We chat all things protest and We the People related with multidisciplinary artist Katie Sfetkidis.
Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance. It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.
First of all, tell us about ‘We the People’ – what’s the core concept of the project and what inspired you to pursue it.
The core question is “how has the pandemic changed the way we protest and the way we think about protesting”. It’s a response to the feeling of colliding set of crises – be it climate change, social and economic inequality, colonisation, housing instability, the treatment of refugees, to name a few – set against the issues of public safety.
The work was inspired by my experience of being in lockdown in Melbourne CBD over 2020 and 2021. It gave me a lot of time to think deeply about issues that I care about, whilst also feeling like I couldn’t participate in public demonstration in the same way, mainly due to public health concerns, but also shifting public attitudes towards large scale public demonstration and the use of the police in response. I started wondering if there were other ways that we could gather that could circumnavigate some of these issues. I was particularly inspired by the ways people were using digital technology to both connect with others and share ideas within local and global communities and I began to wonder how one could harness the emancipatory powers of digital technology to create a public demonstration that could exist both in a digital realm and IRL.
As an artist, I think it’s really important to civically engage. This work brings together my interest in feminism and the history of activism. In general my practice is influenced by what has come before and ‘We the People’, in a lot of ways feels like an extension and mash up of a number of projects I have worked on over the past few years, including ‘The Feminist Poster Project’ (2020-2021) and ‘The Women’s COVID-19 Time Capsule’ (2020-2022).
This piece explores the intersection between more traditional forms of public demonstration and the digital realm – how has this changed in recent years?
I think the pandemic has had a huge impact on our relationship to technology. Video calls and online gathering spaces are much more common now than they were two years ago, and social media has really been used to drive global social movements, and this has sometimes translated into large scale in person demonstrations – e.g., Black Lives Matter.
What is so exciting to me about these online spaces are the possibilities they open up for new encounters. For many people, in the early days of the pandemic, video streaming platforms allowed people to access a world and events that had been inaccessible before, perhaps because of chronic illness, disability or cultural and economic reasons. It also allowed people to connect across time and space in different ways.
I am interested in how this might translate to public demonstration. For many reasons, there are people who can’t attend a public demonstration; this could be because of health, age, access, work and family commitments or public safety. I wonder how digital technology can offer an alternative, and a way to bring different groups of people together across space and time.
This seems to be a project that is very interested in the role of ‘political ephemera’ (banners, flags, placards and so on). How will you be depicting that?
Visual material is really important to any public demonstration and will be key to this work. This could be placards and posters, which already feature quite heavily in my practice, but I have dreams to also create some bigger pieces; puppets etc, along the lines of the Burning Koala from a recent Extinction Rebellion demonstration.
At this stage, I am planning on incorporating previous pieces from ‘A Feminist Poster Project’ into this new work and make new signs, banners, and flags. I really love the idea of flag waving as something that is visually striking and can incorporate movement into the piece. It’s also a key feature for many older activists I have come across in my research and I am keen to unpack this more.
The process of creating this ephemera is just as important as their visual impact. Whilst at Adhocracy, I am inviting people to come and create new posters and banners in the studio that can feature in the work. These creative exercises allow time to think through ideas or talk them through in a communal setting, which works to build community.
Where does ‘We the People’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?
In my dreams, ‘We the People’ will be a global event, occurring simultaneously in sites across the globe. In the short term, I will be undertaking another creative development in Melbourne later this year and continuing to talk with activist communities across Australia. At this stage I also hope to spend some time in NSW and Queensland early next year.
Anything else audiences should know?
‘We the People’ is just as much about the journey as it is about the final outcome. Like many past projects, I am seeking to engage with women in the community to highlight their efforts and facilitate an exchange of ideas. I would encourage anyone up for a yarn or just wanted to listen to drop into the open studio/workshops.
We sat down with artist Catherine Ryan to discuss The Two Body Problem.
Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance. It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.
Firstly, tell us about ‘The Two Body Problem’ – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?
‘The Two Body Problem’ is an experimental performance lecture that I have just begun to develop. The core concept is a simple speculative question: what if we had not one, but two bodies? What if every human consciousness had a spare body that it could use, instead of always being tied to the same one? How would this change the decisions we made? Would we take care of both our bodies and spend equal amounts of time in each one, or would we just spend time in the ‘good’ body and leave the other one at home? And what is a ‘good’ body, anyway?
As for what inspired it, in the most literal sense, like many artists, I have a huge document in my phone’s Notes app, full of half-baked ideas and questions that have popped into my head. One day, I was scrolling back through this vast collection of musings when I came across this question about what it would be like if we had two bodies. I don’t even remember when I wrote it. Was it something that I scrawled while I was out late one night, perhaps? I’ll never know. But it seemed compelling, even in the harsh, more critical light of day, so I started to draw more connections from it.
I have a background in European philosophy, so it occurred to me that there are swathes of thinkers who have considered the potential duality of the body. Early Christian theological disputes about whether God and Jesus were different bodies or not. Mediaeval political theology about the two bodies of the King. Cartesian accounts of dualism – the idea that the mind is separate from the body. And more recently, discussions within Queer theory about whether or not we can speak of there being a body, prior to its existence in language, or considerations within disability studies about the difference between impairment (which is in some sense ‘inherent’) and disability (which is socially derived).
And importantly for me, not only have philosophers and theorists written about multiplicity of the body – pop singers have sung about it.
The phrase ‘experimental performance lecture’ is a fascinating one – how does this differ from the more traditional concept of a lecture and how are you subverting the academic?
The performance lecture, as a type of performance, has a history that goes back several decades, to 1960s conceptual practice, which emphasised process over finished product. Early notable practitioners of the mode include Robert Morris and Andrea Fraser. Central to this type of work is its existence between the frames of performance and academic address. Performance lectures explore the gaps and tensions between theatrical performance and academic and pedagogical contexts. They often play with authority – the authority of the figure standing in front of you as “the expert”, presenting indisputable facts about the world.
In my performance lectures to date, this playfulness has often manifested in my choice to use cheesy, well-known pop songs as entrance points into the consideration of political or philosophical questions. My techniques have also included the interruption of authoritative textual address by singing, dancing and humorous over-analysis of pop music.
You’ve identified some intriguing pop music artefacts that you’ll be utilising – what inspired their selection?
One of the ways that I often work when making performance lectures is to select a small group of pop songs – usually songs that I like myself – and then use them as unusual ways of entering into questions of a philosophical or political nature.
One of the first tracks that inspired this project was SOPHIE’s Immaterial Girl. It’s a stunning track (and it’s awful that SOPHIE’s untimely death means that we won’t get more of her incredible work). Against a hyperactive synth riff, a chipmunky voice sings about whether she would exist and be gendered without all these things that she enumerates:
“Without my legs or my hair
Without my genes or my blood
With no name and with no type of story
Where do I live?
Tell me, where do I exist?”
What a question! She seems to be asking whether gender can be considered as this radically abstract thing that doesn’t need a body at all.
I then started thinking about how there are all these songs about the materiality of the body. There’s Beyoncé’s 2006 track Get Me Bodied, for instance. This song opens with Beyoncé dramatically intoning “9… 4… 8… 1… B-Day!”. These numbers are the date that Beyonce was born – the 4th of September 1981, her birthday, or B-Day. In the context of the song, this is the day that Beyonce got a body, or got bodied. Does this mean that, prior to 1981, Beyoncé existed in some form, without a body? Was there an eternal, incorporeal form of Beyoncé floating through the universe before this? How tied is Beyoncé to her body?
These are the sorts of questions that inspire me. Also, these are excellent songs, and it’s fun to think with them.
