a significant lack of visible and accepted spaces.

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There are a lot of cultural nuances, even religious nuances, within our community and everyone's different backgrounds, so there's definitely an element of balancing different backgrounds and different cultural needs.

The "Dare to Dream" project, led by artist Bonnie Huang, uses multimedia art to connect the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in Greater Western Sydney with their cultural heritage. Huang noted the importance of balancing diverse cultural and religious backgrounds within the community, acknowledging the unique nuances present.

Through the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia's C3West program and ACON Westie, a social group for queer and gender diverse people in Western Sydney, Huang engaged around 70 community members. These individuals, many previously unknown to each other, collaborated over nine months to create sculptures of personal shrines. These shrines are now part of the installation at Westfield Parramatta.

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Over a period of nine months, we engaged with people from Mount Druitt, Bankstown, Blacktown, Parramatta, Granville.

Huang described a personal sense of loneliness as a queer individual in Western Sydney, driving the desire to find others and create shared spaces. "We connected over this desire of wanting to find each other in the places where we grew up," Huang said, noting that many had to move away from Western Sydney to find explicitly queer environments.

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A key part of my experience as a queer person living in Western Sydney was this sense of loneliness and wanting to find other people like me, but also wanting to find spaces where we could be together.

Drag queen Kaia Papaya echoed this sentiment, recalling her own experiences of traveling long distances for community and finding more acceptance in Sydney's CBD. She noted that even ten years ago, safe spaces in the west were virtually nonexistent, leading to potentially dangerous late-night meetings. Papaya expressed hope for greater acceptance of queerness in Western Sydney's cultural landscape in the future.

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We connected over this desire of wanting to find each other in the places where we grew up, or even the fact that a lot of us moved out of Western Sydney in order for us to find explicitly queer spaces.