Where does ‘The Two Body Problem’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?
Somewhere, I hope! This is a first stage development so the piece will need more work after this before it’s performable and tourable.
Anything else audiences should know?
I’d love for them to come along to some of the workshops I’ll be running over the Adhocracy weekend. As part of the development in Adhocracy, I’m planning on running some casual discussions about the opening philosophical provocations of the project. These will be small group discussions where we can think together about questions like: Can you imagine having two bodies? What would you do if they were very different bodies? Would you change how you lived? I’d love to consider some of these questions with new groups of people.
Photo by Pier Carthew
Vitalstatistix Artist in Residence, writer Jennifer Mills, has written a response to YES, the new performance work by acclaimed feminist theatre makers THE RABBLE. Rather than attempt to describe or translate the experience of this extraordinary production, Mills has chosen to assemble a collage poem, a formal response to the work’s invitation to participate in, and widen, its inquiry.
YES is on at Waterside until June 26. Book tickets HERE.
After YES: a collage
1. Why search? What is there to search for?
2. It is a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.
3. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
4. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public nature is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. Understood in pedagogical terms, the performance renders social laws explicit.
5. What’s love got to do with it?
6. Despite the fact that controllers use many of the techniques deployed in other capture crimes and with similar effect, the main elements of coercive control set it apart from all other forms of oppression. Its particularity lies in its aim – to usurp and master a partner’s subjectivity – in its scope of its deployment, its individualised and personal dimensions, and its focus on imposing sex stereotypes in everyday life. The result is a condition of unfreedom (what is experienced as entrapment) that is “gendered” in its construction, delivery, and consequence.
7. Responses, responses, responses. Reviews, reports, inquiries.
8. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
9. Another inquiry is not going to do it, just get a shovel and start digging.
10. I think the politicisation of natural disasters is very unfortunate.
11. Tasmania is the only jurisdiction in Australia to have made coercive controlling behaviours an offence.
12. Do you really want to hurt me?
13. The Prime Minister of Australia publicly apologised to me through the media, while privately his team actively discredited and undermined my loved ones. I tuned into Question Time to see my former bosses, people that I had dedicated my life to, deny and downplay my lived experience.
14. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!
15. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.
16. Coercion entails the use of force or threats to compel or dispel a particular response… coercion can have long-term physical, behavioural or psychological consequences… Control may be implemented through specific acts of prohibition or coercion… but its link to dependence and/or obedience is usually more distal than coercion and so harder to detect.
17. Feeling unsafe? If you, or another adult or child, are in immediate danger call 000.
18. Literature is the question minus the answer.
19. My loved one died in the fires FAQ
20. The rainfall, the extreme weather. We are going to have more flooding and it’s going to be unpredictable and it’s going to be more severe and so as someone who loves Lismore deeply and wants to live here into the future I’m asking for leadership, I’m asking for real and sincere commitment to withdraw support from fossil fuel projects which are driving climate change and making it uninhabitable for us to live here.
21. We were denied funerals by pandemic conditions themselves created by the extension of capital to all corners and all habitats of the world, and without the brief socially-sanctioned ritual, we were expected simply not to grieve at all. The expectation once again that grief is just another form of work we do, and, without the performance, we must continue, unaffected.
22. Where the bloody hell are you?
23. No, I don’t really want to shake your hand.
24. If we had no appetite, we would be free from coercion, but because we are from the start given over to what is outside us, submitting to the terms which give form to our existence, we are in this respect – and irreversibly – vulnerable.
25. Do you want to try my milkshake?
26. I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room.
27. And what can one do?
28. As many trauma survivors will tell you, it’s often the lack of an adequate response in the aftermath of a traumatic event, rather than the experience itself, that causes the most psychological damage.
29. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
30. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
31. You don’t have to participate in this trivial, superficial continuation of mindless abuse culture just for the sake of civility.
32. We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this.
—
Sources
1. Paula (Ingrid Bergman), Gaslight, 1944
2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books 1988
3. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984
4. Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 1988
5. Tina Turner, 1984
6. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007
7. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022
8. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Hogarth Press 1930
9. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022
10. PM Scott Morrison, March 2022
11. Tasmanian government website
12. Culture Club, 1982
13. Brittany Higgins, address to the Women’s March, May 2021
14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard 1899
15. Judith Butler, interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum, 1992
16. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007
17. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety website
18. Attributed to Roland Barthes
19. Title of a page from the NSW coronial inquest into the 2019-20 fires, in which 26 lives were lost
20. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022
21. Sarah Jaffe, ‘Nothing and Everything: Mourning Against Work,’ Salvage, 2022
22. Australian tourism slogan; Australian climate strike placard
23. RFS volunteer in Cobargo when approached by the Prime Minister
24. Judith Butler, ‘Bodies and Power Revisited,’ Radical Philosophy, 2002
25. Australian government consent education video, withdrawn in 2021
26. PM Scott Morrison, December 2019
27. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard, 1899
28. Joelle Gergis, ‘The Great Unravelling,’ Fire Flood Plague, ed. Sophie Cunningham, Vintage 2020
29. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984
30. Ursula K LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books 1969
31. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022
32. Greta Thunberg, address to the United Nations, September 2019
Photo by jen mills @millsjenjen_prints
Our 2022 Writer in Residence Jennifer Mills has been developing her ideas around labour issues in the arts and advocating for solutions to the current reliance on unpaid/underpaid and undervalued work, practices which see artists regularly exploited.
Two recent articles explore this in more depth. In Meanjin this week, “It’s Time… to Demand Fair Pay in the Arts” looks at the state of play after the election, in what Mills hopefully characterises as a postwar rebuild:
“Down in the trenches of the war on arts and culture, we have had time to think. Even more so in the pandemic, which continues to threaten our livelihoods and health at work. Questions about accessibility, sick leave and insurance have surfaced. Artists and writers have not been simply waiting for funding to be restored so that we can go back to the way things were. We are not looking for easy fixes and ‘winnability’ anymore. We are looking for institutional support that reflects our value.
If artists are workers, where are the entitlements that other workers take for granted?”
This follows her previous article in Overland, “A Liveable Income Guarantee should support artists—and artists should support a UBI”. Mills asks what Basic Income models might offer artists and invites us to think about art as labour beyond the hostile terrain of ‘creative industries’:
“Are artists a special category of workers who deserve specific assistance because of what we do? Maybe. Or maybe we have more in common with other workers than we think…
…Looking closely at creative work and how to support it might reveal ways to liberate work for everybody.”
With residencies at Vitalstatistix in April and May, two projects now in development address questions of labour and pleasure, embodiment, sex work, and online/IRL interactions.
The Read is a collaboration between dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi and writer, sex worker and activist Tilly Lawless, investigating labour, desire, and bodies and their mechanics, drawing on Amrita’s interests in participatory research, intimate conversations and resilience.
Artists amira.h. and Monte Masi are collaborating on Goddess Ball’s Fun House, using text, performance and endurance to explore the online world of adult camming sites, the nature of work and play, and the true meaning of fun.
Jennifer Mills spoke with both these creative duos over Zoom about their works in progress, collaborative practices, friendship and trust, labour and time, adaptation, pleasure, and making meaningful work.
JM Starting with amira and Monte. Where did the idea spring from to work together?
Monte Masi amira’s and my relationship goes back a fair while, we both studied at the South Australian School of Art at around the same time, but this project is our first time directly collaborating. The first development was part of last year’s Adhocracy at Vitalstatistix and because of “the situation” (laughs), amira and I spent the Adhocracy weekend in 2021 working at a distance over Zoom.
This project really begins with you, amira, sharing an artist’s book – a piece of collected text that you had been amassing, which was text from camming sites’ chat rooms. amira eventually sent me a 2,000 page pdf of that which went by the same name, ‘Goddess Ball’s Fun House.’ And amira had mentioned sharing that text amongst a few people and inviting a response, so whoever had the honour of receiving the text might become obligated to create a response.
amira.h. The text was collected from October 2018 to 2020 sometime, but then I went back and got more, which I haven’t actually added to the ibook file I sent you… it’s not a pdf, it is specific because the pdf has lots of emojis and they don’t move but I wanted people to see what I was seeing on the sites, which is a lot of emojis, emoticons I call them, and they’re very different from other social media, very specific to these sites. So yep, it was a 2,000 or so page ibook.
JM That’s a weighty tome! Why did you start collecting this document?
a.h. Well, that’s what I do – I collect stuff, even at uni I would give people postcards and tell them to text me a response and then I created a book – I called it a book – of pages stuck on the wall, of people’s responses to me. That was in the hundreds, just text responses. I like collecting things.
JM It sounds like a very zine-influenced practice to me.
a.h. I do love zines, definitely.
MM You were going to curate an exhibition based on these responses.
a.h. That was Dominic Guerrera’s idea, he works at Country Arts, and he suggested we could show it at Nexus, but that just didn’t feel right. So then Monte asked me to be an assistant to a whole other project, and I was living on Kaurna land, in Adelaide, but now I’m not, so I had moved and Monte asked if I could still assist and I said I didn’t know, and then he said Vitals have this Adhocracy thing due tomorrow, let’s just quickly write up a proposal (laughs).
MM I saw us putting together the Adhocracy application as a continuation of your invitation to think of a response to that text. I thought we could create that response together.
JM I love that Adhocracy is a space that you can jump on at those moments. It sounds like this project has been through a few versions of itself, are you still taking a digital/online approach?
a.h. It is definitely morphing. Recently Monte said ‘I don’t want to have Zooms or livestreams in our work!’ We want it to be in real life, IRL.
JM There was a lot of excitement around the potential of online spaces but now there’s so much fatigue as well, people are really happy to be able to be physically with each other again.
a.h. It’s true. In my head I kind of see a live chat, you know, I definitely wouldn’t want to show any of the people on the websites, so I want to be able to zone in on the chat and have that accessible in the space, and that might be the only online component.
MM I am certainly cognisant of that snap-back to the way things were. It was great to have a lot of stuff over Zoom and suddenly people being quite invested in livestream, even for me as someone who thinks of themselves as able-bodied or reasonably mobile, it was a treat to be able to for example catch something in New York that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, let alone how it might have felt for someone who actually finds it incredibly difficult to get into a theatre or a performance space. But I think maybe it’s because the first time we really had a development for this work we had to do it over the screen, I just think a lot of the ideas and a lot of the forms that we’re imagining and dreaming of for this work are things that you do in front of other people.
JM Are you going to retain a participatory element of that, with people whose conversation you’re using as source material?
a.h. I have got some ideas, but Monte and I haven’t decided on anything concrete yet.
JM In terms of working out those kind of mechanisms or ideas, what’s your process as a collaboration?
a.h. We try to have Zoom meetings every 2-3 weeks. I text Monte all the time, probably annoyingly, if I get an idea I just send it to him, it’s very spontaneous for me and that’s what I like about it.
MM In some ways it has been fairly spontaneous but it’s also been quite discursive, in that sometimes we will have what is ostensibly a meeting which will end up with you, amira, telling me particular details of a particular period in your life or a particular kind of online web of intrigue, and going down a sort of rabbithole of different things, and trusting to do that while not knowing whether it really lives in the world of the work.
JM While we’re talking about these blurring boundaries I’m going to let Amrita and Tilly into the meeting. We’ve just been talking about collaboration and the way that art and life blend a little in the process. Amrita and Tilly were you friends before you started this project together?
Tilly Lawless We knew each other vaguely but we have definitely become closer through doing it.
Amrita Hepi Tilly made a really good point today, that because this has been so delayed it’s been a nice way to get to know each other. If we had started 2.5 years ago when we were originally supposed to start, maybe it would have been harder. I feel like there was material generated in speaking to each other and getting to know each other.
We had this conversation about the kind of economy that the arts runs on, the economy of friendship, that obviously there is a camaraderie, and it’s one of the most beautiful things, but that it can also be really abusive in some ways.
JM Totally. It can manifest as exploitative labour practices very quickly.
TL There is a level of trust that has come with knowing each other for the last few years that makes me feel like I can trust what Amrita says in the room.
I think that if we’d started not knowing each other well that I would have been quite tentative, and I don’t feel that. I feel quite confident in voicing my opinion. I only see the friendship as positive. I understand that people can exploit friendships in order to get certain artistic things from people or to not pay people for their labour but I haven’t felt like that one bit.
AH I said to Tilly at the start that sometimes there can be a tyranny of structurelessness: we’re improvising, we’re trying things, the hierarchies are different, and in the room I am performing in it too, I’m in it with you. But I am the director. I will be making the work. And I think there is a nice trust that comes from knowing that is your responsibility.
JM It builds trust when there’s a bit of clarity around roles.
TL A director is the same role you would get when, as a writer, you have an editor editing your work. You have someone that has more power than you, you’ve agreed to them having a say over what you’re doing, and you trust them in the critiques that they’re going to give… I wouldn’t say yes to being directed by someone unless I respected that they could direct me well.
JM I wanted to ask all four of you a bit more about process as labour but also process as play, and where that sits for you as a collaboration and how you manage that balance?
MM Before, I used that word discursive, but in some ways what I mean is also playful, as playful as you can be in a chat over Zoom, where yes, you are in theory trying to advance a project but you are also trying to work out what are the possible boundaries for the project so that you are creating some sense of what is inside the world of the work before we get started with our residency at Vitalstatistix. For us it has up to this point been about play. And we’ve been talking a lot about fun anyway within the work – we have this title of Goddess Ball’s Fun House so there’s been fun stuff and fool stuff. We’re getting a piece of neon fabricated that says ‘FUN.’
AH The way that I like to work is fast and relaxed, but I spent a good part of my early dance career working in companies that didn’t feel that way – where everything felt serious and sombre and we needed to get it right. I think I thought for a long time that it really needed to be that way. I use this analogy of when I stopped using birth control, when I switched to another kind of birth control and because it didn’t hurt I wasn’t sure it was working, I wasn’t sure it was real. There’s an idea that if I’m not having some kind of epiphany or I’m not having a struggle… I mean it really doesn’t need to be that way.
JM There’s this ‘if you’re not suffering, you’re not making work’ mentality. I think a lot of us have absorbed this hyper-employment model as sole traders or practitioners where we do push ourselves and work really long hours.
MM And that’s the logic of the project in some ways anyway. It always wants to see a peak at the moment of presentation, it always wants you to go a bit beyond yourself to get something done.
TL My relationship to it is a bit different because I have my job that I do for money and I work really hard at it and then everything I do that is creative is fun.
AH But also I wouldn’t have asked you to come and do it just for fun and I won’t pay you!
TL Obviously the pay matters, but I don’t have the sense of, ‘is art only real if there’s suffering involved?’ because I have always enjoyed the things that I do creatively, whereas I often don’t enjoy my daily work.
AH The other thing is not just if there’s suffering involved, but is the labour real if there isn’t a moment of transformation? If it’s hard and if it looks like it’s easy, is it still labour? Or if it has a feeling of effortlessness is it really labour?
JM And there’s a crossover there with sex work as well, if it’s pleasurable is it still labour?
TL My relationship to fun has changed since the pandemic. Before the pandemic I would have thought what a drag to go leave my house for two weeks and do this thing and be in a studio all day and now it’s so much fun to be in another state, and to be in a big room with someone. I have turned from being a glass half empty person before the pandemic to glass half full. I am getting scraps of fun out of everything.
JM There’s a real element of joy in returning to working physically close to each other … is that infecting the work, that craving for physicality and being in space?
AH Yeah, absolutely. Over Zoom, we haven’t figured out how to manufacture improvisation in quite the same way. Real time allows for an ease of working. Number one, this is how I have always known how to make. Number two, I think it is really much more enjoyable. Even if it is hard to be away from home, doing this in another way or not together would just not be possible.
MM For me and amira, the first stage development for this work was at Adhocracy in 2021 but we had to do that over Zoom. So I was in the basement at the Waterside hall chatting to amira on screen. There were a couple of Adelaide-based projects that did have their creative teams with them and I was eyeing them off with a slight jealousy: ‘They’re all talking to each other without a delay!’ I think in a way the thought of being in a room together has driven some of the ideas about what we’re going to do in our upcoming couple of weeks.
JM That desire has to infect the work, especially as the work is already about desire. The desire for physical closeness is already in it.
a.h. It’s really exciting to be performing IRL. I’ve been doing online stuff from about 2016, I was just doing that ‘for fun’ because it was so novel, like Periscope – but being in a physical space, I am imagining how we can utilise smell and taste and touch…
JM Can I ask you about the idea of failure and mistakes in your work? Monte, you have spoken about misperformance as a strategy, and that really resonates with my experience of being genderqueer.
MM We have these scripts that we follow – you could think about it as a dramatic script but you might also think about it as a cultural script – and by not performing well or by failing to appear in the proper way, it might be generative. So by misperforming that script you might be able to generate something new. Which is connected to ideas in The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, and to writing by José Esteban Muñoz and other theorists.
JM There is also great potential for comedy in that.
MM Performing things in a totally committed but very wrong way is connected to what clowns do, and playing the fool.
a.h. I have always embraced failure. I mean, growing up as a queer Muslim woman, I thought I was going to kill myself by the time I was fifteen…
JM Society tells you that you don’t deserve to live.
a.h. Yes. I’m the eldest child out of four, I’m the one who is the fuckup – I don’t own my house, I am unmarried, I don’t have kids, to society I am a failure, so I have embraced that in lots of my work. I fuck up and you have to accept it. I have accepted that I don’t adhere to rules, even rules I set myself.
JM: When you’re discovering your creativity as a queer artist, it’s a huge lesson to know that that’s where the sparks are, in the fuckups and the failures and the not fitting right.
AH Definitely in that stuff. But also in the mundanity of the existence of the failure. We’ve been asking about assumptions. What do people assume about what it is that you’re doing at work? And what’s the reality? So one of the exercises we have is I ask Tilly, what do you think people assume about sex work, or about writing? And vice versa, around the labour of being a dancer. What a day of work is like, what the architecture looks like in the space, where you are, what you’re doing with your body, what happens? The things we think are mundane actually reveal something about the unconscious, about what the other is assuming about us.
JM And it absolutely reveals the structures under that work as well, physical structures and temporal structures and the embodiment of the labour that you’re doing – a lot of creative labour is quite invisible to the general public.
AH There are three zones, in the way I’ve been thinking. There’s the desire to do – the desire to act in both our labours. Then there’s the labour itself and what it’s worth or what its value is perceived to be. And then there are examples of other people in labour, or other objects that are desirable, that feed into this.
TL There is some assumed knowledge with the audience in that we assume they know that both dance and sex work are labour.
AH But then there’s what it’s worth, and what it looks like, and what happens before the event. What leads you into a performance, and what makes it good? How do you make something good? That is actually kind of nebulous.
JM With literature and dance, there’s a perception that they spring almost spontaneously from the body, that you don’t require external resources to make them.
AH Yes, ‘you can do it anywhere.’ I was talking to a friend who wrote a beautiful article and they said it really poured out of them, and I love that word pour. There is so much stored that is maybe conscious or unconscious or that maybe we just heard yesterday that makes its way into the room, the rehearsal room. You realise how much you know about something that you didn’t know you knew.
JM That deep archival knowledge that you have to draw on from longer practice is one of the great pleasures of getting older in a creative career. And also your networks grow and so your ability to draw on others’ knowledge grows.
AH You have a reference point and maybe you have watched work that you can then take into your own methodology, because there’s a tone of understanding, rather than just going: I need it to be good, and how the fuck do I get there.
As an emerging artist, what I didn’t know… maybe there was also nothing to lose.
MM In some ways I would agree. When I was an emerging artist you did feel like you were running on energy. I couldn’t even imagine what the possible consequences would be of failing, I was just doing stuff.
AH As you get better, you have a better understanding of your own aesthetic.
Now I am thinking about things more sustainably, like if I’m making this work maybe I want to be able to show it in a different context, not be [hammers hands] bang-bang-bang. The Read feels like it’s been ruminating for a while and I’d like for it to be able to take the time it needs to take and also have the chance to be in different formats and different contexts. I know a bit more about what I’m interested in in terms of subject and material.
TL I’ve found it really useful not to tie my identity to what I create. If it’s not good, it doesn’t matter too much. I’m still a person beyond what I created, my friends are still going to like me, I’m still going to have a great life. Not everything you do ends up being as you’ve imagined it before you do it. So I just try to not tie myself to those things too much. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t put in all your energy or all your hopes. But your life is full beyond what you created as an artist.
AH I worked with a dance theatre company called Marrugeku for a long time and it taught me to make from this reactionary place. In some ways I still do, something will niggle at me. Sometimes the politic of something overwhelms the poetic; it can suck out the fun. You think you have to perform the politic by which it is perceived.
This is not what Marrugeku does, they do it with a poetics that then infects the politics. With making now, it doesn’t feel as fraught with having to express the politics, because it is already there. And it can be fun.
TL I realised quite quickly that I don’t want it to be a professional career, I love writing and I will always write but I don’t want to pursue it as a career, it ruins my enjoyment of it. I like it too much to ruin that.
MM I have seen people do really weird things in order to try and find or keep that sense of pleasure or openness alive. With all sorts of artists, anyone who is able to derive some income from what they make, there is a recognition that once you start to have people really interested in what you’re doing or you’re creating opportunities that are being recognised by others, that there is a danger that what makes a thing fun and possible can be extinguished or leave you.
JM I think it’s also a really exciting thing that art does, finding these cracks where things that are work don’t feel like work. It’s possible to do that in every job – every job can and should have those moments of ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this, it’s so fun.’
AH I have a query around that because I don’t just make art for the good feeling. I am not necessarily interested in making people feel good or entertained. I guess it’s like the panic and stretch zones, still trying to find the way into being enjoyable but there is also the fiscal financial stuff that comes into it. Then there’s this other thing: a part of my revenue stream, if I’m honest, is using dance as a commercial tool. So there’s movement direction for advertisements, or myself as the subject modelling for things and talking about the fact that I’m a dancer. People ask ‘how could you do that?’
But are we only ever doing it for a good feeling or for our community? That’s part of it, but I do not believe for a second that that is the only reason we’re doing it.
JM Maybe the pleasure is not the end point. The pleasure is like a window into meaningful work. It’s a clue that the universe has left us that we can follow.
AH To purpose. We’ve been talking about that in our work, about identity and class, and the big example we’ve been talking about is the allegory of the turnspit dog. The turnspit dog would run on this wheel like a hamster wheel that would turn the meat and cook it. Then at the turn of the industrial revolution, with electricity, all of a sudden it didn’t have a purpose anymore, and it was then bred out.
Being in the Port, I think about work and art and labour, and striking. When workers talk about striking, they withdraw their labour, but for artists that doesn’t make sense – they’ll just find somebody else. And then that leads into thinking about the gig economy, and it’s all so soupy – personally finding the pleasure and purpose fits into something that’s a much bigger machination.
JM I feel like I’m haunted now by the ghost of my future redundancy.
AH There is that nebulous fear: a GPT-3 AI wrote this…
JM Oh absolutely. There are already AIs that could substitute for some of my freelance work quite easily.
AH I am so curious and suspicious about that dream that we’ll be overwhelmed by machines. The fear that we wouldn’t be able to work anymore if the machines take over. I think it’s almost a desire: ‘Oh no, don’t take the work away!’
a.h. Talking about labour, the start of Goddess Ball’s Fun House came about through my body being so injured that I couldn’t work. So I was a personal shopper for one of the huge supermarkets for nine months, and then ended up with carpal tunnel, hip bursitis, tendonitis… I couldn’t walk anymore. And a friend suggested to get into the camming world. I was living on my own, didn’t have a fridge for about six months, and I was on the dole.
I didn’t start this for pleasure. It was out of pain. Survival sex work.
Andy Kaufman is a big influence on this work. Andy only does something if it’s fun, if it’s not fun he stops doing it. But if you delve into his online world at the moment, it’s not fun at all.
The root word of fun is actually fool. Monte and I have done a lot of research about the Fool card in tarot, which is the zero. Not the start and not the end, but a liminal card. I feel like I have been on a Fool’s journey with these online lives that I have lived. I’ve played the fool and I’ve been made fun of. Fun isn’t always pleasurable.
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The Read showings: 5 & 6 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE
Goddess Ball’s Fun House showings: 19 & 20 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE
Photo credit: Emma Luker for Replay Creative (@replaycreative on Instagram)
Photo by Jess Alice/Writers SA
Writer and 2022 Vitalstatistix Artist in Residence Jennifer Mills delivered a closing address to the Living Landscapes writers festival on 9th April at Hart’s Mill. Speaking on the subject of ‘Writing for Tomorrow,’ Mills invited writers and artists to ask deep questions about landscape, history, temporality and accountability as we think and tell stories with nature.
This is an edited version of the address, reproduced with permission from the author and festival organisers Writers SA and the City of Port Adelaide/Enfield.
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It’s an honour to be on Kaurna land, in a place called Yerta Bulti, this area on and around the Port River. I always seem to meet people here who have been drawn back to this place – returning sailors, dock workers, migrants, artists. I am often being drawn back here myself.
This semi-domesticated, semi-preserved, haphazardly commodified and redeveloped place is built around an estuary, on tidal mangrove flats. Mangroves are an important nursery for many aquatic species, fish and shellfish, which are in turn a food source for birds, animals and people. Kaurna people used the tides and estuaries to their advantage, cleverly trapping fish in the creeks and channels; I’m told there are still remnants of Kaurna fish traps around the coast. Workers here have found shell middens while digging foundations for new developments, evidence of the abundance of nourishment this place has provided for many years. Evidence of the endurance of history.
This was one of the first places white settlers landed in our state. There were refugees, migrants, exiles, speculators; some seeking freedom from oppression in Europe, others looking for someone to oppress. They called this place Port Misery. They didn’t like it much. Colonel Light described the new harbour here as ‘more extensive, safe and beautiful than we could ever have hoped for,’ but he didn’t have to camp in the mud.
When settlers made that harbour in 1837 they cut a channel and began to move the water, to transform the landscape, slowly and unevenly. What you see around you today is not a plan. It’s an unfinished process, a series of impulses moving, sometimes in opposing directions.
It’s a place that has had its ups and downs, its industrial highs and lows. Boom and bust cycles wash in and out. Labour movements grow strong and fade and grow strong again. Tides of people come and go. I think writers and artists are attracted to places like this, places where there’s an exchange between land and water, a liminality. Between countries and languages and cultures too. Port cities never really belong to where they are. Ports are always open to the world, breathing it in and out.
Maybe the presence of arts organisations and creative spaces here isn’t an economic phenomenon or a political one, but something to do with the will of this place. It invites incubation, like my current habitat at Vitalstatistix. Yerta Bulti is a nursery for ideas and creativity, just as it’s long been a nursery for fish.
*
When critics write about the landscape in a text, they usually write in terms of setting. They ask why an author has chosen to set their story in a particular place, as though stories can be picked up and put down anywhere. They seem to think that in the relationship between writer and landscape the writer has all the power. I find this a little absurd.
How you write about landscape depends on where you are from and how you’ve learned to inhabit it; what your relationship is to the country around you. It depends on the place itself. My mother is a painter; she taught me to pay close attention to nature. Look, she said, over and over. Listen. We’re always already in a relationship with place. Landscape moves through us.
Also, I’m new here. And for many of us from settler and migrant backgrounds, that relationship with place remains freighted with unfinished business. Unceded sovereignty, murder, silence. We write against that national silence, that amnesia, or else we write for it.
Why am I talking about the past when I’m supposed to be talking about the future? James Baldwin teaches us: ‘History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.’
We do pretend otherwise. Tony Birch has called attention to the relationship between denial of the ongoing effects of colonisation and denial of the climate crisis. He asks:
‘How does the nation move from a state of colonial anxiety that refuses genuine recognition and engagement to a concept of locating ‘Indigenous theories, methodologies, and methods at the centre, not the periphery’ of our society? While such a shift could ultimately produce ‘an ecological philosophy of mutual benefit’, getting there will be a serious challenge. This political and cultural mind-shift would appear seismic, perhaps beyond realistic expectations…’
There is a double denialism in the Australian psyche. When you feel history’s weight pushing up behind you, and the future’s challenges rising up ahead, it’s easy to experience this as a kind of paralysis.
Maybe we can’t have a cosy domestic relationship with this land, reduce it to what Evelyn Araluen calls ‘the unfair green of organised countryside.’ It is more powerful than we are. On the one side, we have attempted domination, expansion and extraction, wholesale destruction of this country. On the other, fires, floods, dramatic storms, what feels like the country pushing back.
*
There’s something about the shore, about places where bodies of water and land meet, that makes me question the notion of linear time. Estuarine places are anti-border. Land and water are never quite separate. They’re in exchange, like our breath and everything else’s.
In her poem ‘Littoral,’ Gwen Harwood wrote of walking another coastline,
‘through time where past and future come
to the fine edge of clarity:
a world I never can remake,
a world still to be made.’
The past and the future are pressing against us.
As writers, we have to engage with the material. To think about the effect we’re trying for, our impact on the world. But when we wade out into the murkier waters of why we do this thing we do, I find it isn’t really about the material at all. Patrick White put it this way:
‘I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities… I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays…’
(Patrick White Speaks, Vintage 1990)
I know the feeling. I’m not so sure about that word supernatural, though.
Nature writing has long expressed a desire for transcendence, an awareness of nature as the source. Thoreau wrote in his Journals that nature is full of genius: ‘it’s the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to the imagination.’ In the Masnavi, Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi tells us to listen to the song of the reed flute expressing its sorrow at being separated from the earth. To live is to long for a return to the source. That song, that breath, becomes the voice of the poet.
The Tao Te Ching puts it this way:
‘Humans follow the laws of Earth
Earth follows the laws of Heaven
Heaven follows the laws of Tao
Tao follows the laws of nature.’
(translated by Derek Lin)
So I don’t think of this spiritual power as supernatural, but as natural, part of the relationship between us and the earth, the relationship everything has with everything else, the exchange inherent in all ecosystems. We’re not set apart from nature. It travels though us like a river.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:
‘We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.’
You note she is using what she calls ‘the grammar of animacy’: language that acknowledges the agency and subjectivity of water, clouds, soil and rocks. Hannah Kent spoke earlier about the importance of landscapes with agency in her own writing. In English, we are taught this is just a literary device: personification, or the pathetic fallacy. It’s frowned upon, expressing the personhood of a tree or a stone.
But Muteshekau Shipu, the Magpie river in Quebec, is legally a person, thanks to the Innu community. In Ecuador, the rights of nature were enshrined in the constitution in 2008. Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia have similar laws. There are campaigns in New Zealand, India, Bangladesh, Australia, and the EU. Language is power. Of course how we write about nature matters.
Fossil fuel subsidies are increasing in this country, now equivalent to a staggering $22,000 a minute. We are opening new coal and gas facilities while the IPCC says we urgently need to shut down the ones we already have. Australia’s political culture seems to be caught in a vision of nature as something separate, something we can control or from which we extract resources, something we might look after, piecemeal, but that we’re under no obligation to. This destruction isn’t accidental, a by-product of extraction. The destruction is the colonial project. The destruction is the point.
They might not say it, but our leaders want to sever our relationship with nature. To break the relationships of First Nations people, and working class people, and artists, with nature. They are afraid of what those relationships, those connections, that kinship, might teach us.
*
The written word can be a kind of fence. A text can be an act of enclosure, of definition, of constraint and control. The insect pin through the hollow thorax, the preservation of time. The controlled archive of a culture of domination, a capitalist division of land, a linearity. Rational.
A text can also be a hole in that fence. Every way out happens first in the imagination: past what we think we know about where we are. Beyond realistic expectations.
I think all writing hovers somewhere between that urge to define and hold the moment, and the urge to find an exit and break away.
*
I’ve been distracted the last month or so by the floods, especially in Lismore and the mid-north coast of NSW, Bundjalung country. I’ve been trying to write about the future and the climate emergency, while checking in with friends up there, trying to help where I can. Sending books to Lismore library, donating to the amazing mutual aid project run by the Koori Mail. The climate emergency isn’t in the future. It’s here.
Writing feels incredibly slow and useless when faced with that reality. With war. My friends describe sweeping human waste out of their homes and workplaces. Peoples houses destroyed by the second one-in-100-year flood in a month. Folks who lost their homes in the fires of 2019 are still waiting for assistance. The climate emergency is here, and people are dying from it.
Writing is slow, but at the same time, we desperately need to change the dominant narrative. For years, climate scientists have been crying out for help from artists and writers. We need more and better stories. Philosopher Judith Butler writes: ‘We are at this moment ethically obliged and incited to think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible.’
Art doesn’t always have to have a political agenda, but art is always political in nature; language, image, story, are all expressions of power as well as meaning. Politics itself is mostly story. If culture wasn’t powerful, governments wouldn’t be trying so hard to starve it of oxygen.
We’re facing a crisis of accountability. The state can argue in court that it has no duty of care to young people, no obligation to protect them from the harms of the climate emergency, and it can win – but that doesn’t make it true. What stories do is give an account. They can hold those in power to account. All stories are about accountability in some way, about the search for justice.
*
I keep coming back to the problem of time. This moment of dyschronia we live in, as our past catches up with us and the future falls apart before we can reach it, where the present can feel intensely compressed. We live and breathe between amnesia and catastrophe.
Don’t let yourself be paralysed by that. Let yourself think slowly in spite of it. Maybe our relationship with work and time needs to change as much as our relationship with nature does. We need to act quickly, urgently, but we also need to act with a much deeper temporality in mind.
What might it mean to write for tomorrow and yesterday, ten years’ time and ten years ago, ten generations before and beyond you, ten thousand years? Can we alter our concept of narrative time to embrace more versions of story, to involve and encounter ourselves in other lives, other futures, the human and non-human, folded in upon our own? Or are we trapped by settler culture’s linearity, its need for growth and development and control?
*
So we return to the movement of tides. Yerta Bulti: I’m told that in the Kaurna language it means a place of sleep or death. An in-between country. A place that is neither and both land and sea, between the waking, reasoned mind and that other mind you’re hoping will show up when you’re writing. Between the cadastral map of the hundred of Port Adelaide and the old songs of place that you might catch if you could only turn your ear at the wind.
By 1838 the newspapers were reporting that it was ‘generally conceded that a blunder had been committed in fixing the Port of Adelaide here.’ We are all walking around in the mess of old decisions. But at the same time, there’s so much possibility. So much work to do.
A world I never can remake. A world still to be made. Gwen Harwood’s poem goes on like an incantation:
‘I must suffer, and change, and question all,
wrestle with thought and word, and bind
my speech to the earth’s own laws to win
the heart’s true life at last.’
What does she mean, to bind our speech to the earth’s own laws?
Are you putting up a fence, or making a hole in it?
No artist can ever know their own impact. I am both delighted and dismayed by this every day of my life. A book isn’t a mark of success or failure in the same earthly way as a nice house or money or letters after your name. It’s a gift with no known recipient, an act of faith in a shifting pattern of reciprocity.
Earlier today, Ali Cobby Eckermann spoke about what she saw as her cultural duty to the landscape. Imagine if everyone thought and felt that way. You can hear that possibility in the language, sometimes: we pay attention, like a debt. It is an obligation.
Alexis Wright put it this way: ‘Think what the earth needs. What makes a good ancestor?’
That’s where we might start to make a future.
We sat down with Em König and Jason Sweeney to discuss Emission.
Tell us about Emission. Where did the idea come from?
Jason: Initially we wanted to make a work that was centred around eco-grief and to create an immersive sound work that allowed the listener to mourn the slow death of the planet with us. Grim beginnings! To be really really honest, the idea has just evolved over the time that Em and I have been making it. There are definitely still elements that clearly let the audience know that the work is about the grief of the dying planet but we also know that in this space there has to be some element of hope otherwise we may as well unplug the devices and sit and stare at a wall. Which, I don’t mind saying, I tend do a lot of lately anyhow. Personally I am also interested in the idea of an emission being what art does. It is content that fills a space. Sound is great at filling spaces! What happens when we just make sound? Without the need for over-burdening the audience with endless ’this is about’ essays or pretentious waffle in the program! Em and I, I reckon, have arrived at a point now where it really is about the act of making sound and the audience listening. I know in this over-wordy art world where we try and justify every little thing that can be challenging – to just have a work that is about listening. So, making a 50 minute sound emission that you just sit or lay back and listen to. Can it really be that simple? Surely in this saturated media world something so simple could actually be a beautiful thing.
Em: The previous two works Jason and I created were very much song based, highly visual ‘concert-style’ pieces so we really wanted this third work to be a complete listening experience for the audience. That was the initial goal. We spoke at length about creative and inventive ways of making sound, what sound is and how it works and the benefits of creating a performance work that it entirely sound based. i.e. what can sound do that other methods of communication cannot? What can we communicate through sound, where other media have failed us? As for theme – it’s always ‘the end of the world’ with us. But this time we’ve added a spot o’ humour. Necessary, I feel.
Emission is the third work in a trilogy of sound-based performance works. Can you tell me about the previous two, and the connections between the three?
Jason: All three are actually completely different! Sentients was a kind of light extravaganza by Geoff Cobham and Em and I were these two lofty figures high up in the mezzanine area of Hart’s Mill. And we sang 10 songs to an audience who sat in the huge space of that venue. This work was really more about the industry of agriculture and its impact upon the environment. But again, like I was saying above, you really could just come along and sit and listen to some nice songs and watch the pretty lights! Now, Masc was more like a mini electro-pop concert where Em got their heels, tight corset and rubber masks on and I assumed the role of big-hatted pagan priest. It was a bunch of songs we performed against a backdrop of Heath Britton’s evocative video projections and made to sound really good with Sascha Budimski’s audio expertise.
What does your process look like for making this sort of work? What are your inspirations?
Jason: Em and I work like a band. We do weekly rehearsals in a grungy band rehearsal room and we make it like that. We’ve tried making these things in artist residencies but unfortunately many spaces just don’t have the facilities to accommodate really loud sound whilst other people are trying to work. And because we are making music and sound in the same way a band does, it makes sense to go into a band room where you can make as much noise as you want. In terms of inspiration, it might sound daggy but for me it really is just in the collaboration with Em. I guess we sort of feed off each other and make a lot of the creative decisions through improvisation or just going into a room with pre-determined ideas.
Em: As Jason said, we inspire each other. Our creative collaboration came about very organically when we were a couple and would spend long nights in the studio improvising until we found things we like. This has continued to be and remains our tried and true process for everything we work on. We trust each other and that’s what’s most important.
What are you hoping that audiences will take away from Emission?
Jason: Hopefully not hearing loss (bring ear plugs if you can!). To be honest, I’d say just use this performance as a place to go somewhere else for a while that isn’t about talking or about being on your damn phone or doom scrolling.
Em: Something. Anything. Maybe nothing. I don’t expect anybody to take anything away from art at this stage. I just hope they enjoy it.
Any final words?
Jason: There will be loud noise, strobing effects and maybe tears. Tears of joy?
Em: Clatter! Crash! Clack!
We sat down with Meg Wilson and Sascha Budimski from Progress Report to talk about the design elements of the work.
Alison and Alisdair have talked about how a random piece of styrofoam they found in a dance studio was the initial inspiration for the projects. What were your inspirations? How has the work evolved over multiple developments?
Sascha: The sound for this development of Progress Report has taken a very clear turn in terms of defining an overarching concept and sonic palette. In the previous development, we were still really getting a feel for where and what the sound could be. We also only had a couple weeks, so the impulse was very much to just throw lots of ideas into the space and see what stuck. The majority of the sound for that development was definitely your more “traditional” sound and music for contemporary dance / theatre – synths, ambiences, beats etc, but a few of the things we tried in that development have ultimately gone on to really define and inform where we are currently at with the work. In that development, Alisdair created a playable instrument out of the polystyrene and we recorded it and incorporated it into the work in both a live and recorded way, which we’re also expanding on in this development. We also recorded what we call a “fan jam” where we stuck a bunch of industrial carpet blowers and an upright industrial fan onto a few dmx faders and mic’d them up. One night Alisdair and I stayed back after rehearsal, hit the record button and jammed it out with the fans and a few microphones. Ultimately, we didn’t end up using any of that recording in the score, but we ended up using the idea of mic’d up fans as a live element during the show instead.
Meg: Alisdair and Alison had developed the concept and palette of materials quite a lot before I came into the project. It was the palette of materials that really led the charge on all fronts. The creative process was all about discovering what was possible with the soft plastics we had been collecting over a number of years and the truckload of styrofoam that was sourced mid-recycling process as well as donated by the general public to the project. There were a lot of very interesting styrofoam forms that you couldn’t quite guess what they were used for in the first place and mounds of soft plastics that could be cut, moulded and melted together to make large sheets of patterned fabric.
What was it like designing a show where the set is also simultaneously the prop, and the inspiration for the concept?
Meg: It’s funny because at times it feels like we don’t actually even have a set. We start with basically a black box and then by the end of the piece we suddenly find ourselves wading through a mess of styrofoam, plastic and debris. Piecing the show together felt a bit like that as well. We started with a few simple shapes and they accumulated as Alisdair, Alison and I found exciting new ways to work with the materials. I guess it felt very much like the pile of plastics that accumulates in your ‘to be recycled’ pile at home.
So much styrofoam! What was it like working with that?
Meg: Some of the styrofoam we sourced were huge pieces that used to line the concrete pillars of carparks or packaging for very large items. Working with those on our makeshift wire cutter was quite cumbersome. The result was stunning though as some of those large pieces were very old and had veins of glue in them that looked a bit like marble. Styrofoam has a multitude of properties you didn’t know it was good for. Alisdair and Sascha found ways to make music out of it and I was able to cut packaging to make interesting sculptural forms and lightweight architectural elements and then melt other pieces into dense bricks. It’s a pity it’s so toxic, smells awful when you cut it with a hot wire and is extremely bad for the environment! I was fully masked up and working out in the open air for most of the development period.
Sascha: An aspect which we only touched on in the previous development but which has ultimately become a major part of the sound for this development, is the sound of the styrofoam itself. Alisdair and I went ahead and recorded a couple hours worth of styrofoam during the recent lockdown. We both then took a copy of those recordings and created our own layers from it using our various techniques. We converged back at rehearsals with our styrofoam morph layers and began trying them with sections of the work and mashing layers together throughout sections of the work. It feels like such an obvious idea path now, I’m not sure why we didn’t invest more into it in the previous development… the sounds we’ve managed to pull and manipulate from the styrofoam have been fascinating and currently [a couple weeks out from premiere] we’re injecting and reworking the sound design to incorporate these styro layers and mutations. We’ve conjured up something very unique with the styrofoam sounds, and we’re really riding that line of recogniseable styrofoam sounds vs “that was styrofoam??”. I’m eager to see if our audiences recognise that a lot of what they’re hearing is the same stuff that’s on stage in front of them.
Sascha- What’s next for the show? And after that- Do you happen to have any interesting, Port Adelaide based projects that you’d like to chat about?
Sascha: After our Vitals season we’re taking Progress Report over to Melbourne for a week of shows at Substation. After that I’m happy to report I’ll be back at Vitals in September with the amazing Em Konig and Jason Sweeney for a project they’ve been developing called Emission. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into this one, their vision and production values in regards to sound are always quite solid to me, which makes my role as sound engineer a pleasure. It’s also a really nice opportunity to take my “creative cap” off for a project, as my sole focus is just ensuring that they’re feeling as comfortable as possible on stage and sounding great in the room. Mixing stuff that I didn’t have to make and listen to a thousand times is such a fantastic palette cleanser for me, what makes it even better is how much I love what Em and Jason create. I’ve worked with them previously on a show called Masc which we developed here and took over to Melbourne… a couple years later I still find myself washing dishes or folding laundry and subconsciously bobbing my head to some of their songs. Masc was excellent and I really hope they remount it in the future (hint hint Jason and Em). I won’t talk too much about what they’re planning for Emission, as we’ve only had initial production chats about it, but let’s just say I’m pretty excited and it should shape up to be a really great night of music performance. I really try to emphasize that when I talk about Jason and Em’s work; they don’t just play music on stage, they craft and create a strongly conceptualized evening of contemporary music performance and theatre.
We sat down with Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe from Progress Report to talk about the work.
Tell us about Progress Report. Where did the idea come from, and what are you hoping that people get out of the work?
Alisdair: Progress Report is a theatrical response to the inner turmoil and cognitive dissonance brought on by considering the climate crisis and envisioning a future. The projects roots however were seeded by a far more abstract interest in the physical qualities of Polystyrene. Alison happened upon a really interesting choreographic scenario years ago while developing another work that involved standing in front of a fan and dancing with a large sheet of polystyrene.
Alison: We liked the idea and when we thought about working together years later we re-started with the foam and the fan. The idea developed from there, with the styrofoam material unpacking (pardon the pun) concerns about plastic, waste, and consumption.
Alisdair: The work is this simultaneous celebration of the physical beauty of a man made material and a reflection on its devastating impact on our planet and lives.
Alison: We’re hoping that people will be intrigued, amused, and made uncomfortable by the work and see their own experiences of dilemma reflected back to them. We hope that people will be taken on a ride and leave reflecting on the world we live in.
It started life as an Adhocracy project. Has it changed much since then? Where did you think the work would end up?
Alison: Adhocracy was such a fantastic way to kick start the project! We achieved so much in just four days! Lewis Rankin was working with us on that development, he has moved on to doing amazing things with Gravity and Other Myths. We have had a few team changes since but in essence, the project is the same, a solo performance with objects and since that first development we have become more and more focussed on human impact and experience on this world.
Alisdair: The Adhocracy development answered the question we had in regards to viability, as one of the biggest gaps when imagining a work is whether that work would actually be of any interest when fully realised. What we did is plot out the ark of the entire show in a very rough way and found that we had the bones for what could be a really interesting and engaging piece, were we to invest more time in refinement. So the essential identifiers of the work have been there right from the start, and a lot of the development time has been spent translating rough sketches into fully realised and detailed ideas. We knew by the end of the Adhocracy development that we would do what ever it took to develop and present the work, we knew the kind of performance environment it was suited to, what we didn’t know was whether we could garnish interest from presenters and whether the idea would be as interesting to said presenters as it was to us.
How did the two of you start working together? Is this your first project?
Alison: Our first show together was in 2008 Alisdair made interactive and site specific sound installations for my work ’42a’, since then we have collaborated on various projects including ‘I Can Relate’ commissioned by Carriageworks 2015 and ‘Concrete Impermanence’ 2018, again with Alisdair predominately making sound, but also joining the conversations about the works structure and assisting in the creation of the work in general. We have discussed our other projects with each other over the years and have a great respect for each others work, which has made it easy to trust each other when taking on the role as shared lead artists for this project. Progress Report is the first time we have worked as co-directors. Its very rewarding, exciting and fun!!
You’re both clearly passionate about recycling. The set is made from recycled plastics including a lot of styrofoam. What’s it like working and dancing with unexpected materials?
Alison: The styrofoam does break into small pieces that we are careful to vacuum up at the end of each rehearsal day. so there is a microcosm reflective of global issues happening in the studio. The restriction of using select materials means that we are pushed to invent different ways of using these same objects, and how to represent them in different situations.
Alisdair: The styrofoam, just like the dancing body, is a site of potential creatively speaking, it can be cut and change form with ease, especially so, given we are working with industrial sized pieces, and so working with it has been expansive and exploratory. It is a fascinating material with really unique properties that prompt really interesting choreographic scenarios.
Any final words?
Alisdair: Through Progress Report we are responding to climate change as a human problem, where human drivers and motives are wrapped up in social norms, convoluted and distorted by social histories and deeply embedded behaviour patterns. It’s like the work is a cornered beast trying to find its way out of an impending doom, it is trying to cry out for help by envisioning preposterous and impossible alternate realities as a way to psychologically accept reality. Coming to terms with reality is kind of presented as a madness in this work, as it may well be, given how much as humans we love and accept story, fantasy and ambition as cultural guides.
pvi collective led local rebels in a series of meetings and actions between May 19-30 as part of tiny revolutions. This is their report.
REBEL REPORT: Port Adelaide, Kaurna Country
Summary:
Rebels based in Kaurna Country assembled nightly across the week of 17th May to unpack, interrogate and devise tiny public actions in response to public submissions revealing the private impact of some of humanity’s current global challenges.
The rebel meetings were often rowdy, at times moving. There was vodka. A consensus was reached. The submissions were THUNKED.
In the week following, the tactical rebel force designed and enacted each tiny revolution with stealth in the public realm.
This is their rebel report.
global issue category: status of women
tactic request: tiny sabotage
Sally is overwhelmed by the lack of research being done into relieving pain experienced because of biologically female specific medical issues. For Sally’s tiny revolution, pvi rebels created an informative and humorous poster that drew comparisons between different types of pain experienced by male and female bodies. For example, being kicked in the balls by an AFL player still rates lower than childbirth on the tiny revolutions graph. These posters were installed in all gendered toilets in pubs around the port.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: education
tactic request: tiny slogan
Francoise is overwhelmed by the Australian education system that still has children falling through the cracks. pvi rebels used tik tok as a scaffold to create a call and response slogan chant “what do you want to learn?”
The initial call and response was actioned by mini pvi rebels, shared and hash tagged to help it grow.
We are still open to responses.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: everything else
tactic request: tiny identity correction
Georgina is overwhelmed by entitled people being in power and a lack of love in their political strategies. pvi rebels undertook some identity correction with our very important “straight, white, male” politician, holding a press conference outside of an abandoned public housing area. he announced significant investment in the buildings behind him to provide free housing, love and care under the direction of the Parliament of Nanas. Remember to always ask yourself: What Would Nana Do?
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: climate crisis
tactic request: tiny walkout
Alice is overwhelmed by how she might function in the face of a slow fade into chaos and starvation? For alice’s tiny revolution, pvi rebels plotted to
instigate a walkout by those shopping at large corporate giants direct to local and sustainable businesses nearby. to assist with this journey, pirate rebel jimmy handed out treasure maps showing the location of sustainable, local food stores outlets in the area.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: health
tactic request: tiny invisible performance
Jamila is overwhelmed by the scale of how inaccessible public and private spaces are for chronically ill and disabled people. pvi rebels took mobility devices embedded with audio to some of the least accessible public places in Port Adelaide to use invisible performance to exaggerate the invisibility of these experiences to the wider public. The voiced mobility devices were generated by people with disabilities in answer to the prompt: what would your mobility device saw if it could talk?
pvi collective and the tiny revolutions team would like to thank the participants from Karrarendi – The First Nations Disability arts and craft group from Kura Yerlo. Thank you for sharing your voices and your experiences.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: ethics
tactic request: tiny overloading
Chris is overwhelmed by a lack of ethics from which everything else grows. pvi rebels penned handwritten love letters on our best pink paper to luxury cars from items of less value: other cars, the road, traffic lights. these love letters were then hand delivered lovingly to luxury cars in port Adelaide.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: democracy
tactic request: tiny occupation
SJ is overwhelmed that it seems we are in the dying days of democracy and our planet. for SJ’s tiny occupation, pvi rebels designed a blueprint for a proposed community garden to be installed in a public, concreted spaces, making food access more universal and sustainable. this blueprint listed layout of the garden and what should be planted based the traditional first nations plants that grow well in the area. Printed as paste ups, the blueprint was installed in concreted and abandoned areas in the Port.
Full mission briefing and overview
global issue category: wealth inequality
tactic request: tiny hoax
Alie is overwhelmed by so much unemployment, pitiful wages, resentment against those on welfare who are often seen as choosing welfare as a lifestyle (rather than living in abysmal poverty). pvi rebels set up the Parents Against Public Funds in private schools (PAP) facebook page, complete with introductory video from the president, Di Vest. PAP’s remit is to divest from public funding because they are not dole bludgers, and do not want to filth of public money on their hands. The facebook content particularly focused on the “school fate”, where high end baked goods will be sold at high end prices. Our tiny hoax is still available and we encourage you all to support this good work.
